Download or read book Kurosawa s Rashomon A Vanished City a Lost Brother and the Voice Inside His Iconic Films written by Paul Anderer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking investigation into the early life of the iconic Akira Kurosawa in connection to his most famous film—taking us deeper into Kurosawa and his world. Although he is a filmmaker of international renown, Kurosawa and the story of his formative years remain as enigmatic as his own Rashomon. Paul Anderer looks back at Kurosawa before he became famous, taking us into the turbulent world that made him. We encounter Tokyo, Kurosawa’s birthplace, which would be destroyed twice before his eyes; explore early twentieth-century Japan amid sweeping cross-cultural changes; and confront profound family tragedy alongside the horror of war. From these multiple angles we see how Kurosawa’s life and work speak to the epic narrative of modern Japan’s rise and fall. With fresh insights and vivid prose, Anderer engages the Great Earthquake of 1923, the dynamic energy that surged through Tokyo in its wake, and its impact on Kurosawa as a youth. When the city is destroyed again, in the fire-bombings of 1945, Anderer reveals how Kurosawa grappled with the trauma of war and its aftermath, and forged his artistic vision. Finally, he resurrects the specter and the voice of a gifted and troubled older brother—himself a star in the silent film industry—who took Kurosawa to see his first films, and who led a rebellious life until his desperate end. Bringing these formative forces into focus, Anderer looks beyond the aura of Kurosawa’s fame and leads us deeper into the tragedies and the challenges of his past. Kurosawa’s Rashomon uncovers how a film like Rashomon came to be, and why it endures to illuminate the shadows and the challenges of our present.
Download or read book Akira Kurosawa written by Eric San Juan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The career of acclaimed filmmaker Akira Kurosawa spanned more than five decades, during which he directed more than thirty movies, many of them indisputable classics: Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Throne of Blood, and Yojimbo, among others. During the height of his creative output, Kurosawa became one of the most influential and well-known directors in the world, inspiring filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and movies such as The Magnificent Seven; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; and Star Wars. In Akira Kurosawa: A Viewer’s Guide, Eric San Juan provides a comprehensive yet accessible examination of the artist’s entire cinematic endeavors. From early films of the 1940s such as Sanshiro Sugata and No Regrets for Our Youth to Oscar winner Dersu Uzala—the author helps readers understand what makes Kurosawa’s work so powerful. Each discussion includes a brief synopsis of the film, an engaging analysis, and thoughtful insights into the film’s significance. All of Kurosawa’s works, from 1943 to 1993, are analyzed here, including the overlooked television documentary Song of the Horse, produced in 1970. In addition to more than twenty photos, Akira Kurosawa: A Viewer’s Guide provides rich discussions that will appeal to students of cinema as well as anyone who wants to learn more about Japan’s greatest director.
Download or read book My Affair with Art House Cinema written by Phillip Lopate and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phillip Lopate fell hard for the movies as an adolescent. As he matured into an acclaimed critic and essayist, his infatuation deepened into a lifelong passion. My Affair with Art House Cinema presents Lopate’s selected essays and reviews from the last quarter century, inviting readers to experience films he found exhilarating, tantalizing, and beguiling—and sometimes disappointing or frustrating—through his keen eyes. In an essayist’s sinuous prose style, Lopate captures the formal mastery, artistic imagination, and emotional intensity of art house essentials like Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, as well as works by contemporary filmmakers such as Maren Ade, Hong Sang-soo, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Christian Petzold, Paolo Sorrentino, and Jafar Panahi. Essays explore Chantal Akerman’s rigorous honesty, Ingmar Bergman’s intimacy, Abbas Kiarostami’s playfulness, Kenji Mizoguchi’s visual style, and Frederick Wiseman’s vision of the human condition. Lopate also reflects on the work of fellow critics, including Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. His considered, at times contrarian critiques and celebrations will inspire readers to watch or rewatch these films. Above all, this book showcases Lopate’s passionate advocacy for not only particular films and directors but also the joys and value of a filmgoing culture.
Download or read book The Russian Kurosawa written by Olga V. Solovieva and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-03 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Kurosawa offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in postwar debates on cultural and political reconstruction.
Download or read book Electrified Voices written by Kerim Yasar and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before karaoke’s ubiquity and the rise of global brands such as Sony, Japan was a place where new audio technologies found eager users and contributed to new cultural forms. In Electrified Voices, Kerim Yasar traces the origins of the modern soundscape, showing how the revolutionary nature of sound technology and the rise of a new auditory culture played an essential role in the formation of Japanese modernity. A far-reaching cultural history of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio, and early sound film in Japan, Electrified Voices shows how these technologies reshaped the production of culture. Audio technologies upended the status of the written word as the only source of prestige while revivifying traditional forms of orality. The ability to reproduce and transmit sound, freeing it from the constraints of time and space, had profound consequences on late nineteenth-century language reform; twentieth-century literary, musical, and cinematic practices; the rise of militarism and nationalism in the 1920s and 30s; and the transition to the postwar period inaugurated by Emperor Hirohito’s declaration of unconditional surrender to Allied forces—a declaration that was recorded on a gramophone record and broadcast throughout the defeated Japanese empire. The first cultural history in English of auditory technologies in modern Japan, Electrified Voices enriches our understanding of Japanese modernity and offers a major contribution to sound studies and global media history.
