The Japanese cinema book - Softcover

The Japanese Cinema Book provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world's most fascinating and widely admired film-making 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. The Japanese Cinema Book is designed to appeal to the largest possible readership and includes an unusually plural range of critical perspectives based on the expertise of established and emerging scholars and critics. As such, it 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 is structured around seven inter-related sections, addressing theories and approaches; institutions and industry; film style; genre; times and spaces of representation; social contexts, and flows and interactions. Ranging from internationally 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. The book's innovative multi-focal approach combines general surveys of a particular historical topic or critical approach with various curated themes at a more micro level. It argues there is no single fixed Japanese cinema, but instead a fluid and varied field of Japanese film-making cultures that continue to exist in a dynamic relationship with other cinemas and regions. To underline its historical and geographical diversity, The Japanese Cinema Book also offers a genuinely inter-disciplinary dialogue with related fields of study. It explores the multi-faceted wealth of Japanese cinema through the eyes not only of renowned film scholars, but also writers with backgrounds in Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, the Performing Arts, History, and Cultural Studies.

Hideaki Fujiki is Professor of Cinema Studies and Japanese Studies at Nagoya University, Japan. He is the author of Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan and his essays have appeared in Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (eds.) Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, Cinema Journal, Japan Forum, Review of Japanese Culture and Society, and Iconics, and he has contributed to the Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema. Alastair Phillips is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of City of Darkness, City of Light: Emigre Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939 and Rififi: A French Film Guide. He is the co-author of 100 Film Noirs (BFI Screen Guides) and the co-editor of Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood; Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts and A Companion to Jean Renoir. His articles on international film history and aesthetics have appeared in numerous journals and books. He is an editor of the journal Screen and serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema and the BFI Film Classics series.