Details

ISBN-10: 0231191634
ISBN-13: 9780231191630
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publish Date: 04/16/2019
Dimensions: 8.50" L, 5.50" W, 0.70" H

What Is Japanese Cinema?: A History

Translator: Philip Kaffen

Paperback

Price: $26.00

Overview

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.

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Reviews
No living scholar-critic of Japanese movies possesses Yomota Inuhiko's encyclopedic range and sheer passion for film. What Is Japanese Cinema? is a tour de force of filmic history: a concise and spirited account of how Japanese film came to be, illuminating carryovers from native theatrical traditions and the tensions lining the political history of modern East Asia. That Japanese cinema has all along been local, and–in its imperial ambitions, aesthetic power, or moral force–global in its reach, is a matter that this insightful book brings remarkably to light.–Paul Anderer, author of Kurosawa's Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Iconic Films
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Details

ISBN-10: 0231191634
ISBN-13: 9780231191630
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publish Date: 04/16/2019
Dimensions: 8.50" L, 5.50" W, 0.70" H
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