EALC 230: Postwar Japanese Cinema and Visual Culture (HC/BMC)

Kenji Mizoguchi is one of the three acclaimed masters--together with Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa--of Japanese cinema. Ten years in the making, Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema is the definitive guide to the life and work of one of the greatest film-makers of the 20th century. Born at the end of the 19th Century into a wealthy family, Mizoguchi's early life influenced the themes he would take up in his work. His father's ambitious business ventures failed and the family fell into poverty. His mother died and his beloved sister was sold into a geisha house. Her earnings paid for Mizoguchi's education. Weak and deluded men, and strong, self-sacrificing women--these were to become the obsessive motifs of Mizoguchi's films. Mizoguchi's apprenticeship in cinema was peculiarly Japanese. His concerns--the role of women and the realist representation of the inequities of Japanese society--were not. Through two World Wars, Japan's culture changed. Though censored, Mizoguchi continued to produce films. It was only in the 1950s that Mizoguchi's astonishing cinematic vision became widely known outside Japan. Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema tells the full story of this famously perfectionist, even tyrannical, director. Mizoguchi's key films, cinematographic techniques and his social and aesthetic concerns are all discussed and set in the context of Japan's changing popular and political culture.

For a majority of filmgoers, the names most usually associated with classic Japanese cinema are those of Kurosawa and Ozu. Yet during the early 1950s, at the same time that Kurosawa was becoming known to the public through the release of classics like Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, another Japanese director, Kenji Mizoguchi, quietly came out with a trilogy of films - The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu Monogatari and Sansho the Bailiff - that are the equal of Kurosawa's in mastery, and which by any account rank among the greatest and most enduring masterpieces of world cinema. As a storyteller, Mizoguchi was drawn to the plight and oppression of women throughout the ages - it was, for him, the 'subject of subjects'. So in addition to the movies just mentioned, he is remembered for a string of masterly contemporary films that examined, with unprecedented candour and ferocity, the conditions of life in Japanese brothels and geisha houses. Yet, as well as being a moralist. Mizoguchi was a stylist. His films are considered by critics to be among the most beautiful ever made, from a purely pictorial point of view. Filmgoers who have responded enthusiastically in recent years to Chinese classics like Farewell My Concubine or to the colourful works of Zhang Yimou will be delighted to discover 'pre-echoes' of this cinema in such late films by this Japanese master as The Empress Yang Kwei Fei and Tales of the Taira Clan (both released in 1955) works in which colour, costume and decor are deployed with compelling refinement. Despite his extraordinary qualities as a film-maker, Mizoguchi and Japan is the first full -length study in English for over 20 years of a director whose work is as vibrant now as it ever was in its heyday, and whom the French film review Cahiers du Cinema recently hailed 'the greatest of all cineastes.' Mark Le Fanu's preface to the new ebook edition - https://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/files/revised-mizoguchi-and-japan-preface.docx A Retrospective to the 2008 edition - https://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/files/mizoguchi-and-japan-retrospect.doc

Although Kenji Mizoguchi is one of the three most important Japanese directors (along with Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa), there has been no systematic critical study of his work in English. Correcting this omission. Donald Kirihara examines in detail the brilliant early works of one of the world's great film directors, offering an analysis of his career.

One of the most well regarded of non-Western film directors, responsible for acknowledged classics like Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu Yasujiro worked during a period of immense turbulence for Japan and its population. This book offers a new interpretation of Ozu's career, from his earliest work in the 1920s up to his death in 1963, focusing on Ozu's depiction of the everyday life and experiences of ordinary Japanese people during a time of depression, war and economic resurgence. Firmly situating him within the context of the Japanese film industry, Woojeong Joo examines Ozu's work as a studio director and his relation to sound cinema, and looks in-depth at his wartime experiences and his adaptation to postwar Japanese society. Drawing on Japanese materials not previously examined in western scholarship, this is a groundbreaking new study of a master of cinema.

Considered by many film critics and scholars as a master of Japanese Cinema, director Ozu Yasujiro still inspires filmmakers both within and outside of Japan. With fifteen never before published chapters in English by contributors from North America, Europe, and Japan, Reorienting Ozu explores the Japanese director's oeuvre and his lasting impact on global art cinema. Exploring major theoretical frameworks that characterize Ozu studies, chapters consider the various cultural factors that influenced the director's cinematic output, such as the anxiety of middleclass Japan in the 1930s, the censorship imposed by the US-occupation after World War II, and women's rights in Ozu's late work such as Tokyo Twilight (1957). Ultimately, chapters illuminate Ozu's influence on the directors of Japan and beyond. With the recent restoration and re-release of Ozu's early and late films, this volume provides an opportunity to examine not only the auteur's major works but also the relationships--both cultural and aesthetic--that are forged among directors across the world.

Numerous books on Japanese film have focused on important directors, such as Gosho, Naruse, Kurosawa and Ozu, and many fine histories of Japanese film have been written. Sorensen's English-language book focuses exclusively upon the occupation period and its effects on cinema. By offering this interpretation of cinema during the occupation, Sorensen gives us a new cultural history of the period.

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.

"Most directors have one film for which they are known or possibly two," said Francis Ford Coppola. "Akira Kurosawa has eight or nine." Through masterpieces such as Kagemusha, Seven Samurai, and High and Low, Akira Kurosawa (1910-98) influenced directors from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to Martin Scorsese, and his groundbreaking innovations in cinematography and editing, combined with his storytelling, made him a cinematic icon. In this succinct biography, Peter Wild evaluates Kurosawa's films while offering a view of the man behind the camera, from his family life to his global audience.             After discussing Kurosawa's childhood in Japan, Wild explores his years as an assistant director at a new film studio and his early films during and after World War II before he won international acclaim with Rashomon. While surveying Kurosawa's impressive career, Wild also examines the myriad criticisms the director faced both within his own country and abroad--he was too influenced by Western cinema; not authentically Japanese; and he was too sentimental, naïve, arrogant, or out of touch. By placing Kurosawa and his films in the context of his times, Wild helps us to understand the director and the reproaches against him. Cogent and concise, Akira Kurosawa will be essential reading for anyone interested in the work of this masterful filmmaker.

In Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema, James Goodwin draws on contemporary theoretical and critical approaches to explore the Japanese director's use of a variety of texts to create films that are uniquely intertextual and intercultural. Surveying all of Kurosawa's films and examining six films in depth -- The Idiot, The Lower Depths, Rashomon, Ikiru, Throne of Blood, and Ran -- Goodwin finds in Kurosawa's themes and techniques the capacity to restructure perceptions of Western and Japanese cultures and to establish new meanings in each.