Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema

Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema PDF Author: Daisuke Miyao
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478008873
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
In Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, Daisuke Miyao explores the influence of Japanese art on the development of early cinematic visual style, particularly the actualité films made by the Lumière brothers between 1895 and 1905. Examining nearly 1,500 Lumière films, Miyao contends that more than being documents of everyday life, they provided a medium for experimenting with aesthetic and cinematic styles imported from Japan. Miyao further analyzes the Lumière films produced in Japan as a negotiation between French Orientalism and Japanese aesthetics. The Lumière films, Miyao shows, are best understood within a media ecology of photography, painting, and cinema, all indebted to the compositional principles of Japonisme and the new ideas of kinetic realism it inspired. The Lumière brothers and their cinematographers shared the contemporaneous obsession among Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists about how to instantly and physically capture the movements of living things in the world. Their engagement with Japonisme, he concludes, constituted a rich and productive two-way conversation between East and West.

Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema

Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema PDF Author: Daisuke Miyao
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478008873
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Get Book

Book Description
In Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, Daisuke Miyao explores the influence of Japanese art on the development of early cinematic visual style, particularly the actualité films made by the Lumière brothers between 1895 and 1905. Examining nearly 1,500 Lumière films, Miyao contends that more than being documents of everyday life, they provided a medium for experimenting with aesthetic and cinematic styles imported from Japan. Miyao further analyzes the Lumière films produced in Japan as a negotiation between French Orientalism and Japanese aesthetics. The Lumière films, Miyao shows, are best understood within a media ecology of photography, painting, and cinema, all indebted to the compositional principles of Japonisme and the new ideas of kinetic realism it inspired. The Lumière brothers and their cinematographers shared the contemporaneous obsession among Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists about how to instantly and physically capture the movements of living things in the world. Their engagement with Japonisme, he concludes, constituted a rich and productive two-way conversation between East and West.

A New History of Japanese Cinema

A New History of Japanese Cinema PDF Author: Isolde Standish
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441161546
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
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.

Sessue Hayakawa

Sessue Hayakawa PDF Author: Daisuke Miyao
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822339694
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
DIVCritical biography of Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese actor who became a popular silent film star in the U.S., that looks at how Hollywood treated issues of race and nationality in the early twentieth century./div

Nippon Modern

Nippon Modern PDF Author: Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824863747
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
"Devastated by the 1923 earthquake, Tokyo re-built itself in symbiosis with an image of modernity concocted by its own film studios. Nippon Modern renders that image, aspect after fascinating aspect, in sharp detail. Scores of films make up that image, a few resurrected in this volume for intense and delightful analysis. A sensitive viewer and an honest resourceful historian, Wada-Marciano lays out what she’s found in relation to other studies of this precious period, and she does so without hyperbole and without a glaring agenda. She makes you understand how, after Tokyo would again be devastated in 1945, these ‘modern’ films could become objects of nostalgia. Such is the care she gives her subject and such the fragility of that subject." —Dudley Andrew, Yale University "Nippon Modern will be recognized as one of the core books of Japanese film studies, a must-read for anyone interested in Japanese cinema. Because it brings Japanese cinema study into dialogue with important debates in history, area studies, and post colonial studies, it should have a wide and heterogeneous readership that will be attracted to its compelling analysis of important films and straightforward narration of biographies and studio history." —Abé Mark Nornes, University of Michigan 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 high lighted 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 con tribute to the current inquiry into non-Western vernacular modernities.

The Aesthetics of Shadow

The Aesthetics of Shadow PDF Author: Daisuke Miyao
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822354225
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
In this revealing study, Daisuke Miyao explores "the aesthetics of shadow" in Japanese cinema in the first half of the twentieth century. This term, coined by the production designer Yoshino Nobutaka, refers to the perception that shadows add depth and mystery. Miyao analyzes how this notion became naturalized as the representation of beauty in Japanese films, situating Japanese cinema within transnational film history. He examines the significant roles lighting played in distinguishing the styles of Japanese film from American and European film and the ways that lighting facilitated the formulation of a coherent new Japanese cultural tradition. Miyao discusses the influences of Hollywood and German cinema alongside Japanese Kabuki theater lighting traditions and the emergence of neon commercial lighting during this period. He argues that lighting technology in cinema had been structured by the conflicts of modernity in Japan, including capitalist transitions in the film industry, the articulation of Japanese cultural and national identity, and increased subjectivity for individuals. By focusing on the understudied element of film lighting and treating cinematographers and lighting designers as essential collaborators in moviemaking, Miyao offers a rereading of Japanese film history.

