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
One of the most prolific and respected directors of Japanese cinema, Naruse Mikio (1905–69) made eighty-nine films between 1930 and 1967. Little, however, has been written about Naruse in English, and much of the writing about him in Japanese has not been translated into English. With The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, Catherine Russell brings deserved critical attention to this under-appreciated director. Besides illuminating Naruse’s contributions to Japanese and world cinema, Russell’s in-depth study of the director sheds new light on the Japanese film industry between the 1930s and the 1960s. Naruse was a studio-based director, a company man renowned for bringing films in on budget and on time. During his long career, he directed movies in different styles of melodrama while displaying a remarkable continuity of tone. His films were based on a variety of Japanese literary sources and original scripts; almost all of them were set in contemporary Japan. Many were “women’s films.” They had female protagonists, and they depicted women’s passions, disappointments, routines, and living conditions. While neither Naruse or his audiences identified themselves as “feminist,” his films repeatedly foreground, if not challenge, the rigid gender norms of Japanese society. Given the complex historical and critical issues surrounding Naruse’s cinema, a comprehensive study of the director demands an innovative and interdisciplinary approach. Russell draws on the critical reception of Naruse in Japan in addition to the cultural theories of Harry Harootunian, Miriam Hansen, and Walter Benjamin. She shows that Naruse’s movies were key texts of Japanese modernity, both in the ways that they portrayed the changing roles of Japanese women in the public sphere and in their depiction of an urban, industrialized, mass-media-saturated society.
Word and Image in Japanese Cinema examines the complex relationship between the temporal order of linguistic narrative and the spatiality of visual spectacle, a dynamic that has played an important role in much of Japanese film. The tension between the controlling order of words and the liberating fragmentation of images has been an important force that has shaped modern culture in Japan and that has also determined the evolution of its cinema. In exploring the rift between word and image, the essays in this volume clarify the cultural imperatives that Japanese cinema reflects, as well as the ways in which the dialectic of word and image has informed the understanding and critical reception of Japanese cinema in the West.
From the Seven Samaruai and Godzilla to the Ring. this is an outstanding collection of twenty-four articles on key films of Japanese cinema, from the silent era to the present day, that presents a full introduction to Japanese cinema history, culture and society.
A re-interpretation of the master of Japanese cinema from a socio-historical perspectiveOne of the most well regarded of non-Western film directors, responsible for acknowledged classics like Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu Yasujiro worked during a period of immense turbulence for Japan and its population. This book offers a new interpretation of Ozus career, from his earliest work in the 1920s up to his death in 1963, focusing on Ozus depiction of the everyday life and experiences of ordinary Japanese people during a time of depression, war and economic resurgence. Firmly situating him within the context of the Japanese film industry, Woojeong Joo examines Ozus work as a studio director and his relation to sound cinema, and looks in-depth at his wartime experiences and his adaptation to post-war Japanese society. Drawing on Japanese materials not previously examined in western scholarship, this is a ground-breaking new study of a master of cinema.Case studies include:Ozus shAshimin films Ozus wartime films, including the script of The Flavour of Green Tea over RicePostwar script of The Moon Has RisenTokyo Story
In A New History of Japanese Cinema Isolde Standish focuses on the historical development of Japanese film. She details an industry and an art form shaped by the competing and merging forces of traditional culture and of economic and technological innovation. Adopting a thematic, exploratory approach, Standish links the concept of Japanese cinema as a system of communication with some of the central discourses of the twentieth century: modernism, nationalism, humanism, resistance, and gender. After an introduction outlining the earliest years of cinema in Japan, Standish demonstrates cinema's symbolic position in Japanese society in the 1930s - as both a metaphor and a motor of modernity. Moving into the late thirties and early forties, Standish analyses cinema's relationship with the state-focusing in particular on the war and occupation periods. The book's coverage of the post-occupation period looks at "romance" films in particular. Avant-garde directors came to the fore during the 1960s and early seventies, and their work is discussed in depth. The book concludes with an investigation of genre and gender in mainstream films of recent years. In grappling with Japanese film history and criticism, most western commentators have concentrated on offering interpretations of what have come to be considered "classic" films. A New History of Japanese Cinema takes a genuinely innovative approach to the subject, and should prove an essential resource for many years to come.
Richie offers movie buffs and serious film students a lively, comprehensive overview of Japanese cinema from the end of the 19th century to the present. Updated DVD and VHS listings feature new releases, classic films, and reviews.
Nippon Modern is the first intensive study of Japanese cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, a period in which the country's film industry was at its most prolific and a time when cinema played a singular role in shaping Japanese modernity. During the interwar period, the signs of modernity were ubiquitous in Japan's urban architecture, literature, fashion, advertising, popular music, and cinema. The reconstruction of Tokyo following the disastrous earthquake of 1923 highlighted the extent of this cultural transformation, and the film industry embraced the reconfigured space as an expression of the modern. Shochiku Kamata Film Studios (1920-1936), the focus of this study, was the only studio that continued filmmaking in Tokyo following the city's complete destruction. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano points to the influence of the new urban culture in Shochiku's interwar films, acclaimed as modan na eiga, or modern films, by and for Japanese. Wada-Marciano's thought-provoking examinations illustrate the reciprocal relationship between cinema and Japan's vernacular modernity--what Japanese modernity actually meant to Japanese. Her thorough and thoughtful analyses of dozens of films within the cultural contexts of Japan contribute to the current inquiry into non-Western vernacular modernities.
Celebrated as one of Japan’s greatest filmmakers, Kobayashi Masaki’s scorching depictions of war and militarism marked him as a uniquely defiant voice in post-war Japanese cinema. A pacifist drafted into Japan’s Imperial Army, Kobayashi survived the war with his principles intact and created a body of work that was uncompromising in its critique of the nation’s military heritage. Yet his renowned political critiques were grounded in spiritual perspectives, integrating motifs and beliefs from both Buddhism and Christianity. A Dream of Resistance is the first book in English to explore Kobayashi’s entire career, from the early films he made at Shochiku studio, to internationally-acclaimed masterpieces like The Human Condition, Harakiri, and Samurai Rebellion, and on to his final work for NHK Television. Closely examining how Kobayashi’s upbringing and intellectual history shaped the values of his work, Stephen Prince illuminates the political and religious dimensions of Kobayashi’s films, interpreting them as a prayer for peace in troubled times. Prince draws from a wealth of rare archives, including previously untranslated interviews, material that Kobayashi wrote about his films, and even the young director’s wartime diary. The result is an unprecedented portrait of this singular filmmaker.