On Japanese Cinema

Last updated: August 3, 2010

Film Studies For Free wanted to make sure its readers didn't miss the video embedded above. It's another great offering from Fora.tv, this time a very entertaining and informative interview with Donald Richie about his internationally celebrated work on Japanese cinema and culture. FSFF heard of this via David Hudson and the Japan Society Film Blog.

In addition, FSFF has assembled some links below to openly accessible and very high quality scholarship on Japanese cinema (including numerous full-length studies), with work by Donald Richie, and many other excellent items which are indebted to his studies of Japanese cinema.

This was quite a broad category to research online, so FSFF will inevitably have missed some good resources: suggestions for any high quality additions are, therefore, even more welcome than usual! (Update: See comments  below for some of these, including the tip to link to Eigagogo's bookmarks at Delicious which lists some further great resources).

•  Kaori Ashizu, 'Kurosawa’s Hamlet?', Shakespeare Studies 33 (1995): 71-99

• Sarah M. Ball, The Uncanny in Japanese and American Horror Film: Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s Ring, MA thesis, North Carolina State University, 2006  

• Colette Balmain, 'Inside the Well of Loneliness: Towards a Definition of the Japanese Horror Film', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Discussion Papers, 2006 

• Colette Balmain, '“Vengeful Virgins in White”: Female Monstrosity in Asian Cinema', in Niall Scott (ed), Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2004) [scroll down through pdf to p. 123]

• David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)

• David Bordwell, 'Review of Noël Burch's "To the Distant Observer"', Wide Angle vol. 3, no. 4 (1980): 70–73

• Mio Bryce, Christie Barber, James Kelly, Siris Kunwar and Amy Plumb, 'Manga and Anime: Fluidity and Hybridity in Global Imagery', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2010

• Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (London : Scholar Press, 1979)

• Robert Castle, 'The Radical Capability of Rashomon', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 33, October 2003

• Ryan Cooke, 'Review of Jay McRoy, Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008', Screening the Past,Issue 23, 2008

• Christopher J. Coyne, 'Culture, Common Knowledge and Post-Conflict Reconstruction', Journal of Intercultural Communication, No 13 (2007)

• Darrell William Davis, Saving Face: Spectator and Spectacle in Japanese Theatre and Film (LEWI Working Paper Series/David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, October 2004)

• Darrell William Davis, 'Reigniting Japanese Tradition with Hana-Bi', Cinema Journal 40, No. 4, Summer 2001

• Rayna Denison, 'On Susan J. Napier's From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West', Participations, Volume 6, Issue 2 (November 2009)

• Freda Freiberg, 'The Unkindest Cut of All? Some Reflections on the Recent Cinematic Release of the Uncut Version of Nagisa Oshima's Ai no corrida', Senses of Cinema, Issue 12, Feb-Mar 2001

• Freda Freiberg, 'Pale Flower', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010

• Freda Freiberg, 'Miyazaki's Heroines', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010

• New Jinshi Fujii, 'Films That Do Culture : A Discursive Analysis of Bunka Eiga, 1935-1945', Iconics 6, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 2002

• New Hideaki Fujiki, 'Dual Persona : Onoe Matsunosuke as Japan's Early Cinema Star', Iconics 7, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 2004

• Tag Gallagher, 'Mizoguchi and freedom', Screening the Past, Issue 13, 2001

• Aaron Gerow, 'One print in the age of mechanical reproduction: film industry and culture in 1910s Japan', Screening the Past, 2000 (11), 11 January 2000

• New Aaron Gerow, 'The Benshi's New Face : Defining Cinema in Taisho Japan', Iconics 3, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1994

• Andrew Grossman, 'Gohatto-or the End of Oshima Nagisa?', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 33, 2001 July

• New Masato Hase, 'Cinemaphobia in Taisho Japan : Zigomar, delinquent boys and somnambulism', Iconics 4, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1998

• New Kyoko Hirano, 'The Banning of Japanese Period Films by the American Occupation,' Iconics 1, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1987

• Lori Hitchcock, 'Third Culture Kids: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Language and Multiculturalism in Swallowtail Butterfly', Scope, February 2004

• Hikari Hori, 'Representing a Woman’s Story: Explicit Film and the Efficacy of Censorship in Japan', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts

