What's CineMagaziNet! ?
Editor in Chief
  • Kato Mikiro, Professor of Cinema Studies, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University.
Associate Editors
  • Tashiro Makoto, Professor of Comparative Cultural Studies, Faculty of Letters, Kokushikan University.
  • Matsuda Hideo, Professor of Cinema Studies, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University.
  • Itakura Fumiaki, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University .

CMN! (CineMagaziNet!) is a non-profit online cinema studies and criticism magazine. Its editorial policy is as follows:

  1. CMN! aims to create a radical language through cinema studies and criticism.
  2. The primary object of CMN! is research on Japanese cinema history.
  3. CMN! aims to form links between culture industry institutions and cinema studies.
  4. CMN! is directed towards constructing a cinematic discursive community.

To explain each of these ideals in more detail:

  1. Creating a radical language means constructing a language based on both objective research and continuous subjective experience. Critical language is, to borrow a term from the sciences, a language that reaches the "critical point," and is different from either powerless impressionistic criticism or inexperienced subjective criticism.
  2. Making Japanese cinema history the primary object of CMN! is to make central everything unexplained about the formation and transformation of Japanese film production and exhibition. This is because there are many areas of Japanese cinema history, which has reached its 100th year in 1997, that have still not been written about. Of course, this editorial direction need not be limited only to the research object of this publication, Japanese cinema.
  3. Forming links between cultural industry institutions and cinema studies is to not stop simply at the level of film research and criticism, but to place in one's field of vision the connections between film culture and the film industry as a whole and the social totality of which they are a part. This means especially to blaze the future of film culture by offering proposals about the cultural activities and programs of the film industry or film archives as well as testing business simulations.
  4. To aim to construct a cinematic discursive community is to build an appropriate base for critical standards regarding cinema. Although film critics often offer aesthetic judgment on a certain film without having any specific proof, can our community possess the foundation for objectively evaluating whether or not the judgments of critics are appropriate? For an example from experience to be an example, it is necessary to construct the standards that circulate inside our community.