Download or read book The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies written by Luke Hockley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 1081 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the IAJS award for best edited book of 2018! The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies weaves together the various strands of Jungian film theory, revealing a coherent theoretical position underpinning this exciting recent area of research, while also exploring and suggesting new directions for further study. The book maps the current state of debates within Jungian orientated film studies and sets them within a more expansive academic landscape. Taken as a whole, the collection shows how different Jungian approaches can inform and interact with a broad range of disciplines, including literature, digital media studies, clinical debates and concerns. The book also explores the life of film outside cinema - what is sometimes termed ‘post-cinema’ - offering a series of articles exploring Jungian approaches to cinema and social media, computer games, mobile screens, and on-line communities. The Routledge International Handbook of Jungian Film Studies represents an essential resource for students and researchers interested in Jungian approaches to film. It will also appeal to those interested in film theory more widely, and in the application of Jung’s ideas to contemporary and popular culture.
Download or read book What Is Japanese Cinema written by Yomota Inuhiko and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Something Like An Autobiography written by Akira Kurosawa and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated by Audie E. Bock. "A first rate book and a joy to read.... It's doubtful that a complete understanding of the director's artistry can be obtained without reading this book.... Also indispensable for budding directors are the addenda, in which Kurosawa lays out his beliefs on the primacy of a good script, on scriptwriting as an essential tool for directors, on directing actors, on camera placement, and on the value of steeping oneself in literature, from great novels to detective fiction." --Variety "For the lover of Kurosawa's movies...this is nothing short of must reading...a fitting companion piece to his many dynamic and absorbing screen entertainments." --Washington Post Book World
Download or read book Ishiro Honda written by Steve Ryfle and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An appreciation of Japanese fantasy-film history through the eyes of a filmmaker whose name is obscure but populism remains influential.” —Chicago Tribune Ishiro Honda, arguably the most internationally successful Japanese director of his generation, made an unmatched succession of science fiction films that were commercial hits worldwide. From the atomic allegory of Godzilla and the beguiling charms of Mothra to the tragic mystery of Matango and the disaster and spectacle of Rodan, The Mysterians, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Honda’s films reflected postwar Japan’s anxieties and incorporated fantastical special effects, a formula that created an enduring pop culture phenomenon. Now, in the first full account of this overlooked director’s life and career, Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski shed new light on Honda’s work and the experiences that shaped it—including his days as a reluctant Japanese soldier, witnessing the aftermath of Hiroshima, and his lifelong friendship with Akira Kurosawa. The book features close analysis of Honda’s films (including, for the first time, his rarely seen dramas, comedies, and war films) and draws on previously untapped documents and interviews to explore how creative, economic, and industrial factors impacted his career. Fans of Godzilla and tokusatsu (special effects) film, and of Japanese film in general, will welcome this in-depth study of a highly influential director who occupies a uniquely important position in science fiction and fantasy cinema, as well as world cinema. “Provides the reader with a lasting sense of the man—his temperament, values, philosophies, dreams, and disappointments?behind some of cinema’s most beloved characters.” —Film Comment
Download or read book The Warrior s Camera written by Stephen Prince and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of 88, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon, which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's films, Stephen Prince provides two new chapters that examine Kurosawa's remaining films, placing him in the context of cinema history. Prince also discusses how Kurosawa furnished a template for some well-known Hollywood directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Providing a new and comprehensive look at this master filmmaker, The Warrior's Camera probes the complex visual structure of Kurosawa's work. The book shows how Kurosawa attempted to symbolize on film a course of national development for post-war Japan, and it traces the ways that he tied his social visions to a dynamic system of visual and narrative forms. The author analyzes Kurosawa's entire career and places the films in context by drawing on the director's autobiography--a fascinating work that presents Kurosawa as a Kurosawa character and the story of his life as the kind of spiritual odyssey witnessed so often in his films. After examining the development of Kurosawa's visual style in his early work, The Warrior's Camera explains how he used this style in subsequent films to forge a politically committed model of filmmaking. It then demonstrates how the collapse of Kurosawa's efforts to participate as a filmmaker in the tasks of social reconstruction led to the very different cinematic style evident in his most recent films, works of pessimism that view the world as resistant to change.
