A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos

Front Cover
Kodansha International, May 27, 2005 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 317 pages
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 filmmakers. This revised edition includes analyses of the latest trends in Japanese cinema, such as the revival of the horror genre, and introduces today's up-and-coming directors and their works.

As Paul Schrader writes in his perceptive foreword, Richie's accounting of the Japanese film "retains his sensitivity to the actual circumstances of film production (something filmmakers know very well but historians often overlook) . . . and shows the interweave of filmmaking-the contributions of directors, writers, cinematographers, actors, musicians, art directors, as well as financiers."

Of primary interest to those who would like to watch the works introduced in these pages, Richie has provided capsule reviews of the major subtitled Japanese films commercially available in DVD and VHS formats. This guide has been updated to include not only the best new movie releases, but also classic films available in these formats for the first time.
 

Contents

Foreword by Paul Schrader
7
IA CONCISE HISTORY OF JAPANESE FILM
15
Taisho Democracy and Shochiku
43
The Occupation of Japan
107
Making Audiences
213
IIA SELECTIVE GUIDE TO DVDS AND VIDEOS
261
Japanese Historical Periods
293
Glossary
300
Index
306
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2005)

Donald Richie was born, in Lima, Ohio on April 17, 1924. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Maritime Service as a civilian typist. He explored Tokyo on foot and began to attend the movies, which he wrote about for Stars and Stripes and later for the Japan Times. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Columbia University in 1953 and then returned to Japan. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was a film curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, but by 1973 he returned to live permanently in Japan. He wrote more than 50 books about all aspects of Japan including film, food, social customs, fables, gardens, temples, folk art, music, pop culture, tattoos and sexual mores. His works include The Inland Sea, Memoirs of the Warrior Kumagai, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, and Zen Inklings. He died on February 19, 2013 at the age of 88.

Bibliographic information