DIVCritical biography of Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese actor who became a popular silent film star in the U.S., that looks at how Hollywood treated issues of race and nationality in the early twentieth century./div

In Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, Daisuke Miyao explores the influence of Japanese art on the development of early cinematic visual style, particularly the actualité films made by the Lumière brothers between 1895 and 1905. Examining nearly 1,500 Lumière films, Miyao contends that more than being documents of everyday life, they provided a medium for experimenting with aesthetic and cinematic styles imported from Japan. Miyao further analyzes the Lumière films produced in Japan as a negotiation between French Orientalism and Japanese aesthetics. The Lumière films, Miyao shows, are best understood within a media ecology of photography, painting, and cinema, all indebted to the compositional principles of Japonisme and the new ideas of kinetic realism it inspired. The Lumière brothers and their cinematographers shared the contemporaneous obsession among Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists about how to instantly and physically capture the movements of living things in the world. Their engagement with Japonisme, he concludes, constituted a rich and productive two-way conversation between East and West.

In this revealing study, Daisuke Miyao explores "the aesthetics of shadow" in Japanese cinema in the first half of the twentieth century. This term, coined by the production designer Yoshino Nobutaka, refers to the perception that shadows add depth and mystery. Miyao analyzes how this notion became naturalized as the representation of beauty in Japanese films, situating Japanese cinema within transnational film history. He examines the significant roles lighting played in distinguishing the styles of Japanese film from American and European film and the ways that lighting facilitated the formulation of a coherent new Japanese cultural tradition. Miyao discusses the influences of Hollywood and German cinema alongside Japanese Kabuki theater lighting traditions and the emergence of neon commercial lighting during this period. He argues that lighting technology in cinema had been structured by the conflicts of modernity in Japan, including capitalist transitions in the film industry, the articulation of Japanese cultural and national identity, and increased subjectivity for individuals. By focusing on the understudied element of film lighting and treating cinematographers and lighting designers as essential collaborators in moviemaking, Miyao offers a rereading of Japanese film history.

What might Godzilla and Kurosawa have in common? What, if anything, links Ozu’s sparse portraits of domestic life and the colorful worlds of anime? In What Is Japanese Cinema? Yomota Inuhiko provides a concise and lively history of Japanese film that shows how cinema tells the story of Japan’s modern age. Discussing popular works alongside auteurist masterpieces, Yomota considers films in light of both Japanese cultural particularities and cinema as a worldwide art form. He covers the history of Japanese film from the silent era to the rise of J-Horror in its historical, technological, and global contexts. Yomota shows how Japanese film has been shaped by traditonal art forms such as kabuki theater as well as foreign influences spanning Hollywood and Italian neorealism. Along the way, he considers the first golden age of Japanese film; colonial filmmaking in Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan; the impact of World War II and the U.S. occupation; the Japanese film industry’s rise to international prominence during the 1950s and 1960s; and the challenges and technological shifts of recent decades. Alongside a larger thematic discussion of what defines and characterizes Japanese film, Yomota provides insightful readings of canonical directors including Kurosawa, Ozu, Suzuki, and Miyazaki as well as genre movies, documentaries, indie film, and pornography. An incisive and opinionated history, What Is Japanese Cinema? is essential reading for admirers and students of Japan’s contributions to the world of film.

Japanese Cinema includes twenty-four chapters on key films of Japanese cinema, from the silent era to the present day, providing a comprehensive introduction to Japanese cinema history and Japanese culture and society. Studying a range of important films, from Late Spring, Seven Samurai and In the Realm of the Senses to Godzilla, Hana-Bi and Ring, the collection includes discussion of all the major directors of Japanese cinema including Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Oshima, Suzuki, Kitano and Miyazaki. Each chapter discusses the film in relation to aesthetic, industrial or critical issues and ends with a complete filmography for each director. The book also includes a full glossary of terms and a comprehensive bibliography of readings on Japanese cinema. Bringing together leading international scholars and showcasing pioneering new research, this book is essential reading for all students and general readers interested in one of the world’s most important film industries.

