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Buddha: Selling an Asian spectacle

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1386/jjkc.4.1.29_1

1756-4913

Jasper Sharp,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

From the late 1950s onwards, the Japanese film industry came under increasing threat from television. As each of the major studios strove to differentiate their product from this new small-screen medium, Daiei was the first to experiment with wide-gauge 70mm production, with Misumi Kenji directing Shaka/Buddha (1961) using the Super Technirama 70 system developed by Technicolor. A religious epic detailing the birth of Buddhism, its subject matter fell in line with Daiei president's Nagata Masaichi's previous attempts at promoting Japanese cinema on the world stage with exotically resented period films such as Jigokumon/Gate of Hell (1953), while combining Hollywood's predilection in its widescreen films for melodramatic religious epics and what Twentieth Century-Fox head of production Darryl Zanuck referred to as ‘large scale spectacles and big outdoors films’. This article describes how Nagata endeavoured to create a blockbuster in the vein of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) primarily aimed at Asian audiences, and the legacy of his attempts at adapting a new technology to suit Japanese production and exhibition practices.