Japanese Filmmakers
January 18, 2012
BRILLANTE MENDOZA TO FILIPINO-JAPANESE FILMMAKERS IN JAPAN
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Warm Water Under A Red Bridge … |
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Warm Water Under A Red Bridge … |
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Koyaanisqatsi – Life Out of Balance $6.98 KOYAANISQATSI – DVD Movie… |
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Dying to Have Known $2.99 … |
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Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah – Giant Monsters All-Out Attack $8.61 This 2001 Godzilla feature from Japan’s Toho Studios, released as part of the mighty monster’s 50th anniversary, is a visually impressive and action-packed entry in the long-running franchise, but also one with a fast and loose re-interpretation of its history that may displease some stalwart fans. Writer-director Shusuke Kaneko (who previously revitalized the Gamera series) erases everything that… |
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Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film $15.47 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… |
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The Warrior’s Camera $19.99 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 rev… |
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Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) $21.95 The films of Akira Kurosawa have had an immense effect on the way the Japanese have viewed themselves as a nation and on the way the West has viewed Japan. In this comprehensive and theoretically informed study of the influential director’s cinema, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto definitively analyzes Kurosawa’s entire body of work, from 1943’s Sanshiro Sugata to 1993’s Madadayo. In sc… |
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The Grudge [UMD for PSP] $2.99 It’s not the scary hit that The Ring was in 2002, but The Grudge makes a similarly convincing case for American remakes of popular Japanese horror films. Barely a year passed between the release of Takashi Shimizu’s creepy ghost story Ju-On: The Grudge and the production of this American remake, set in Tokyo and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar in her first post-Buffy horror film. About the only sig… |
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Crazed Fruit – Criterion Collection (DVD) $18.8 Single Disc – Special Edition Japanese filmmaker Ko Nakahira’s debut film CRAZED FRUIT (KURUTTA KAJITSU) sparked o |
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Fish Story (DVD) $19.53 A rare single by an obscure rock band makes a strange voyage through time in this witty and original science fiction tale from Japanese filmmaker Yoshihiro Nakamura. In 1975, an obscure rock band called Gekirin record a song called “Fish Story” that an… |
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My Year of Meats (Paperback) $10.77 Jane Takagi-Little, by trade a documentary filmmaker, by nature a truth seeker, is “racially half,” Japanese and American, and, as she tells us, “neither here nor there…” Jane is sharp-edged, desperate for a job, and determined not to fall in love ag… |
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A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to Videos and DVD’s $151.77 In A Hundred Years of Japanese Films, Richie offers an insider’s look at the achievements of Japanese filmmakers. He begins in the late 1800s, when the industry took its inspiration from the traditional stories of Kabuki and Noh theater, and finishes in the present with the latestaward-winning dramas showcased at Cannes. In between, Richie explores the roots of Japan’s contribution to world cinema. He discusses the careers of Japan’s rising stars and celebrated directors, and also offers a fascinating view of the strategies and politics of the movie studios themselves. A selective guide in the book’s second part provides capsule reviews of the major Japanese films available in VHS and DVD formats, as well as those televised on standard and cable channels. |
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A Much Recorded War: The Russo-Japanese War in History and Imagery $40 At the dawn of the 20th century, the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) became a worldwide political focal point. The war, marked the rise of Japan as a world power, paved the way for the Russian Revolution, and made Theodore Roosevelt the first American ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. It engaged the fervent attention of Asia, Europe, and the United States–so much so that the Milton Bradley Co. created a popular board game based on the war. But more than this, the Russo-Japanese conflict was the first war to be fully recorded by the international media. Journalists, photographers, and filmmakers poured into the areas, capturing the battles in words and visuals, and creating in the process a flood of images remarkable for their vibrancy and power.A Much Recorded War examines the Russo-Japanese conflict from the viewpoint of its artistic legacy, exploring the ways in which it was represented, promoted, and mythologized. Featuring more than 80 objects–from woodblock prints, lithographs, watercolors, and photographs to film, postcards, and even garments–the book discusses the origins and history of the war, the development of its imagery in Japanese art, and the groundbreaking role of photography and film. Published to mark the 100th anniversary of the Portsmouth Treaty, which ended the war, this is both a remarkable work of historical scholarship and a brilliant compendium of period graphic art. |
