EALC 200: Approaches to the Study of East Asian Cultures (HC/BMC) Spring 2017: Film

This best-selling text is a succinct guide to thinking critically and writing precisely about film.   Both an introduction to film study and a practical writing guide, this brief text introduces students to major film theories as well as film terminology, enabling them to write more thoughtfully and critically. Consult chapter three: "Film Terms and Topics for Film Analysis and Writing." Also the tips presented in chapter 5: "Style and Structure in Writing" are useful when you are writing the paper.

The Historical Dictionary of Chinese Cinema covers the history of Chinese cinema from its very beginning in 1896 to the present. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography.

The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema is an introduction to and overview of the long history of Japanese cinema. It aims to provide an entry point for those with little or no familiarity with the subject, while it is organized so that scholars in the field will also be able to use it to find specific information. This is done through a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, and appendixes of films, film studios, directors, and performers. The cross-referenced dictionary entries cover key films, genres, studios, directors, performers, and other individuals.

This important work fills the need for a reasonably priced yet comprehensive volume on major directors in the history of Japanese film.

The Chinese Cinema Book provides an essential guide to the cinemas of the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora, from early cinema to the present day. With contributions from leading international scholars, the book is structured around five thematic sections: Territories, Trajectories, Historiographies; Early Cinema to 1949; The Forgotten Period: 1949-80; The New Waves; and Stars, Auteurs and Genres.

What does it mean to be 'Chinese'? This controversial question has sparked off a never-ending process of image-making in Chinese-speaking communities throughout the twentieth century. This introduction to Chinese national cinema covers three 'Chinas': mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Historical and comparative perspectives bring out the parallel developments in these three Chinas, while critical analysis explores thematic and stylistic changes over time.As well as exploring artistic achievements and ideological debates, Yingjin Zhang examines how - despite the pressures placed on the industry from state control and rigid censorship - Chinese national cinema remains incapable of projecting a single unified picture, but rather portrays many different Chinas.

The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement is the first English-language book on Chinese documentary film, the signature mode of contemporary Chinese visual culture. The book offers an introduction, a detailed historical analysis, and specialized essays on specific themes and individual films to illuminate this exciting trend.

The author traces the dynamic history of Chinese filmmaking and discusses its course of development from the early days to the present. Moving decade by decade, he explores such key themes as the ever-shifting definitions of modern marriage in 1920s silent features, East-West cultural conflict in the movies of the 1930s, the strong appeal of the powerful melodramatic mode of the 1930s and 1940s, the polarizing political controversies surrounding Chinese filmmaking under the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the 1940s, and the critical role of cinema during the bloody civil war of the late 1940s. Also covers the Maoist era.

This is a collection of original essays written by experts in a range of disciplines that provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution and current state of Chinese cinema.

In A New History of Japanese Cinema Isolde Standish focuses on the historical development of Japanese film. She details an industry and an art form shaped by the competing and merging forces of traditional culture and of economic and technological innovation. Adopting a thematic, exploratory approach, Standish links the concept of Japanese cinema as a system of communication with some of the central discourses of the twentieth century: modernism, nationalism, humanism, resistance, and gender. After an introduction outlining the earliest years of cinema in Japan, Standish demonstrates cinema's symbolic position in Japanese society in the 1930s - as both a metaphor and a motor of modernity. Moving into the late thirties and early forties, Standish analyses cinema's relationship with the state-focusing in particular on the war and occupation periods. The book's coverage of the post-occupation period looks at .romance. films in particular. Avant-garde directors came to the fore during the 1960s and early seventies, and their work is discussed in depth. The book concludes with an investigation of genre and gender in mainstream films of recent years. In grappling with Japanese film history and criticism, most western commentators have concentrated on offering interpretations of what have come to be considered .classic. films. A New History of Japanese Cinema takes a genuinely innovative approach to the subject, and should prove an essential resource for many years to come.

From the revered classics of Akira Kurosawa to the modern marvels of Takeshi Kitano, the films that have emerged from Japan represent a national cinema that has gained worldwide admiration and appreciation. "The Directory of World Cinema: Japan" provides an insight into the cinema of Japan through reviews of significant titles and case studies of leading directors, alongside explorations of the cultural and industrial origins of key genres. As the inaugural volume of an ambitious new series from Intellect documenting world cinema, the directory aims to play a part in moving intelligent, scholarly criticism beyond the academy by building a forum for the study of film that relies on a disciplined theoretical base. It takes the form of an A Z collection of reviews, longer essays, and research resources, accompanied by fifty full-color film stills highlighting significant films and players. The cinematic lineage of samurai warriors, yakuza enforcers, and atomic monsters take their place alongside the politically charged works of the Japanese New Wave, making this a truly comprehensive volume."

Yakuza, samurai and horror films have been some of the most popular genres in Japanese cinema over the last two decades, with a clearly defined generic lineage in the country's cinematic tradition. Studying these genres through a close analysis of their most representative films, thisinnovative study examines the way individual films have either adapted to or drawn away from their own genre conventions, or, in the case of "magic realist" films, have introduced significant new developments which have little real precedence in Japanese filmmaking. With close textual analysis, thisstudy looks at the prevalence of repetition and variation in these contemporary Japanese genres, offering for the first time in English an academic appreciation and overview of popular Japanese cinema. Looking at the work of directors as varied as Kitano "Beat" Takeshi and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, andfilms as iconic as Hana-Bi and The Bird People in China, this book provides an invaluable resource for film students and scholars alike.About the series: Traditions in World Cinema introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume concentrates on a set of films from a different national, regional or, in some cases, cross-cultural cinema which constitute a particular tradition.

The authoritative guide to Japanese film, completely revised and updated. Now available in paperback for the first time, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film by Donald Richie, the foremost Western expert on Japanese film, gives us an incisive, detailed, and fully illustrated history of the country's cinema. Called 'the dean of Japan's arts critics' by Time magazine, Richie takes us from the inception of Japanese cinema at the end of the nineteenth century, through the achievements of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu, then on to the notable works of contemporary