• Yuwen Hsiung, 'Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and East Asia's Macbeth', CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004)

• Lee Wood Hung, 'Natural Culturalism in The Ballad of Narayama: A Study of Shohei Imamura's Thematic Concerns', Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2003

• Timothy Iles, 'Are We There Yet? Travelling Toward the Self in Contemporary Japanese Cinema', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2007

• Mizuko Ito, 'The Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix', A position paper prepared for the workshop and conference on Girls 'n' Games, May 8-9, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006

• New Kenji Iwamoto, 'Film Criticism and the Study of Cinema in Japan：A Historical Study', Iconics 1, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1987

• Brian Jarvis, 'Anamorphic allegory in The Ring, or, seven ways of looking at a horror video', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 3, 2007

• Lei Jin, 'Silence and Sound in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood', CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004) 

• Journal of the Imaginary and Fantastic Vol. 1.  No. 2.:  The Films of Hayao Miyazaki

• Sato Kenji, 'More animated than life', Japan Echo, Dec 1997; 24, 5; International Module pg. 50

• Chika Kinoshita, '"Choreography of desire: analysing Kinuyo Tanaka's acting in Mizoguchi's films', Screening the Past, Issue 13, 2001

• New Futoshi Koga, 'A Review of Pornographic Images in the 1970s in Japan: Centered Around Nikkatu Roman Porno Film"', Iconics 2, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1992

• Colleen A. Laird, 'Japanese cinema, the classroom, and Swallowtail Butterfly', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010

• Annie Manion, 'Discovering Japan: Anime and Learning Japanese Culture', A Master's Thesis Submitted to the East Asian Studies Center, USC

• Dolores Martinez, 'Where the human heart goes astray: Rashomon, Boomtown and subjective experience', Film Studies, Issue 11, Winter 2007

• Yuji Matson, The Word and The Image: Collaborations between Abe Kôbô and Teshigahara Hiroshi, Masters Thesis, University of Victoria, 2007 

• Bonnie Melchior, 'King Lear and Ran: Identity Translated and Transformed', East-West Connections: Review of Asian Studies Volume 5, Number 1 (2005) [scroll to p. 41 in PDF]

• New Kiseko Minaguchi, 'Yamamoto Satsuo's Haha no kyoku (Mother's Melody) : Making a Father's Story of Stella Dallas', Iconics 6, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 2002

• Gary Morris, 'The Spirit Moves: The World of Kenji Mizoguchi',  Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 22, 1999

• New Hisashi Nada, 'An Aspect of the Reception of Avant Garde Films in Japan', Iconics 2, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1992

• New Hisashi Nada, 'The Little Cinema Movement in the 1920s and the Introduction of Avant-Garde Cinema in Japan', Iconics 3, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1994

• Lindsay Nelson, 'Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema', Cinemascope, Issue 13, July-December 2009

• Eimi Ozawa , 'Remaking Corporeality and Spatiality: U.S. Adaptations of Japanese Horror Films, 49th Parallel, Conference Special Edition, Autumn 2006

• Chris Payne, 'Burying the Past: Nihonjinron and the Representation of Japanese Society in Itami's The Funeral', Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies, 1: 1 (2003), 13-20

• Michael Francis Phillips, 'A Cinematic Challenge to Modernity Critical Theory in Postwar Japanese Cinema: An Introduction to Fukasaku Kinji', eCommons@Texas State University, May 2009

• Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (New York: Anchor Books, 1961; Michigan Electronic Reprint 2004)

• Donald Richie, 'Expressionism in Film', Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo Exhibition Catalogue, Mori Art Museum, 2006

• Donald Richie, 'The Daughter of the Samurai: a German-Japanese co-production', Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo Exhibition Catalogue, Mori Art Museum, 2006

• Donald Richie, writer and film critic, Conversations With History: "Writing, Film, and Japan: An Expatriate's View," 9/21/01

• Juneko J. Robinson , 'Review: Jay McRoy (2007) Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam: Rodopi', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010 

• Caroline Ruddell, 'Breaking Boundaries The Representation of Split Identity in Anime', Animation Studies – Vol.2, 2007