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America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy $19.95 During World War II, Japan was vilified by America as our hated enemy in the East. Though we distinguished “good Germans” from the Nazis, we condemned all Japanese indiscriminately as fanatics and savages. As the Cold War heated up, however, the U.S. government decided to make Japan its bulwark against communism in Asia.But how was the American public made to accept an alliance with Japan so soon after the “Japs” had been demonized as subhuman, bucktoothed apes with Coke-bottle glasses? In this revelatory work, Naoko Shibusawa charts the remarkable reversal from hated enemy to valuable ally that occurred in the two decades after the war. While General MacArthur’s Occupation Forces pursued our nation’s strategic goals in Japan, liberal American politicians, journalists, and filmmakers pursued an equally essential, though long-unrecognized, goal: the dissemination of a new and palatable image of the Japanese among the American public. With extensive research, from Occupation memoirs to military records, from court documents to Hollywood films, and from charity initiatives to newspaper and magazine articles, Shibusawa demonstrates how the evil enemy was rendered as a feminized, submissive nation, as an immature youth that needed America’s benevolent hand to guide it toward democracy. Interestingly, Shibusawa reveals how this obsession with race, gender, and maturity reflected America’s own anxieties about race relations and equity between the sexes in the postwar world. America’s Geisha Ally is an exploration of how belligerents reconcile themselves in the wake of war, but also offers insight into how a new superpower adjusts to its role as the world’s preeminent force. |
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America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy $13.95 During World War II, Japan was vilified by America as our hated enemy in the East. Though we distinguished “good Germans” from the Nazis, we condemned all Japanese indiscriminately as fanatics and savages. As the Cold War heated up, however, the U.S. government decided to make Japan its bulwark against communism in Asia.But how was the American public made to accept an alliance with Japan so soon after the “Japs” had been demonized as subhuman, bucktoothed apes with Coke-bottle glasses? In this revelatory work, Naoko Shibusawa charts the remarkable reversal from hated enemy to valuable ally that occurred in the two decades after the war. While General MacArthur’s Occupation Forces pursued our nation’s strategic goals in Japan, liberal American politicians, journalists, and filmmakers pursued an equally essential, though long-unrecognized, goal: the dissemination of a new and palatable image of the Japanese among the American public. With extensive research, from Occupation memoirs to military records, from court documents to Hollywood films, and from charity initiatives to newspaper and magazine articles, Shibusawa demonstrates how the evil enemy was rendered as a feminized, submissive nation, as an immature youth that needed America’s benevolent hand to guide it toward democracy. Interestingly, Shibusawa reveals how this obsession with race, gender, and maturity reflected America’s own anxieties about race relations and equity between the sexes in the postwar world. America’s Geisha Ally is an exploration of how belligerents reconcile themselves in the wake of war, but also offers insight into how a new superpower adjusts to its role as the world’s preeminent force. |
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An Amorous History of the Silver Screen $92.59 Shanghai in the early twentieth century was alive with art and culture. With the proliferation of popular genres such as the martial arts film, the contest among various modernist filmmakers, and the advent of sound, Chinese cinema was transforming urban life. But with the Japanese invasion in 1937, all of this came to a screeching halt. Until recently, the political establishment has discouraged comprehensive studies of the cultural phenomenon of early Chinese film, and this momentous chapter in China’s history has remained largely unexamined. The first sustained historical study of the emergence of cinema in China, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen is a fascinating narrative that illustrates the immense cultural significance of film and its power as a vehicle for social change. Named after a major feature film on the making of Chinese cinema, only part of which survives, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen reveals the intricacies of this cultural movement and explores its connections to other art forms such as photography, architecture, drama, and literature. In light of original archival research, Zhang Zhen examines previously unstudied films and expands the important discussion of how they modeled modern social structures and gender roles in early twentieth-century China. The first volume in the new and groundbreaking series Cinema and Modernity, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen is an innovative–and well illustrated–look at the cultural history of Chinese modernity through the lens of this seminal moment in Shanghai cinema. |