Download or read book World Cinema through Global Genres written by William V. Costanzo and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World Cinema through Global Genres introduces the complex forces of global filmmaking using the popular concept of film genre. The cluster-based organization allows students to acquire a clear understanding of core issues that apply to all films around the world. Innovative pedagogical approach that uses genres to teach the more unfamiliar subject of world cinema A cluster-based organization provides a solid framework for students to acquire a sharper understanding of core issues that apply to all films around the world A “deep focus” section in each chapter gives students information and insights about important regions of filmmaking (India, China, Japan, and Latin America) that tend to be underrepresented in world cinema classes Case studies allow students to focus on important and accessible individual films that exemplify significant traditions and trends A strong foundation chapter reviews key concepts and vocabulary for understanding film as an art form, a technology, a business, an index of culture, a social barometer, and a political force. The engaging style and organization of the book make it a compelling text for both world cinema and film genre courses
Download or read book The Man Without Talent written by YOSHIHARU TSUGE and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Japanese manga legend's autobiographical graphic novel about a struggling artist and the first full-length work by the great Yoshiharu Tsuge available in the English language. Yoshiharu Tsuge is one of comics' most celebrated and influential artists, but his work has been almost entirely unavailable to English-speaking audiences. The Man Without Talent, his first book ever to be translated into English, is an unforgiving self-portrait of frustration. Swearing off cartooning as a profession, Tsuge takes on a series of unconventional jobs -- used camera salesman, ferryman, and stone collector -- hoping to find success among the hucksters, speculators, and deadbeats he does business with. Instead, he fails again and again, unable to provide for his family, earning only their contempt and his own. The result is a dryly funny look at the pitfalls of the creative life, and an off-kilter portrait of modern Japan. Accompanied by an essay from translator Ryan Holmberg that discusses Tsuge's importance in comics and Japanese literature, The Man Without Talent is one of the great works of comics literature.
Download or read book Japanese Cinema written by Donald Richie and published by Harvill Secker. This book was released on 1971 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film written by Chris D. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2005-05-27 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film" offers an extraordinary close-up of the hitherto overlooked golden age of Japanese cult, action and exploitation cinema from the early 1950s through to the late 1970s, and up to the present day. Having unique access to the top maverick filmmakers and Japanese genre film icons, Chris D. brings together interviews with, and original writings on, the lives and films of such transgressive directors as Kinji Fukasaku ("Battles Without Honour and Humanity"), Seijun Suzuki ("Branded to Kill") and Koji Wakamatsu ("Ecstasy of the Angels") as well as performers like Shinichi 'Sonny' Chiba ("The Streetfighter", "Kill Bill Vol. 1") and glamorous actress Meiko Kaji ("Lady Snowblood"). Bringing the story up-to-date with an overview of such Japanese 'enfants terrible' as Takashi Miike ("Audition") and Kiyoshi Kurasawa ("Cure"), this book also provides a compendium of facts and extras including filmographies, related bibliographies on genre fiction including Manga, and a section on female yakuzas. Illustrated with fantastic stills and posters from some of Japan's finest cult and action films, this is a veritable bible for fans and newcomers alike.
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 Rashomon written by Akira Kurosawa and published by University Microfilms. This book was released on 1979 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rashomon is one of the greatest of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's films, the winner of the 1951 Venice Festival prize and the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1952. It features Toshiru Mifune, the best-known Japanese actor in the West, as the bandit, and accused rapist and murderer. At the beginning of the film, a woodcutter, priest, and commoner happen to meet at the ruined gate--Rashomon--outside the city of Kyoto. This tale of rape and murder is first seen through the eyes of the woodcutter and priest, both of whom have been touched by the events. The cynical, detached commoner, "everyman," listens to and comments upon their stories. The central section of the film, a series of flashbacks and tales within tales, consists of the same events retold by the husband (speaking through a medium, from the grave), the wife, the bandit, and the woodcutter. Each tells what happened--or possibly, what should have happened. The film deals with multiple truths; Richie summarized the director's point of view in the introduction: "the world is illusion, you yourself make reality, but this reality undoes you if you submit to being limited by what you have made." The sixth title in the Rutgers Films in Print Series and the first Japanese film, this volume brings together for the first time the full continuity script of Rashomon; an introductory essay by Donald Richie; the Akutagawa stories upon which the film is based; critical review and commentaries of the film; a filmography; and a bibliography. Donald Richie is the author of the definitive books in English on Kurosawa and Ozu. In addition, he is coauthor of the standard English-language history of the Japanese film and author or editorof several other books on the subject. He has also served as film critic for the Japan Times and as curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Download or read book To the Distant Observer written by Noël Burch and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1979-01-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