• Chi-Yun Shin, 'Art of branding: Tartan "Asia Extreme" films', Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Greg M. Smith, 'Critical reception of Rashomon in the West', Asian Cinema, Fall/Winter 2002

• Ayumi Suzuki, 'A nightmare of capitalist Japan: Spirited Away', Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009

• Donato Totaro, 'Tokyo Sonata: Flirting with the Fantastic: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008', Offscreen Journal,Vol . 13, Issue 5, 2009

• William Tsutsui, 'Godzilla And Postwar Japan', East-West Connections: Review of Asian Studies Volume 5, Number 1 (2005) [Scroll to p. 1 in PDF]

• Paul Waley, 'Re-scripting the city: Tokyo from ugly duckling to cool cat', Japan Forum 18(3) 2006: 361–380

• Gregory A. Walle, Narrating the new Japan: Biograph's The Hero of Liao-Yang (1904) Screen 2006 47: 43-65

• Craig Watts, 'Blood Spear, Mt. Fuji: Uchida Tomu's Conflicted Comeback from Manchuria', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 33, July 2001

• Erica Lee Zilleruelo, Shakespeare by Any Other Word? Shakespeare's King Lear and Macbeth Reivented in the Films of Akira Kurosawa, Masters Thesis, Wichita State University, 2002

More about → On Japanese Cinema

On "England" and "Englishness" in British Cinema and Television

Updated July 27, 2010

Image from Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942)

Film Studies For Free was recently very inspired by Nick James's wonderful overview of the career of Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti for next month's Sight and Sound magazine. As a huge fan of Cavalcanti's work, and in particular of his (and Ealing's) Went the Day Well? (indeed, FSFF's author lives in a English village uncannily like that portrayed in this film), it immediately set about researching a list of links to online scholarly works on the Brazilian filmmaker, only to discover very few openly accessible ones in English (do check out, though, Kristin Thompson and David Cairn's essays on Went the Day Well?, and the latter's other postings on Cavalcanti here, here, here, here, and here).

FSFF's author's rage at this overall lack of anglophone material (see the photographic evidence above) was eventually sublimated in a different curatorial project, one still connected to themes at the heart of Cavalcanti's work, and also to some related topics explored in further August 2010 Sight and Sound articles (ones sadly not [yet] online: William Fowler's 'Absent authors: Folk in artist film', and Rob Young's 'The pattern under the plough').

Anyhow, below you will find the fruit of this inspiration and frustration: a list of links to thoughtful and thought-provoking international scholarship on expressions of "England" and (multifarious) "Englishness" in (mostly) British cinema and television.

• José Arroyo, 'The films of Isaac Julien: Look back and talk black', Jump Cut, no. 36, May 1991

• Victoria Ball, 'Female identity and the British female ensemble drama 1995-1998', PhD thesis. Queen Margaret University, 2007

• Charles Barr, 'Projecting Britain and the British Character: Ealing Studios, Part II', originally Screen, 15(2), 1974

• Alexandra Lynn Barron, 'Postcolonial Unions: The Queer National Romance in Film and Literature', PhD Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, May 2005

• Joe Brooker, 'England's Screening', Film-Philosophy, 3.10, 1999

• Stuart Duncan Brown, 'Uses of Laughter in the Cinematic Representation of the British Working-Class', PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, December 2007

• Charlotte Brunsdon, 'The Poignancy of Place: London and the Cinema', Visual Culture in Britain, Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2004 , pp. 59-73

• Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘A fine and private place’: the cinematic spaces of the London Underground' Screen 2006 47: 1-17

• Katherine Byrne, '“Such a fine, close weave”: Gender, Community and the Body in Cranford (2007)', Neo-Victorian Studies, 2.2, Winter 2009/2010

• Elizabeth de Cacqueray, 'New Slants on Gender and Power Relations in British Second World War Films', Miranda, No. 2, 2010

• Mónica Calvo Pascual, 'My Beautiful Laundrette: Hybrid "Identity", or the Paradox of Conflicting Identifications in "Third Space" Asian-British Cinema of the 1980s', Miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies 26 (2002): pp. 59-70

• E. Anna Claydon, ‘Nostalgia in the Post-National: Contemporary British Cinema and the South-Asian Diaspora’, South Asian Cultural Studies,Vol.2 No.1, 2008, pp 26 - 38

