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Screen 2006 47(1):43-65; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl003
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved

Narrating the new Japan: Biograph's The Hero of Liao-Yang (1904)

Gregory A. Waller

This essay analyzes the representation of Japan and "Japaneseness" in Biograph's The Hero of Liao-Yang (September, 1904), an early narrative film released in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). This war is a remarkably rich historical site for exploring the politics of cross-cultural representation because it evoked, participated in, and transformed a tangled skein of American discourses concerning race, militarism, nationalism, and modernization. To explore these discourses, particularly in relation to Japanese masculinity, I situate The Hero of Liao-Yang in the context of a wide range of period texts drawn from several different media and cultural channels, including editorial cartoons and photojournalism as well as children's fiction and first-person accounts by renowned war correspondents. This inclusive, comparative approach helps account for the particular representational strategies in The Hero of Liao-Yang and also allows for a more full assessment of the complex ideological weight of the Russo-Japanese War and the New Japan in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.


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