Author: Mark Schilling Publisher: Shambhala Publications ISBN: 0834804158 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 401
Book Description
This comprehensive look at Japanese cinema in the 1990s includes nearly four hundred reviews of individual films and a dozen interviews and profiles of leading directors and producers. Interpretive essays provide an overview of some of the key issues and themes of the decade, and provide background and context for the treatment of individual films and artists. In Mark Schilling's view, Japanese film is presently in a period of creative ferment, with a lively independent sector challenging the conventions of the industry mainstream. Younger filmmakers are rejecting the stale formulas that have long characterized major studio releases, reaching out to new influences from other media—television, comics, music videos, and even computer games—and from both the West and other Asian cultures. In the process they are creating fresh and exciting films that range from the meditative to the manic, offering hope that Japanese film will not only survive but thrive as it enters the new millennium.
Author: Timothy Iles Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9047424697 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
A concise, textually analytical study of the ways in which works of contemporary Japanese cinema have explored and reflected a 'crisis' in Japan's changing conceptions of individuality and identity approaching the central issue from a range of aspects.
Author: Jay McRoy Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9401205329 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 230
Book Description
Over the last two decades, Japanese filmmakers have produced some of the most important and innovative works of cinematic horror. At once visually arresting, philosophically complex, and politically charged, films by directors like Tsukamoto Shinya (Tetsuo: The Iron Man [1988] and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer [1992]), Sato Hisayasu (Muscle [1988] and Naked Blood [1995]) Kurosawa Kiyoshi (Cure [1997], Séance [2000], and Kaïro [2001]), Nakata Hideo (Ringu [1998], Ringu II [1999], and Dark Water [2002]), and Miike Takashi (Audition [1999] and Ichi the Killer [2001]) continually revisit and redefine the horror genre in both its Japanese and global contexts. In the process, these and other directors of contemporary Japanese horror film consistently contribute exciting and important new visions, from postmodern reworkings of traditional avenging spirit narratives to groundbreaking works of cinematic terror that position depictions of radical or ‘monstrous’ alterity/hybridity as metaphors for larger socio-political concerns, including shifting gender roles, reconsiderations of the importance of the extended family as a social institution, and reconceptualisations of the very notion of cultural and national boundaries.
Author: Keiko I. McDonald Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315292394 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 358
Book Description
Of all the world s cinemas, Japan's is perhaps unique in its closeness to the nation's literature, past and contemporary. The Western world became aware of this when Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice film festival in 1951 and the Oscar for best foreign film in 1952. More recent examples include Shohei Imamura's Eel, which won the Palm d'Or (Best Picture) at Cannes in 1997.From Book to Screen breaks new ground by exploring important connections between Japan's modern literary tradition and its national cinema. The first part offers an historical and cultural overview of the working relationship that developed between pure literature and film. It deals with three important periods in which filmmakers relied most heavily on literary works for enriching and developing cinematic art. The second part provides detailed analyses of a dozen literary works and their screen adoptions.
Author: Mika Ko Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135238863 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 241
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.
Author: Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824863747 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 201
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.
Author: Mark Schilling Publisher: ISBN: 9781937220099 Category : Languages : en Pages : 482
Book Description
From popular genre films to cult avant-garde works, this book is an essential guide to Japan's vibrant cinema culture. It collects two decades of the best of Mark Schilling's film writing for Variety, Japan Times, and other publications. The book offers an in-depth look at hundreds of landmark Japanese movies as well as undeservedly neglected ones. The essays and detailed analyses are interwoven with more than sixty interviews showcasing Japan's most talented directors and stars. This book enables students, teachers, and lovers of Japanese cinema to make new discoveries while learning more about their favorite films. Mark Schilling set off for Japan in 1975 to immerse himself in the culture, learn the language, and haunt the theaters. He has been there ever since. In 1989 he became a regular film reviewer for The Japan Times, and has written on Japanese film for publications including Variety, Screen International, Premier, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, Japan Quarterly, Winds, Cinemaya, and Kinema Jumpo.
Author: Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 9780822325192 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 500
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: Colette Balmain Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 0748630597 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
This book is a major historical and cultural overview of an increasingly popular genre. Starting with the cultural phenomenon of Godzilla, it explores the evolution of Japanese horror from the 1950s through to contemporary classics of Japanese horror cinema such as Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge. Divided thematically, the book explores key motifs such as the vengeful virgin, the demonic child, the doomed lovers and the supernatural serial killer, situating them within traditional Japanese mythology and folk-tales. The book also considers the aesthetics of the Japanese horror film, and the mechanisms through which horror is expressed at a visceral level through the use of setting, lighting, music and mise-en-scene. It concludes by considering the impact of Japanese horror on contemporary American cinema by examining the remakes of Ringu, Dark Water and Ju-On: The Grudge.The emphasis is on accessibility, and whilst the book is primarily marketed towards film and media students, it will also be of interest to anyone interested in Japanese horror film, cultural mythology and folk-tales, cinematic aesthetics and film theory.
Author: Mark Schilling
Author: Timothy Iles
Author: Jay McRoy
Author: Keiko I. McDonald
Author: Mika Ko
Author: Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
Author: Alexander Jacoby
Author: Mark Schilling
Author: Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto
Author: Colette Balmain