In Japan, perhaps uniquely, the history of capitalism coincides neatly with the history of film. What links these two histories and what their relationship reveals about film culture and everyday life in Japan, is the subject of this original and provocative work. Looking at a hundred-year history of film and capitalism, The Flash of Capital theorizes a cultural history that illuminates the spaces where film and the nation transcend their customary borders, where culture and capital crisscross—and in doing so, develops a new way of understanding historical change and transformation in modern Japan and beyond. Eric Cazdyn focuses on three key moments of historical contradiction: colonialism, post-war reconstruction, and globalization. In great classics of Japanese film, in documentaries, works of science fiction, animation, and pornography he brings to light cinematic attempts to come to terms with the tensions inherent in each historical moment—tensions between colonizer and colonized, between the individual and the collective, and between the national and the transnational. Through a close reading of cinema within its political context, Cazdyn shows how formal inventions in the realms of acting, film history and theory, thematics, documentary filmmaking, and adaptation articulate a struggle to solve implacable historical problems. Richly illustrated, this innovative work of cultural history and criticism will be of interest to those concerned with Japanese film history, the culture and political economy of Japan, and anyone seeking explanations of historical change that challenge conventional distinctions between the aesthetic and the geopolitical.