• Robin Cohen, ' Fuzzy Frontiers of Identity: The British Case', Social Identities Vol 1. No. 1 1995, 35−62

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, 'Filmic Representations of the British Raj in the 1980s: Cultural Identity, Otherness and Hybridity', PhD Thesis, Universidad de Zaragoza, March 2009

• Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy, 'Everything You Always Hated about Thatcher's Britain: A Cultural Analysis of Mike Leigh's High Hopes', Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 28, 2003

• Josephine Dolan, 'Englishness: Heroes, heroines and reciprocal encounters', Identity, Self and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006

• Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, ‘Seeing white: female whiteness and the purity of children in Australian, British and Chinese visual culture’, Social Semiotics, 10:2, 2000, 157-171

• Gillian Dow, 'Lady Bathurst’s Patriotic Ballroom, or “Reading Austen at a Distance”: The French Revolutionary Wars in Recent Adaptations ', Persuasions-Online, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2008

• Geoff Eley, 'Finding the People's War: Film, British Collective Memory and World War II', American Historical Review, 105, 5 (June 2001), 818-838

• Steven Fielding , 'A mirror for England? Cinematic representations of politicians and party politics during the ‘golden age’ of party, c. 1944-64', The First Annual International Conference on Minor Parties, Independent Politicians, Voter Associations and Political Associations in Politics, University of Birmingham, 2007

• Thaïs Flores Nogueira Diniz, 'Representation and Identity: Shakespeare in the Forties', Estudos Anglo Americanos 17-18 (1993-94)

• Andrew Higson, 'Transnational developments in European cinema in the 1920s',Transnational Cinemas Volume 1, Number 1, 2010

• Justin Hindmarsh, 'British Cinema - Style and Context: An Examination of British "New Wave" Films', Discussion Papers in Mass Communications, University of Leicester, January 1997

• Elena Von Kassel, 'An Image of Britain during the Second World War: The films of Humphrey Jennings (1939-1945)',  Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [Online], Vol. IV - n°3 | 2006

• Frank Leishman, 'From Dock Green to Life on Mars: Continuity and Change in TV Copland', University of Gloucestershire Inaugural Lecture No 1, 2008

• Melinda Lewis, 'Renegotiating Britishness through Comedy television', Master Thesis, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University, August 2009

• Chris Louttit, 'Cranford, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Adapting the Victorian Novel for Television', Adaptation, (2009) 2 (1): 34-48

• Robert Mayer, 'Not Adaptation by ‘Drifting’: Patrick Keiller, Daniel Defoe, and the Relationship between Film and Literature', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 16, Issue 4, 2004

• Michael McCluskey, 'Amateur Film and the Interwar English Countryside', Scope, Using Moving Image Archives, Edited by Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson, Issue 17, June 2010

• José I. Prieto Arranz, 'Images of English purity: A comparative study of Elizabeth I and Diana, Princess of Wales', Identity, Self and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006 (scroll to p. 116)

• Cornelis Martin Renes, 'Whose New World? Derek Jarman’s Subversive Vision of The Tempest (1979)', BELLS, 17, 2008

• Josh Romphf , '“Invention in the Name of Community”: Workshops, the Avant-Garde and The Black Audio Film Collective', Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 1 [2010], Iss. 1

• Pave Skopal, 'DVD marketing in U.S. of Working Title's British romantic comedies: Framing reception and strategies of cultural appropriation', Jump Cut, No. 48, winter 2006

• John C. Tibbetts, 'Between the Map and the Painted Landscape: Kevin Brownlow’s Historical Films',  PREPRINT at Kansas University Repository: Historical Journal of Film, Radio, Television, June 2000. 20(2): 227-251

• Rosie White, 'Englishness and espionage: Edith Cavell as the good spy', Identity, and Symbolism, Volume 1.2 November 2006 (scroll to p. 129)

• Jonathan Wright, 'Rereading the British Social Realist Film: Samantha Lay's British Social Realism', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 8 No. 4, January 2003

More about → On "England" and "Englishness" in British Cinema and Television

Peruvian Cinema (in the age of transnational film finance)

Image of Fausta/Magaly Solier, in La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (Claudia Llosa, Spain/Peru, 2009) - see a review of this film here

Film Studies For Free's author attended a very stimulating seminar yesterday given by Sarah Barrow of Anglia Ruskin University, entitled 'Transnational Film Financing in the Hispanic World: A Peruvian Case Study'.

