Reorienting Ozu
Reorienting Ozu

Author: Jinhee Choi

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0190254971

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Considered by many film critics and scholars as a master of Japanese Cinema, director Ozu Yasujiro still inspires filmmakers both within and outside of Japan. With fifteen never before published chapters in English by contributors from North America, Europe, and Japan, Reorienting Ozu explores the Japanese director's oeuvre and his lasting impact on global art cinema. Exploring major theoretical frameworks that characterize Ozu studies, chapters consider the various cultural factors that influenced the director's cinematic output, such as the anxiety of middleclass Japan in the 1930s, the censorship imposed by the US-occupation after World War II, and women's rights in Ozu's late work such as Tokyo Twilight (1957). Ultimately, chapters illuminate Ozu's influence on the directors of Japan and beyond. With the recent restoration and re-release of Ozu's early and late films, this volume provides an opportunity to examine not only the auteur's major works but also the relationships--both cultural and aesthetic--that are forged among directors across the world.

Ozu
Ozu

Author: Kathe Geist

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2022-06-28

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 9888754173

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Based on a close reading of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s extant films, this book provides insights into the ways the director created narrative structures and used symbolism to construct meaning in his films. Against critics’ insistence that Ozu was indifferent to plot and unlikely to use symbols, Geist demonstrates otherwise, revealing the director’s subtle iconographic paradigms. Her incisive understanding of the historical and cultural context in which the films were conceived amplifies her analysis of the films’ structure and meaning. Ozu: A Closer Look guides the reader through Ozu’s early, silent films and his sound films made during Japan’s wars in Asia and the subsequent American Occupation, then takes up specific themes relevant to his later, better-known films. These themes include religion, gender, and the influence of traditional Japanese painting. Geist also examines the impact that Ozu’s films had on specific directors in Europe, America, and Japan. Intended for film scholars, students, and fans of the director, this book provides fresh insights into the director’s films and new challenges for those who study him. “Kathe Geist has woven an elegantly textured tapestry in this illuminating survey of Ozu’s films and their endless sense of pattern, rhythm, and cultural renewal. Melding form, narrative, iconography, and context, the book traces old and new patterns of meaning and critical debate.”—Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick; author of the BFI Film Classic on Tokyo Story (2022) “Ozu: A Closer Look provides one of the most comprehensive and meticulous analyses so far on Ozu Yasujiro. With her great attention to small textual details, along with intertextual and contextual comparisons, Geist achieves a significant reinterpretation of the director’s work, opening up new possibilities in future Ozu studies.”—Woojeong Joo, Nagoya University; author of The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday

Tokyo Story
Tokyo Story

Author: Alastair Phillips

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-11-03

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 1911239244

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This BFI Film Classics study of Tokyo Monogatari/Tokyo Story (1953) reveals the making, meaning and legacy behind Ozu Yasujiro's masterpiece. Ozu's moving family drama is universally acknowledged as one of the most significant Japanese films ever made. In its complex portrait of human motivation and lively sense of social space, it offers a profound and poignant insight into the generational shifts of post-war Japan. Alastair Phillips provides an in-depth analysis of the film and its key locations - the city of Tokyo, the town of Onomichi and the coastal resort of Atami - with a discussion of its representation of Japanese society at a time of great cultural change. Drawing upon Japanese and English language sources, he situates the film within various contemporary critical and industrial contexts and examines the multiple international dimensions of Tokyo Story's long after-life to understand its enormous contribution to global film culture.

Cinema Illuminating Reality
Cinema Illuminating Reality

Author: Victor Fan

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2022-03-29

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1452964319

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A new critical approach to cinema and media based on Buddhism as a philosophical discourse How can a philosophical discourse generated in Asia help us reframe and renew cinema and media theory? Cinema Illuminating Reality provides a possible way to do this by using Buddhist ideas to examine the intricate relationship between technicity and consciousness in the cinema. The resulting dialogue between Buddhism and Euro-American philosophy is the first of its kind in film and media studies. Victor Fan examines cinema’s ontology and ontogenetic formation and how such a formational process produces knowledge, political agency, and in-aesthetics. Buddhism allows Fan to deconstruct binary thinking and reimagine media as an ecology, rethinking cinema in relational terms between the human and the machine. Along the way, Fan considers a wide variety of case studies from around the globe, while paying special attention to how contemporary Tibeto-Sinophone filmmakers have adopted relational thinking to detail ways of rebuilding a world that appears to be beyond repair. From Chinese queer cinema to a reexamination of Japanese master Ozu’s work and its historical reception to Christian Petzold’s 2018 existential thriller Transit, CinemaIlluminating Reality forges a remarkable path between Buddhist studies and cinema studies, casting vital new light on both of these important subjects.

Lexicon of Global Melodrama
Lexicon of Global Melodrama

Author: Heike Paul

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2022-05-31

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 3839459737

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This new go-to reference book for global melodrama assembles contributions by experts from a wide range of disciplines, including cultural studies, film and media studies, gender and queer studies, political science, and postcolonial studies. The melodramas covered in this volume range from early 20th century silent movies to contemporary films, from independent ›arthouse‹ productions to Hollywood blockbusters. The comprehensive overview of global melodramatic film in the Lexicon constitutes a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners of film, teachers, film critics, and anyone who is interested in the past and present of melodramatic film on a global scale. The Lexicon of Global Melodrama includes essays on All That Heaven Allows, Bombay, Casablanca, Die Büchse der Pandora, In the Mood for Love, Nosotros los Pobres, Terra Sonâmbula, and Tokyo Story.

Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema
Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema

Author: Joanne Bernardi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-09

Total Pages: 776

ISBN-13: 1315534355

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema provides a timely and expansive overview of Japanese cinema today, through cutting-edge scholarship that reflects the hybridity of approaches defining the field. The volume’s twenty-one chapters represent work by authors with diverse backgrounds and expertise, recasting traditional questions of authorship, genre, and industry in broad conceptual frameworks such as gender, media theory, archive studies, and neoliberalism. The volume is divided into four parts, each representing an emergent area of inquiry: "Decentring Classical Cinema" "Questions of Industry" "Intermedia as an Approach" "The Object Life of Film" This is the first anthology of Japanese cinema scholarship to span the temporal framework of 200 years, from the vibrant magic lantern culture of the nineteenth century, through to the formation of the film industry in the twentieth century, and culminating in cinema’s migration to gaming, surveillance video, and other new media platforms of the twenty-first century. This handbook will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Japanese studies, film studies, and cultural studies more broadly.

Exploring Film and Christianity
Exploring Film and Christianity

Author: Rita Benis

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-29

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1040149111

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book examines the connections between film and Christianity, considering how films express and depict Christian faith and spirituality and provide experiences associated with it. The notion of movement as immobility (from Simone Weil) is employed to describe film and its images in motion. Its movements can reconnect us with the movements of the world, those motions in which a mysterious sense of order, what Weil calls "immobility," arises. Film is understood as a privileged form to access inscrutable spiritual (in)visibilities that can be linked with Christian concepts and practices. The chapters in Exploring Film and Christianity offer new studies of famous directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson combined with analyses of recent notable films, including Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, Martin Scorsese’s Silence, and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Organized around the productive topics of theory, expression, depiction and experience, this volume is a valuable contribution to interdisciplinary research on film and Christianity.

The Cinema of Discomfort
The Cinema of Discomfort

Author: Geoff King

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-10-07

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1501359282

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How do we understand types of cinema that offer experiences of discomfort, awkwardness or disquieting uncertainty? This book examines a number of examples of such work at the heart of contemporary art and indie film. While the commercial mainstream tends to offer comforting viewing experiences – or moments of discomfort that exist largely to be overcome – The Cinema of Discomfort analyses films in which discomfort is offered in a sustained manner. Cinema of this kind confronts us with material such as distinctly uncomfortable sexual encounters. It invites us into uncertain relationships with awkward and sometimes unlikable characters. It presents us with challenging behaviour or what are presented as uncomfortable realities. It often refuses information on which to base judgments. More discomfortingly, cinema of this kind tends to provoke uncertainty at the level of what emotional responses we are encouraged to have towards difficult, sometimes controversial, characters or events. The Cinema of Discomfort examines a number of case-studies, including Palindromes by Todd Solondz (US) and Dogtooth from Yorgos Lanthimos (Greece), along with other examples from Austria, Sweden, the UK, the US and Germany. Offering close textual analysis of the manner in which discomfort is generated, it also asks how we should understand the appeal of such work to certain viewers and how the existence of films of this kind can be explained, as products of both their socio-cultural context and the more particular institutional realms of art and indie film.

Killers, Clients and Kindred Spirits
Killers, Clients and Kindred Spirits

Author: Coleman Lindsay Coleman

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2019-05-09

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 1474411835

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The only Japanese director to have won the Palme d'Or from Cannes more than once, and second only to Ozu Yasujiro in the number of times he has won the prestigious Kinema Jumpo Best One award, the late Imamura Shohei was one of Japan's leading and most controversial film directors. This book is one of the first to study all of Imamura's major films alongside his television and theatrical documentaries, focusing on his major themes and concerns. By giving shape to Imamura's career, the book positions him as a stylistic innovator as well as an ethnographic investigator into Japanese culture and tradition; the preeminent examiner of the hidden, barely repressed underpinnings of Japanese society.

The Japanese Cinema Book
The Japanese Cinema Book

Author: Hideaki Fujiki

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-04-02

Total Pages: 625

ISBN-13: 1844576817

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Japanese Cinema Book provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world's most fascinating and widely admired filmmaking regions. In terms of its historical coverage, broad thematic approach and the significant international range of its authors, it is the largest and most wide-ranging publication of its kind to date. Ranging from renowned directors such as Akira Kurosawa to neglected popular genres such as the film musical and encompassing topics such as ecology, spectatorship, home-movies, colonial history and relations with Hollywood and Europe, The Japanese Cinema Book presents a set of new, and often surprising, perspectives on Japanese film. With its plural range of interdisciplinary perspectives based on the expertise of established and emerging scholars and critics, The Japanese Cinema Book provides a groundbreaking picture of the different ways in which Japanese cinema may be understood as a local, regional, national, transnational and global phenomenon. The book's innovative structure combines general surveys of a particular historical topic or critical approach with various micro-level case studies. It argues there is no single fixed Japanese cinema, but instead a fluid and varied field of Japanese filmmaking cultures that continue to exist in a dynamic relationship with other cinemas, media and regions. The Japanese Cinema Book is divided into seven inter-related sections: · Theories and Approaches · * Institutions and Industry · * Film Style · * Genre · * Times and Spaces of Representation · * Social Contexts · * Flows and Interactions