Download or read book Visions of Japanese Modernity written by Aaron Andrew Gerow and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Aaron Gerow focuses on the early period in which the institutional and narrational structure of Japanese cinema was in flux, arguing that the transnational intertext is less important than the power-laden operations by which the meaning of cinema itself was discursively defined. Both progressive critics of the 'pure film' movement and the more conservative Japanese cultural bureaucrats demanded a unitary text that suppressed the hybrid and unpredictable meanings attendant on early Japanese cinema's informal exhibition contexts. Gerow points out the irony that the progressive and individualist pure film movement critics worked in concert with the Japanese state to undo the 'theft' of Japanese cinema, proposing to replace representations of Japan in Western films by exporting a Japanese cinema 'reformed' to emulate the international norm.

Download or read book Dialectics without Synthesis written by Naoki Yamamoto and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dialectics without Synthesis explores Japan’s active but previously unrecognized participation in the global circulation of film theory during the first half of the twentieth century. Examining a variety of Japanese theorists working in the fields of film, literature, avant-garde art, Marxism, and philosophy, Naoki Yamamoto offers a new approach to cinematic realism as culturally conditioned articulations of the shifting relationship of film to the experience of modernity. In this study, long-held oppositions between realism and modernism, universalism and particularism, and most notably, the West and the non-West are challenged through a radical reconfiguration of the geopolitics of knowledge production and consumption.

Download or read book Making Audiences written by Hideaki Fujiki and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book explores the hundred-year history of the relationships between Japanese media and social subjects through an analysis of the connections between cinema audiences and five significant discursive terms in the Japanese language: minshåu (the people), kokumin (the national populace), tåoa minzoku (the East Asian race), taishåu (the masses), and shimin (citizens). Roughly speaking, as far as their relations with cinema are concerned, the term "the people" circulated from the 1910s through the 1920s, "the national populace" from the 1930s through the 2010s and even to the present day, "the East Asian race" from the late 1930s up to the mid-1940s, "the masses" from the late 1920s to the present, and "citizens" from the 1960s through the present. The overlap between the terms indicates that the history of Japanese social subjects has unfolded not in a linear, but in a multilayered manner. Each period has also been bound up with various political and economic issues which have impacted on that very history. These include the presence of capitalism, total war, imperialism, democracy, social movements, post-Fordism, neoliberalism, the network society, and the risk society. In each context, such terms as "the people," "the national populace," "the East Asian race," "the masses," and "the citizens" have not necessarily been deployed in terms of a set of lexically defined, fixed, and stable meanings; rather, they all have entailed certain discrepancies and contradictions among a diverse range of standpoints, while at the same time changing their different interpretative valence according to historical context. In addition, these concepts have sometimes been used to define the self and at other times to define a given other. Moreover, the terms have not only been enunciated through discourses; they have also been enacted by physical bodies. The overall purpose of this book, therefore, is to empirically and analytically elucidate a dynamic, multi-layered history of cinema audiences in Japan as part of a larger relationship between media and social subjects and examines cinema audiences as simultaneously shaped by and shaping social history. In so doing, it brings a new perspective to the history of Japanese society and culture in its global context from the early twentieth century up to the early twenty-first century"--

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema written by Daisuke Miyao and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a multifaceted single-volume account of Japanese cinema. It addresses productive debates about what Japanese cinema is, where Japanese cinema is, as well as what and where Japanese cinema studies is, at the so-called period of crisis of national boundary under globalization and the so-called period of crisis of cinema under digitalization.

Download or read book Writing Cinema written by Aaron Andrew Gerow and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Making Personas written by Hideaki Fujiki and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The film star is not simply an actor but a historical phenomenon that derives from the production of an actor’s attractiveness, the circulation of his or her name and likeness, and the support of media consumers. This book analyzes the establishment and transformation of the transnational film star system and the formations of historically important film stars—Japanese and non-Japanese—and casts new light on Japanese modernity as it unfolded between the 1910s and 1930s. Hideaki Fujiki illustrates how film stardom and the star system emerged and evolved, touching on such facets as the production, representation, circulation, and reception of performers’ images in films and other media. Examining several individual performers—particularly benshi narrators, Onoe Matsunosuke, Tachibana Teijirō, Kurishima Sumiko, Clara Bow, and Natsukawa Shizue—as well as certain aspects of different star systems that bolstered individual stardom, this study foregrounds the associations of contradictory, multivalent social factors that constituted modernity in Japan, such as industrialization, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, and consumerism. Through its nuanced treatment of the production and consumption of film stars, this book shows that modernity is not a simple concept, but an intricate, contested, and paradoxical nexus of diverse social elements emerging in their historical contexts.