What Is Japanese Cinema?

What Is Japanese Cinema? PDF Author: Yomota Inuhiko
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549482
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
What might Godzilla and Kurosawa have in common? What, if anything, links Ozu’s sparse portraits of domestic life and the colorful worlds of anime? In What Is Japanese Cinema? Yomota Inuhiko provides a concise and lively history of Japanese film that shows how cinema tells the story of Japan’s modern age. Discussing popular works alongside auteurist masterpieces, Yomota considers films in light of both Japanese cultural particularities and cinema as a worldwide art form. He covers the history of Japanese film from the silent era to the rise of J-Horror in its historical, technological, and global contexts. Yomota shows how Japanese film has been shaped by traditonal art forms such as kabuki theater as well as foreign influences spanning Hollywood and Italian neorealism. Along the way, he considers the first golden age of Japanese film; colonial filmmaking in Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan; the impact of World War II and the U.S. occupation; the Japanese film industry’s rise to international prominence during the 1950s and 1960s; and the challenges and technological shifts of recent decades. Alongside a larger thematic discussion of what defines and characterizes Japanese film, Yomota provides insightful readings of canonical directors including Kurosawa, Ozu, Suzuki, and Miyazaki as well as genre movies, documentaries, indie film, and pornography. An incisive and opinionated history, What Is Japanese Cinema? is essential reading for admirers and students of Japan’s contributions to the world of film.

East Asian-German Cinema

East Asian-German Cinema PDF Author: Joanne Miyang Cho
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000461386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This is the first edited volume dedicated to the study of East Asian-German cinema. Its coverage ranges from 1919 to the present, a period which has witnessed an unprecedented degree of global entanglement between Germany and East Asia. In analyzing this hybrid cinema, this volume employs a transnational approach, which highlights the nations’ cinematic encounters and entanglements. It reveals both German perceptions of East Asia and East Asian perceptions of Germany, through analysis of works by both German directors and East Asian/East Asian-German directors. It is hoped that this volume will not only accelerate cross-cultural exchange, but also provide a wider perspective that helps film scholars to see the broader contexts in which these films are produced. It introduces multiple compelling topics, not just immigration, multiculturalism, and exile, but also Japonisme, children’s literature, musical modernity, media hybridity, gender representation, urban space, Cold War divisions, and national identity. It addresses several genres—feature films, essay films, and documentary films. Lastly, by embracing three East Asian cinemas in one volume, this volume serves as an excellent introduction for German cinema students and scholars. It will appeal to international and interdisciplinary audiences, as its contributors represent multiple disciplines and four world regions.

Japanese Cinema

Japanese Cinema PDF Author: Alastair Phillips
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134334214
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Japanese Cinema includes twenty-four chapters on key films of Japanese cinema, from the silent era to the present day, providing a comprehensive introduction to Japanese cinema history and Japanese culture and society. Studying a range of important films, from Late Spring, Seven Samurai and In the Realm of the Senses to Godzilla, Hana-Bi and Ring, the collection includes discussion of all the major directors of Japanese cinema including Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Oshima, Suzuki, Kitano and Miyazaki. Each chapter discusses the film in relation to aesthetic, industrial or critical issues and ends with a complete filmography for each director. The book also includes a full glossary of terms and a comprehensive bibliography of readings on Japanese cinema. Bringing together leading international scholars and showcasing pioneering new research, this book is essential reading for all students and general readers interested in one of the world’s most important film industries.

To the Distant Observer

To the Distant Observer PDF Author: Noël Burch
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520038776
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description


A Hundred Years of Japanese Film

A Hundred Years of Japanese Film PDF Author: ドナルドリッチー
Publisher: Kodansha International
ISBN: 9784770029959
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
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.