During America's Gilded Age (dates), the country was swept by a mania for all things Japanese. It spread from coast to coast, enticed everyone from robber barons to street vendors with its allure, and touched every aspect of life from patent medicines to wallpaper. Americans of the time found in Japanese art every design language: modernism or tradition, abstraction or realism, technical virtuosity or unfettered naturalism, craft or art, romance or functionalism. The art of Japan had a huge influence on American art and design. Title compares juxtapositions of American glass, silver and metal arts, ceramics, textiles, furniture, jewelry, advertising, and packaging with a spectrum of Japanese material ranging from expensive one-of-a-kind art crafts to mass-produced ephemera. Beginning in the Aesthetic movement, this book continues through the Arts & Crafts era and ends in Frank Lloyd Wright's vision, showing the reader how that model became transformed from Japanese to American in design and concept. Hannah Sigur is an art historian, writer, and editor with eight years' residence and study in East and Southeast Asia. She has a master's degree from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is completing a PhD in the arts of Japan. Her writings include co-authoring A Master Guide to the Art of Floral Design (Timber Press, 2002), which is listed in "The Best Books of 2002" by The Christian Science Monitor and is now in its second edition; and "The Golden Ideal: Chinese Landscape Themes in Japanese Art," in Lotus Leaves, A Master Guide to the Art of Floral Design (2001). She lives in Berkeley.

Watching movies every night at home with his cats, film scholar and cat lover Daisuke Miyao noticed how frequently cats turned up on screen. They made brief appearances (think of Mafia boss Marlon Brando gently stroking a cat in a scene from The Godfather); their looks provided inspiration to film creators (Avatar); they even held major roles (The Lion King). In Cinema Is a Cat, Miyao uses the fascinating relationship between cats and cinema to offer a uniquely appealing introduction to film studies. Cats are representational subjects in the nine films explored in this book, and each chapter juxtaposes a feline characteristic—their love of dark places, their “star” quality—with discussion of the theories and histories of cinema. The opening chapters explore three basic elements of the language of cinema: framing, lighting, and editing. Subsequent chapters examine the contexts in which films are made, exhibited, and viewed. Miyao covers the major theoretical and methodological concepts of film studies—auteurism, realism, genre, feminist film theory, stardom, national cinema, and modernity theory—exploring fundamental questions. Who is the author of a film? How does a film connect to reality? What connections does one film have to other films? Who is represented in a film and how? How is a film viewed differently by people of different cultural and social backgrounds? How is a film located in history? His focus on the innate qualities of cats—acting like prima donnas, born of mixed blood, devoted to the chase—offers a memorable and appealing approach to the study of film. How to read audio-visual materials aesthetically and culturally is of limitless value in a world where we are constantly surrounded by moving images—television, video, YouTube, streaming, GPS, and virtual reality. Cinema Is a Cat offers an accessible, user-friendly approach that will deepen viewers’ appreciation of movies, from Hollywood classics like Breakfast at Tiffany’s and To Catch a Thief, to Japanese period dramas like Samurai Cat. The book will be attractive to a wide audience of students and scholars, movie devotees, and cat lovers.

Moving pictures existed for over a decade before anything resembling a star system appeared. Then American cinema went from being devoid of stars to being dependent on them. This is an account of this development in cinema and modern culture.

This is the first edited volume dedicated to the study of East Asian-German cinema. Its coverage ranges from 1919 to the present, a period which has witnessed an unprecedented degree of global entanglement between Germany and East Asia. In analyzing this hybrid cinema, this volume employs a transnational approach, which highlights the nations' cinematic encounters and entanglements. It reveals both German perceptions of East Asia and East Asian perceptions of Germany, through analysis of works by both German directors and East Asian/East Asian-German directors. It is hoped that this volume will not only accelerate cross-cultural exchange, but also provide a wider perspective that helps film scholars to see the broader contexts in which these films are produced. It introduces multiple compelling topics, not just immigration, multiculturalism, and exile, but also Japonisme, children's literature, musical modernity, media hybridity, gender representation, urban space, Cold War divisions, and national identity. It addresses several genres--feature films, essay films, and documentary films. Lastly, by embracing three East Asian cinemas in one volume, this volume serves as an excellent introduction for German cinema students and scholars. It will appeal to international and interdisciplinary audiences, as its contributors represent multiple disciplines and four world regions.

Theorizing Colonial Cinema is a millennial retrospective on the entangled intimacy between film and colonialism from film's global inception to contemporary legacies in and of Asia. The volume engages new perspectives by asking how prior discussions on film form, theory, history, and ideology may be challenged by centering the colonial question rather than relegating it to the periphery. To that end, contributors begin by excavating little-known archives and perspectives from the colonies as a departure from a prevailing focus on Europe's imperial histories and archives about the colonies. The collection pinpoints various forms of devaluation and misrecognition both in and beyond the region that continue to relegate local voices to the margins. This pathbreaking study on global film history advances prior scholarship by bringing together an array of established and new interdisciplinary voices from film studies, Asian studies, and postcolonial studies to consider how the present is continually haunted by the colonial past.