Download or read book Writing in Light written by Joanne Bernardi and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While most people associate Japanese film with modern directors like Akira Kurosawa, Japan's cinema has a rich tradition going back to the silent era. Japan's "pure film movement" of the 1910s is widely held to mark the birth of film theory as we know it and is a touchstone for historians of early cinema. Yet this work has been difficult to access because so few prints have been preserved. Joanne Bernardi offers the first book-length study of this important era, recovering a body of lost film and establishing its significance in the development of Japanese cinema. Building on a wealth of original-language sources-much of it translated here for the first time-she examines how the movement challenged the industry's dependence on pre-existing stage repertories, preference for lecturers of intertitles, and the use of female impersonators. Bernardi provides in-depth analysis of key scripts-The Glory of Life, A Father's Tears, Amateur Club, and The Lust of the White Serpent-and includes translations in an appendix. These films offer case studies for understanding the craft of screenwriting during the silent era and shed light on such issues as genre, authorship and control, and gender representation. Writing in Light helps fill important gaps in the history of Japanese silent cinema. By identifying points at which "pure film" discourse merges with changing international trends and attitudes toward film, it offers an important resource for film, literary, and cultural historians.

Download or read book Cinema Approaching Reality written by Victor Fan and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-03-20 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cinema Approaching Reality, Victor Fan brings together, for the first time, Chinese and Euro-American film theories and theorists to engage in critical debates about film in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 1920s through 1940s. His point of departure is a term popularly employed by Chinese film critics during this period, bizhen, often translated as “lifelike” but best understood as “approaching reality.” What these Chinese theorists mean, in Fan’s reading, is that the cinematographic image is not a form of total reality, but it can allow spectators to apprehend an effect as though they had been there at the time when an event actually happened. Fan suggests that the phrase “approaching reality” can help to renegotiate an aporia (blind spot) that influential French film critic André Bazin wrestled with: the cinematographic image is a trace of reality, yet reality is absent in the cinematographic image, and the cinema makes present this absence as it reactivates the passage of time. Fan enriches Bazinian cinematic ontology with discussions on cinematic reality in Republican China and colonial Hong Kong, putting Western theorists—from Bazin and Kracauer to Baudrillard, Agamben, and Deleuze—into dialogue with their Chinese counterparts. The result is an eye-opening exploration of the potentialities in approaching cinema anew, especially in the photographic materiality following its digital turn.

Download or read book Review of Japanese Culture and Society written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consists mainly of articles reprinted from various sources published originally in Japanese since World War II.

Download or read book Media Theory in Japan written by Marc Steinberg and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an overview of Japanese media theory from the 1910s to the present, this volume introduces English-language readers to Japan's rich body of theoretical and conceptual work on media for the first time. The essays address a wide range of topics, including the work of foundational Japanese thinkers; Japanese theories of mediation and the philosophy of media; the connections between early Japanese television and consumer culture; and architecture's intersection with communications theory. Tracing the theoretical frameworks and paradigms that stem from Japan's media ecology, the contributors decenter Eurocentric media theory and demonstrate the value of the Japanese context to reassessing the parameters and definition of media theory itself. Taken together, these interdisciplinary essays expand media theory to encompass philosophy, feminist critique, literary theory, marketing discourse, and art; provide a counterbalance to the persisting universalist impulse of media studies; and emphasize the need to consider media theory situationally. Contributors. Yuriko Furuhata, Aaron Gerow, Mark Hansen, Marilyn Ivy, Takeshi Kadobayashi, Keisuke Kitano, Akihiro Kitada, Thomas Looser, Anne McKnight, Ryoko Misono, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Miryam Sas, Fabian Schäfer, Marc Steinberg, Tomiko Yoda, Alexander Zahlten

Download or read book The Japanese Cinema Book written by Hideaki Fujiki and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Communist Infiltration of Hollywood Motion picture Industry written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Early Ayn Rand written by Ayn Rand and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-04-05 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable, newly revised collection of Ayn Rand's early fiction—including her previously unpublished short story The Night King—ranges from beginner's exercises to excerpts from early versions of We the Living and The Fountainhead.

