What's CineMagaziNet! ?

Editor in Chief

Kato Mikiro, Assocaite Professor of Cinema Studies, Faculty of Integrated Human Studies, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, University of Kyoto, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 607 Japan

Associate Editors

Matsuda Hideo, Film and Literary Studies, Associate Professor, University of Kyoto
Tashiro Makoto, Film and Literary Studies, Associate Professor, Kokushikan University
Toki Akihiro, Film Historian

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

1. CMN! aims to create a radical language through film studies and criticism.
2. The primary object of CMN! is research on Japanese film history.
3. CMN! aims to form links between culture industry institutions and film 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 film 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 film history, which will reach 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 film 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.