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.
Author: Hideaki Fujiki
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1844576817
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 625
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Book Description
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
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.
Author: Alexander Zahlten
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822372460
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
In The End of Japanese Cinema Alexander Zahlten moves film theory beyond the confines of film itself, attending to the emergence of new kinds of aesthetics, politics, temporalities, and understandings of film and media. He traces the evolution of a new media ecology through deep historical analyses of the Japanese film industry from the 1960s to the 2000s. Zahlten focuses on three popular industrial genres: Pink Film (independently distributed softcore pornographic films), Kadokawa (big-budget productions as part of a transmedia strategy), and V-Cinema (direct-to-video films). He examines the conditions of these films' production to demonstrate how the media industry itself becomes part of the politics of the media text and to highlight the complex negotiation between media and politics, culture, and identity in Japan. Zahlten points to a different history of film, one in which a once-powerful film industry transformed into becoming only one component within a complex media-mix ecology. In so doing, Zahlten opens new paths for uncovering similar broad processes in other large media societies. A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Author: Daisuke Miyao
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199731667
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
The reality of transnational innovation and dissemination of new technologies, including digital media, has yet to make a dent in the deep-seated culturalism that insists on reinscribing a divide between the West and Japan. The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema aims to counter this trend toward dichotomizing the West and Japan and to challenge the pervasive culturalism of today's film and media studies. Featuring twenty essays, each authored by a leading researcher in the field, this volume addresses productive debates about where Japanese cinema is and where Japanese cinema is going at the period of crisis of national boundary under globalization. It reevaluates the position of Japanese cinema within the discipline of cinema and media studies and beyond, and situates Japanese cinema within the broader fields of transnational film history. Likewise, it examines the materiality of Japanese cinema, scrutinizes cinema's relationship to other media, and identifies the specific practices of film production and reception. As a whole, the volume fosters a dialogue between Japanese scholars of Japanese cinema, film scholars of Japanese cinema based in Anglo-American and European countries, film scholars of non-Japanese cinema, film archivists, film critics, and filmmakers familiar with film scholarship. A comprehensive volume that grasps Japanese cinema under the rubric of the global and also fills the gap between Japanese and non-Japanese film studies and between theories and practices, The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema challenges and responds to the major developments underfoot in this rapidly changing field.
Author: Keiko I. McDonald
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824829391
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Reading a Japanese Film, written by a pioneer of Japanese film studies in the United States, provides viewers new to Japanese cinema with the necessary tools to construct a deeper understanding of some of the most critically acclaimed and thoroughly entertaining films ever made. In her introduction, Keiko McDonald presents a historical overview and outlines a unified approach to film analysis. Sixteen "readings" of films currently available on DVD with English subtitles put theory into practice as she considers a wide range of work, from familiar classics by Ozu and Kurosawa to the films of a younger generation of directors.
Author: Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822325192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500
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Book Description
This work will become not only the newly definitive study of Kurosawa, but will redefine the field of Japanese cinema studies, particularly as the field exists in the west.
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.
Author: Laura Lee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319663739
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
This book explores the rich complexity of Japan’s film history by tracing how cinema has been continually reshaped through its dynamic engagement within a shifting media ecology. Focusing on techniques that draw attention to the interval between frames on the filmstrip, something that is generally obscured in narrative film, Lee uncovers a chief mechanism by which, from its earliest period, the medium has capitalized on its materiality to instantiate its contemporaneity. In doing so, cinema has bound itself tightly with adjacent visual forms such as anime and manga to redefine itself across its history of interaction with new media, including television, video, and digital formats. Japanese Cinema Between Frames is a bold examination of Japanese film aesthetics that reframes the nation’s cinema history, illuminating processes that have both contributed to the unique texture of Japanese films and yoked the nation’s cinema to the global sphere of film history.
Author: Mika Ko
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135238863
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Over the last 20 years, ethnic minority groups have been increasingly featured in Japanese Films. However, the way these groups are presented has not been a subject of investigation. This study examines the representation of so-called Others – foreigners, ethnic minorities, and Okinawans – in Japanese cinema. By combining textual and contextual analysis, this book analyses the narrative and visual style of films of contemporary Japanese cinema in relation to their social and historical context of production and reception. Mika Ko considers the ways in which ‘multicultural’ sentiments have emerged in contemporary Japanese cinema. In this respect, Japanese films may be seen not simply to have ‘reflected’ more general trends within Japanese society but to have played an active role in constructing and communicating different versions of multiculturalism. In particular, the book is concerned with how representations of ‘otherness’ in contemporary Japanese cinema may be identified as reinforcing or subverting dominant discourses of ‘Japaneseness’. the author book also illuminates the ways in which Japanese films have engaged in the dramatisation and elaboration of ideas and attitudes surrounding contemporary Japanese nationalism and multiculturalism. By locating contemporary Japanese cinema in a social and political context, Japanese Cinema and Otherness makes an original contribution to scholarship on Japanese film study but also to bridging the gap between Japanese studies and film studies.