Download or read book Gonda written by Ursula Mayer and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gonda, a new book by Ursula Mayer and Maria Fusco, experiments in cinematic and linguistic registers through polyphonic monologue. Taking the form of a ciné-roman, the book is based on Mayer's 16mm film of the same name, with a screenplay written by Maria Fusco and commissioned by Film London. Gonda is informed by Ayn Rand's 1934 play Ideal. In the play's script, controversial Russian American writer and philosopher Rand lays out her philosophical system of "Objectivism" with its stubbornly anti-altruistic and individualistic position. As a critical counter to Rand, Gonda creates kaleidoscopic printed spaces in which image and text shift roles to affect presupposed ideals of identity and existence. Noting how the cinematic image actually gazes back on us, the book utilizes highly stylized and precisely composed full-color imagery, and features Dutch transgender model Valentijn de Hingh. The screenplay, printed in full in this book, is developed from a series of interdisciplinary workshops where academics, curators, critics, and writers considered the possibilities of writing through or by rather than about Rand's play. The screenplay's key textual reference is the production structure of Félix Guattari's unrealized 1986 Project for a Film by Kafka, in which Guattari proposed a made-for-television mini-series inspired by episodes in Kafka's writings and life. Gonda cannibalizes original writing and transcribed workshop material together with five letter-based passages from Ideal, nudging them into alternative personal pronouns, to make Gonda a book of voices. Ursula Mayer is an Austrian artist based in London. Working predominantly with film, performance, and photography, her work has been recently shown in the Baltic Triennial, Vilnius; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Performa, New York. Maria Fusco is a Northern Irish writer, critic, and editor based in London. She is director of art writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and editor of the journal The Happy Hypocrite. Her book of short stories, The Mechanical Copula, was published by Sternberg Press in 2010.

Download or read book Three Plays written by Ayn Rand and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-04-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published together for the first time are three of Ayn Rand's most compelling stage plays. The courtroom drama Night of January 16th, famous for its open-ended verdict, is presented here in its definitive text. Also included are two of Rand's unproduced plays, Think Twice, a clever philosophical murder mystery, and Ideal, a bitter indictment of people's willingness to betray their highest values-symbolized by a Hollywood goddess suspected of a crime.

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Shadow written by Daisuke Miyao and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-04 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Sessue Hayakawa written by Daisuke Miyao and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-28 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886–1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. In this critical study of Hayakawa’s stardom, Daisuke Miyao reconstructs the Japanese actor’s remarkable career, from the films that preceded his meteoric rise to fame as the star of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) through his reign as a matinee idol and the subsequent decline and resurrection of his Hollywood fortunes. Drawing on early-twentieth-century sources in both English and Japanese, including Japanese-language newspapers in the United States, Miyao illuminates the construction and reception of Hayakawa’s stardom as an ongoing process of cross-cultural negotiation. Hayakawa’s early work included short films about Japan that were popular with American audiences as well as spy films that played upon anxieties about Japanese nationalism. The Jesse L. Lasky production company sought to shape Hayakawa’s image by emphasizing the actor’s Japanese traits while portraying him as safely assimilated into U.S. culture. Hayakawa himself struggled to maintain his sympathetic persona while creating more complex Japanese characters that would appeal to both American and Japanese audiences. The star’s initial success with U.S. audiences created ambivalence in Japan, where some described him as traitorously Americanized and others as a positive icon of modernized Japan. This unique history of transnational silent-film stardom focuses attention on the ways that race, ethnicity, and nationality influenced the early development of the global film industry.