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Cinema of Death $29.98 Underground Cinema first appeared in the 1960s with groundbreaking works by filmmakers as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol, whose films dealt with provocative subjects such as politics, sex, magic and death. Cinema of Death compiles some of the most recent extreme films made, featuring raw, poetic, explosive images that will enter into and linger in the Subconscious.Adoration: Directed by Olivier Smolders, Adoration is the true story of a Japanese man’s love crazed obsession for a woman, which ends in cannibalism.Dislandia: Directed by Brian M. Viveros, Dislandia is a disturbing observance of Lindsey – a child existing in an indistinguishable time and place, haunted by surrealist visions.Pig: Directed by Nico B,Pig is a poetic film in which we see the subconscious of a killer transform into abstract forms and material, all deriving from his suffering and desperation. Featuring Rozz Williams (Christian Death).Hollywood Babylon: Directed by Nico B, Hollywood Babylon is an homage to Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, shot at the Museum of Death, Ca. Le Poem: Directed by Bogdan Borkowski, Le Poem is an actual autopsy of a human body accompanied by the poem The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud. |
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Contemporary Japanese Film $14.01 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. |
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Essence of Anime-Ghost in the Shell $14.98 Best Theatrical Film – 1997 World Animation Festival Best Director of a Theatrical Film – 1997 World Animation Festival 2029 – A female government cyber agent and the Internal Bureau of Investigations are hot on the trail of a The Puppet Master – a computer virus capable of invading cybernetic brains and altering its victim’s memory. Created by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and codenamed Project 2501 , this ‘hacker’ is actually a prototype virtual agent which has now defied its makers by seeking asylum within a new host body outside of the electronic net. Now the two agencies must maneuver against each another in a violent, high-tech race to capture the omnipresent entity. Ghost in the Shell took the world by storm exhibiting a new dimension of anime with unprecedented and mesmerizing cinematic expression. Seamlessly merging traditional cel animation with the latest computer graphic imagery, this stunning sci-fi spectacle broke through the boundaries of mainstream animation with detailed artistic expression and a uniquely intelligent story line. The film has gone on to inspire a generation of filmmakers and has become the most revered anime feature of all time. Veteran anime writer/director/producer Mamoru Oshii, working in conjunction with the animators at Production I.G. (Blood: The Last Vampire, Kaidohmaru, Kill Bill) brought to life Masamune Shirow’s vision (originally serialized in 1991 in Japan’s Young Magazine manga). This excellent cyberpunk thriller was co-produced by Manga Entertainment and enjoyed both critical and popular success at the U.S. box office before becoming the first Japanese animated film to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Top Video Sales Chart (August 24, 1996). |
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Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift (Score) $17.98 For the third installment in the FAST AND THE FURIOUS action-movie series, the filmmakers called upon hip-hop and electronica artists to provide the sonic backdrop. Given TOKYO DRIFT’s Japanese setting, the Teriyaki Boyz offer up some appropriately local flavor with the energetic techno-rap of Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious) and Cho Large, while DJ Shadow contributes a version of his melancholy Six Days that features a guest shot by Mos Def. A soundtrack that stands alone as a dynamic mix, TOKYO DRIFT is sure to appeal to fans of adventurous techno, R&B, and rap. |
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Film Genre Introduction: Documentary Film Festivals, Mob Film, Cinema of Luxembourg, Mental Illness in Film, Latin American Cinema, Videodance $26.53 Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher’s book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Documentary Film Festivals, Mob Film, Cinema of Luxembourg, Mental Illness in Film, Latin American Cinema, Videodance, Romance Film, Cinema of Ukraine, Cinema of Lithuania, Cinema of the Czech Republic, Cinema of Bulgaria, Rape and Revenge Films, Chick Flick, Travelogue, Hood Film, Buddy Film, Amateur Film, Comedy Horror, Found Footage, Chicano Films, Structural Film, Cinema of Montenegro, Bad Girl Movies, Punk Film, Japanese Cyberpunk, Fictional Film, Partisan Film, Heimatfilm, Wire Fu, Cinema of Peru, Educational Film, No Wave Cinema, Mafia Comedy, Golden Age of the Western, Film Series, Training Film, Slapstick Film, Cinema of Georgia, Oceanian Cinema, Telefoni Bianchi, Tendency Film, Horror-Of-Personality, Erotic Thriller, Highlight Film, Heritage Film, List of Religion Films, Metafilm, List of Punk Filmmakers, Female Buddy Film, Rubble Film, Kurdish Cinema, Day in the Life Of, Chopsocky, Colonial Cinema, Calligraphism, Soviet Parallel Cinema, Sex Report Film, Prison Film. Excerpt: Amateur Film is the low-budget hobbyist art of film practiced for passion and enjoyment and not for business purposes. Organizations The international organization for amateur film makers is UNICA (Union International du Cinema Non Professionel); in the United States the American Motion Picture Society (AMPS), in Canada the Society of Canadian Cine Amateurs (SCCA),in the UK it is the Film |
