8 The Early talkie frame in Japanese cinema

Keyword(s):  

This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka’s career spanned the industrial development of cinema - from silent to sound, monochrome to colour. Alongside featuring in films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and Kurosawa, Tanaka was also the only Japanese woman filmmaker between 1953 and 1962, and her films tackled distinctly feminine topics such as prostitution and breast cancer. Because her career overlaps with a transformative period in Japan, especially for women, this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives into the Japanese history of women and classical era of national cinema. The first half of the book focuses on Tanaka as actress and analyses the elements and meanings associated with her star image, and her powerful embodiment of diverse, at times contradictory, ideological discourses. The second half is dedicated to Tanaka as director and explores her public image as filmmaker and her depiction of gender and sexuality against the national history in order to reflect on her role and style as author. With a special focus on the melodrama genre and on the sociopolitical and economic contexts of film production, the book offers a revision of theories of stardom, authorship, and women’s cinema. In examining Tanaka’s iconic reification of femininities in relation to politics, national identity, and memory, the chapters shed light on the cultural construction of female subjectivity and sexuality in Japanese popular culture.


Film History ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 363-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroshi Komatsu
Keyword(s):  

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-168
Author(s):  
Erica Ka Yan Poon
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  

This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan. Putting the cinema at the center of a ‘culture of the sound image’, it restores complexity to a media transition that is often described simply as slow and reluctant. In that vibrant sound culture, the talkie was introduced on the radio before it could be heard in the cinema, and pop music adaptations substituted for musicals even as cinema musicians and live narrators resisted the introduction of recorded sound. Taken together, the essays show that the development of sound technology shaped the economic structure of the film industry and its labour practices, the intermedial relation between cinema, radio, and popular music, as well as the architecture of cinemas and the visual style of individual Japanese films and filmmakers.


Asian Cinema ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Keiko I. McDonald
Keyword(s):  

2002 ◽  
pp. 368-401
Author(s):  
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-105
Author(s):  
Elena A Rusinova ◽  
Elizaveta M Habchuk

For a long time, Japanese cinema has been developing separately, mastering the specifics of the new art, which came from the West, and at the same time trying to solve within its framework the problem of "national identity". However, since the 1950s, Japanese cinema has become widely known abroad and is gaining recognition in the West. The present day no one doubts the huge contribution of Japanese filmmakers to the history of world cinema. Nevertheless, the study of Japanese cinema in Russian cinema theory still remains the prerogative of a few professionals who know the Japanese language and are closely acquainted with the Japanese mentality, culture and art, which exert a great influence on the artistic features of Japanese screen art. But in order to even more imbued with the originality of the approach to creating an artistic image in Japanese cinema, it is necessary to draw attention to one of the most important components of its structure, namely, the sound aspect, insufficiently studied in film theory. The novelty of the article is that it analyzes and classifies the sound features of some Japanese movies created in the second half of the 20th - beginning of the 21st centuries, in which the influence of traditional culture manifests itself quite clearly, but at the same time the presence of elements of the Western musical tradition is also noticeable, which reflects to a certain extent the process of transculturalism in cinema that is actual nowadays.


STUDIUM ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 245-272
Author(s):  
Marcos Centeno Martín

Resumen La construcción del cine japonés como cine nacional ha partido a menudo de una visión esencialista que ha ignorado la dimensión transnacional de esta filmografía. Por un lado, el descubrimiento occidental de ciertos autores japoneses en los años cincuenta condujo a la articulación del paradigma del cine nacional japonés a partir de películas dirigidas a asombrar al público europeo con imágenes exóticas de Japón. Los grandes maestros, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi y Ozu fueron escogidos como representantes de una supuesta japonesidad cinematográfica ignorando el peso de Occidente en sus obras. Por otro lado, el estudio de este corpus tradicionalmente ha evolucionado con herramientas teóricas desarrolladas en Occidente y necesita renovarse con conceptos de la tradición cultural, estética y filosófica propia. Pero además, es necesario evaluar cómo se implementaron los elementos del lenguaje fílmico en Japón para entender su relativismo respecto a la historia general del cine. Sus usos y formas no siempre han coincidido con los desarrollos occidentales, de forma que conceptos fílmicos occidentales no han tenido exactamente el mismo significado en el contexto japonés. Palabras clave: cine japonés, cine nacional, transnacionalidad teoría fílmica, cine de postguerra   Abstract The construction of Japanese cinema as a national cinema has often drawn on a essentialist vision neglecting the transnational nature of this filmography. On the one hand, the Western discovery of certain Japanese authors in the fifties triggered the articulation of the paradigm of the Japanese “national cinema” from films aiming to astonish European audiences with exotic images of Japan. The great masters, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu, were chosen as main representatives of the apparent cinematographic japaneseness neglecting the weight of the West on their works. On the other hand, the study of this corpus has been traditionally evolved with theoretical tools developed in the West and need a renewal with concepts taken from Japanese philosophical, aesthetic and cultural tradition. Moreover, it is necessary to assess how the film language elements were implemented in Japan in order to understand its relativism regarding the general film history. Their usages and forms were not always equivalent to those in the West and as a consequence, Western concepts ended up having different meanings in the Japanese context. Key words: Japanese cinema, national cinema, transnationality, film theory, postwar cinema


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