Barrow presented a fascinating overview of Peruvian cinema in the last five years, and, in particular, of the efforts made by an emerging set of filmmakers to take advantage of new international funding and support opportunities. These include the regional Ibermedia programme, Rotterdam Film Festival’s Hubert Bals project, the Berlin World Cinema Fund (WCF), and the Cannes screenwriting residency awards for developing writer-director talent from developing economies. Barrow focused on the career trajectories of two Peruvian writer-directors: Josué Méndez (Días de Santiago [2004]; Dioses [2008]) and Claudia Llosa (Madeinusa [2006]; La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow [2009], Winner of the Golden Bear Award at the Berlinale 2009 and 2009 Foreign-Language Oscar Nominee).

FSFF wanted to follow up on Barrow's valuable seminar with some online resources for researchers working on Peruvian cinema as well as on transnational film finance. Below, then, are some links to high-quality, openly-accessible, scholarly work on these topics, most of them in English. See also FSFF's earlier post on Studies of 'Third Cinema' and anti-Eurocentric film culture

• Buzz Alexander, 'Interview with Pancho Adrienzén: Radical film in Peru today', from Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983, pp. 27-30

• Sarah Barrow, 'Images of Peru: A National Cinema in Crisis', from Latin American Cinema: Essays on Modernity, Gender and Nationhood. Ed. Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005: 39-58

• Scott L. Baugh & Michael Schoenecke, 'Special Issue Introduction: Historical Reflection/Cinematic Projections of Latin American Film', Film & History, Vol. 34.1 (2004)

• Jon Beasley-Murray, “Subalternity, Betrayal, and Flight: Three Recent Films from Peru”, essay draft (2007). See also Beasley-Murray's blog: Posthegemony

• Michael Chanan, 'The economic condition of cinema in Latin America', from Third World Affairs 1985, London: Third World Foundation, pp.379-389

• Tamara Falicov, 'Programa Ibermedia: Co-Production and the Cultural Politics of Constructing an Ibero-American Audiovisual Space', Spectator, Vol. 27, Issue 2, 2007, Special Issue on Media Co-Productions, 21-30

• Francisco da Gama, 'Filming the war with Sendero', Jump Cut, No. 49, spring 2007

• Gabriela Martínez, 'New Readings of Past and Recent Latin American Cinema', A Contra corriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America [Review of Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison (Editors), Latin American Cinema: Essays on Modernity, Gender and National Identity. (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2005)], Vol. 4, No. 1, Fall 2006, 163-174

• Gabriela Martínez, 'Cinema law in Latin America:Brazil, Peru and Colombia ', Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 50, spring 2008

• Sophia A. McClennen, 'The theory and practice of the Peruvian Grupo Chaski', from Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Jeffrey Middents, Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru (UPNE, 2009: Google Books Limited Preview) Also see Middents' blog
  

• Violeta Núñez, 'PERUVIAN CINEMA : An ongoing battle', Cinema Journal/El ojo que piensa, 2007
  

• Miriam Ross, 'Social Engagement, Empowerment and Change - Grupo Chaski’s Microcines: Engaging the Spectator', eSharp, Issue 11, 2008

• Libia Villazana, [Audio file of soundtrack of] 'Latin America in Co-production' (46 minute long documentary directed by Villazana, UK/Peru 2007, partly in English, partly in Spanish), followed by a panel discussion at the Tate Modern Film Synergies event (November 25, 2007) added Nov 2, 2009

• Libia Villazana, 'De una política cultural a una cultura politizada: La República Bolivariana de Venezuela y su revolución cultural en el sector audiovisual', ZiF: Center for Interdisciplinary Research, 2007 added Nov 2, 2009

• Libia Villazana, 'Hacia un cine peruano de coproducción Entrevista con Francisco “Pancho” Lombardi', Contratexto digital. Año 4, N° 5, 2007
  

More about → Peruvian Cinema (in the age of transnational film finance)