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Film Talk: Directors at Work $68 What 1970s Hollywood filmmaker influenced Quentin Tarantino? How have contemporary Japanese horror films inspired Takashi Shimizu, director of the huge box office hit The Grudge? What is it like to be an African American director in the twenty-first century?The answers to these questions, along with many more little-known facts and insights, can be found in Film Talk, an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at filmmaking from the 1940s to the present. In eleven intimate and revealing interviews, contemporary film directors speak frankly about their work-their successes and their disappointments, their personal aspirations, struggles, relationships, and the politics that affect the industry.A medley of directors including those working in pop culture and documentary, as well as feminist filmmakers, social satirists, and Hollywood mavericks recount stories that have never before been published. Among them are Monte Hellman, the auteur of the minimalist masterpiece Two-Lane Blacktop; Albert Maysles, who with his late brother David, created some of the most important documentaries of the 1960s, including Salesman and The Beatles: What’s Happening?; Robert Downey Sr., whose social satires Putney Swope and Greaser’s Palace paved the way for a generation of filmmakers; Bennett Miller, whose film Capote won an Academy Award in 2005; and Jamie Babbit, a lesbian crossover director whose low-budget film But I’m a Cheerleader! became a mainstream hit.The candid conversations, complimented by more than fifty photographs, including many that are rare, make this book essential reading for aspiring moviemakers, film scholars, and everyone interested in the how movies are made and who the fascinating individuals are who make them. |
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Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary $74.39 “Extraordinarily valuable, illuminating, and even entertaining, Forest of Pressure brims with the types of information that only a key insider can get his hands on.” —Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, New York University Ogawa Productions—known in Asia as Ogawa Pro—was an influential filmmaking collective that started in the 1960s under the direction of Ogawa Shinsuke (1936–1992). Between 1968 and the mid-1970s, Ogawa Pro electrified the Japanese student movement with its Sanrizuka documentary series—eight films chronicling the massive protests over the construction of the Narita airport—which has since become the standard against which documentaries are measured in Japan. A critical biography of a collective, Forest of Pressure explores the emergence of socially committed documentary filmmaking in postwar Japan. Analyzing Ogawa Pro’s films and works by other Japanese filmmakers, Abé Mark Nornes addresses key issues in documentary theory and practice, including individual and collective cinema production modes and the relationship between subject and object. Benefiting from unprecedented access to Ogawa Pro’s archives and interviews with former members, Forest of Pressure is an innovative look at the fate of political filmmaking in the wake of the movement’s demise. Abé Mark Nornes is associate professor of screen arts and cultures and Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan. He is a coordinator at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and the author of Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima (Minnesota, 2003). |
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Fuccons-Meet the Fuccons $5.99 Get ready America! Japanese filmmakers have captured the American family on video and the picture isn t pretty. Meet the Fuccons, a typical 2 person family inexplicably transported to the land of the rising sun. Okay, maybe they re not perfect: Dad is a bit stiff and wooden, Mom is plastic and empty headed and Mikey s well, Mike s just a little dummy. But when it comes to standing firm in the face of this new and alien environment, the family that s made together stays together, and it certainly doesn t hurt that the Fuccons are as thick skinned, rigid and inflexible as they come. Go Fuccon crazy as the International Smash Hit that s taken the world by storm is finally reverse imported to America in The Fuccons!System Requirements:Running Time 25 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE |
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Japanese Cinema $29.99 Until recently, the western world has viewed Japanese cinema through a very narrow prism. For years, Westerners interested in Japanese film had to content themselves with the collected works of Akira Kurosawa, a spotty sampling of films by Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu, gobs of anime, and badly dubbed monster movies. Many great filmmakers like Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita have remained unknown in the West, and Japanese musicals and comedies are hardly known outside Asia. This volume sets the record straight, illustrating an in-depth history of Japanese cinema with vivid posters and stunning photography. |
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Korea’s Occupied Cinemas, 1893-1948: The Untold History of the Film Industry $112.09 Korea’s Occupied Cinemas, 1893-1948 compares and contrasts the development of cinema in Korea during the Japanese occupation (1910-1945) and US Army Military (1945-1948) periods within the larger context of cinemas in occupied territories. It differs from previous studies by drawing links between the arrival in Korea of modern technology and ideas, and the cultural, political and social environment, as it follows the development of exhibition, film policy, and filmmaking from 1893 to 1948. During this time, Korean filmmakers seized every opportunity to learn production techniques and practice their skills, contributing to the growth of a national cinema despite the conditions produced by their occupation by colonial and military powers. At the same time, Korea served as an important territory for the global expansion of the American and Japanese film industries, and, after the late 1930s, Koreans functioned as key figures in the co-production of propaganda films that were designed to glorify loyalty to the Japanese Empire. For these reasons, and as a result of the tensions created by divided loyalties, the history of cinema in Korea is a far more dynamic story than simply that of a national cinema struggling to develop its own narrative content and aesthetics under colonial conditions. |
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Shakespeare On Film $2.49 Explores the overlapping, hotly disputed borderlands of literature, theater and film. Concerned with the creative possibilities of rendering Shakespeare on film, the book studies the rich interpretations of Shakespeare by such major directors as Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, Peter Brook, Franco Zeffirelli, the famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and one of Russia’s greatest filmmakers, Grigori Kozintsev. It provides a detailed analyses of sixteen major films, illuminating the relations between Renaissance visions and modern re-visions, the parallels of poetic and cinematic imagery, and the quests of directors for significant cinematic style. Dramatically illustrated by over one hundred film photographs. Originally published by Indiana University Press in 1977. |
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States of Emergency $25.86 Today’s political, technological, and aesthetic landscapes are rife with landmines. In this embattled milieu, leftist filmmakers and conservatives struggle for control of the national imaginary. Amid unprecedented mergers and consolidations, political conservatives have launched major attacks against the National Endowment for the Arts, the Public Broadcasting System, state arts councils, and other sponsors of oppositional programming. Meanwhile, developing technologies like satellites and the Internet have not only altered and globalized communication but also offer untapped possibilities for reconstructing democracies. All of these events signal a radical transformation in how we will view the world in the decades to come.In States of Emergency, Patricia R. Zimmermann describes the shifting terrains socially engaged documentary artists and experimental filmmakers encounter in the aftermath of these changes. Public space has been chiseled away and politically conscious documentaries forced to go underground. Viewing an array of subjects (including the wars in Bosnia, Chiapas, and the Persian Gulf; Japanese internment during World War II; homelessness; race; and reproductive rights) through technologies ranging from high-end video, camcorders, cable access, digital imaging systems, and media piracy, Zimmermann creates an explosive montage of colliding ideas and events. In combative terms, she charts the intricately layered relationships between independent documentary, power, money, and culture, and also analyzes how media artists use new technologies and radical media practices to undermine cuts in support and conservative backlash.States of Emergency anchors documentary into asocial and historical context that shows the complex connections among audiences, filmmakers, funders, and subjects in the fascinating and fraught milieu in which they coexist. Zimmermann passionately and convincingly argues that the survival of democracies and public spaces is inextric |
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Susumu Hirasawa – Paprika [Music from the Motion Picture] $14.99 Composer: Susumu Hirasawa. For the score to the acclaimed Japanese anime movie PAPRIKA, the filmmakers enlisted composer Susumu… |
