Calorio and Colombo on Law and Film in Japan @law_humanities

Giacomo Calorio, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Turin, and Giorgio Fabio Colombo, Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University, have published Inside a frame, behind a glass. A preliminary inquiry on law and film in Japan in Law and Humanities. Here is the abstract.

This paper provides both lawyers and cinema experts with some insights about the depiction of law and criminal justice in films in Japan. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest of the Japanese movie industry towards ‘courtrooms drama’, i.e., films set in tribunals and having lawyers, judges, and prosecutors as main characters: a small ‘Golden Age’ of law as depicted in Japanese cinema. This paper (co-written by a comparative lawyer and a film studies specialist) will address this phenomenon from two perspectives: one from a legal studies and popular culture framework, analyzing how such movies reflect – and at the same time shape – the ‘legal imagination’ in Japan. The other, from film studies, focuses on technical, directorial aspects, to emphasize how authors intend to depict the law and its actors.