| Sumario: | Kurosawa’sRashōmon (Rashomon, 1950)and its success at the 1951 Venice Film Festival is often regarded as the pivotal point for Japanese film export as well as the point of departure for Japanese film’s full-blown, successful exposure to overseas markets and audiences. Awards subsequently won by other films directed by Japanese nationals corroborate this interpretation, which, however, tends to marginalise earlier attempts to realise the ‘dream of export’. At best, these are regarded as isolated, eccentric events; yet, the interpretation of these films as predictable failures is to a large part influenced by hindsight. This article takes a film historical approach to discuss the Japanese industry’s early push onto the German market, revolving around three German–Japanese ‘co-productions’ that display varying degrees of international cooperation among equals (1926, 1932 and 1933). These endeavours were embedded within increasing industrial efforts to push international exports and were both a reaction to ‘inauthentic’ Western representational practices and a means to assert a cultural power position through industrial success. Early transnational currents in Japanese cinema pose various questions related to the notion of a ‘national cinema’, and the issue of film as art, as propaganda vehicle or/and as profit-making product. Although being confined within restrictive frameworks of representational traditions of imagining Others, these films demonstrate a two-way flow, as protagonists in both countries considered film as an agent for change in the intertwined spheres of the industrial, national and cultural.
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