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Taisho Trilogy Box Set $79.95 Maverick filmmaker Seijun Suzuki spent the 1960′s concocting astonishing masterpieces of yakuza psychedelia and with the ambitiously stunning Taisho Trilogy, Suzuki reincarnated himself as a master auteur of modern Japanese cinema. This boxed set includes ZIGEUNERWEISEN, KAGERO-ZA and YUMEJI.ZIGEUNERWEISEN: A stunning film about decadence and nihilism in the 1920′s, the film centers on the relationship between four people, drawn together by unseen strings of fate, and nearly driven mad by their own fears and desires. When a professor on vacation meets a former classmate, both become smitten – and later, dangerously obssessed – with a local geisha.KAGERO-ZA: Based on a story by Kyoka Izumi, whose writings influenced a number of playwrights and filmmakers, this film is another wildly inventive installment in the jump-cut, luridly hued, crazy-quilt pantheon of Seijun Suzuki.YUMEJI: The final film in the TAISHO TRILOGY. Sensual and absurdist, the film spins a ghost story around the character and work of real-life painter and poet Yumeji Takehisa (1884-1934). The eponymous character is conjured by Suzuki as a chronic philanderer and dreamer (played by former rock star Kenji Sawada). |
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The Child in Film: Tears, Fears, and Fairy Tales $72 Ghastly and ghostly children, "dirty little white girls," and the child as witness and as victim have always played an important part in the history of cinema, as have child performers. Yet the disruptive power of the child in films made for an adult audience has been a neglected topic. The Child in Film examines popular films including Taxi Driver, Man on Fire, and contemporary Japanese horror, as well as "art house" productions such as Mirror, La JetTe, and Pan’s Labyrinth, and questions why the figure of the child has such a significant impact on the visual aspects and storytelling potential of cinema.Karen Lury argues that the child as a liminal yet powerful agent has allowed filmmakers to play adventurously with cinema’s formal conventions, with far-reaching consequences. She reveals how a child’s relationship to time allows it to disturb conventional master-narratives and explores how the concern for and investment in the child actor conceals the reality of film acting and the skills of the child performer. She addresses the expression of child sexuality, and questions existing assumptions as to who children "really are." |
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The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature: Polygraphic Desire $178 The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature is a study of the ethics of modern Japanese aesthetics from the 1930s, through WWII and into the postwar period. What makes this book unique is that Nina Cornyetz opens up the field in new and controversial ways by exploring the tensions and harmonies between psychoanalytic ethics of the drive and socio-political ethics of relation to the other. Rejecting the convention of viewing these as contradictory, Cornyetz insists that the exemplars of psychoanalytic ethics are to the contrary, simultaneously politically ethical. Cornyetz embarks on innovative and unprecedented readings of some of the most significant literary and film texts of the Japanese canon, including works by Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kôbô and Shinoda Masahiro, all renowned for their texts’ aesthetic and philosophic brilliance. The study looks at how relations between individuals and communities in these texts either reiterate or transcend stereotypes, and how desire is or is not limited by sociocultural norms. Cornyetz argues that these authors’ and filmmakers’ concepts of beauty and relation to others were, in fact, deeply impacted by political and social factors. Ranging from a discussion of fascist aesthetics to heterosexism in modern Japan, The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature shows how certain changing political, intellectual and artistic issues, as well as sociocultural norms, variously nuanced these texts’ depictions of desire and the ‘other’. Through her analysis of cultural texts such as the films Woman in the Dunes and Double Suicide, Cornyetz challenges the convention that praises the universality of their artistic, existential or intellectual achievements. Rather she seeks to reorient these within a specifically Japanese historical context to give a new and insightful interpretation to the work. This ground breaking study is truly interdisciplinary and will |
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The Ring: Volume 1 $14.95 Creepy! Have you seen the movie yet? I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s creepy, dramatic, somehow a little funny, and intense. The Ring, a Japanese multi-media frenzy based on the best-selling horror novels by Koji Suzuki, has already made its way to America in both a Western adaptation of the film, and an equally popular dubbed Japanese version of the film. Well, from Dark Horse Comics comes the equally fantastic manga, and it will be published, respectfully, in the increasingly popular non-Western format, meaning you get a kick out of reading from the back of the book to the front. For those of you who love your media in comic book form, you’ll love seeing this creepy tidbit panel to panel, and for those who love film, step forward and find out why filmmakers idolize comics. The pacing and art throughout the book are so loyal and work so well with the story, you will be overwhelmed and frozen in place in a closet somewhere. Creeeepy! |
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