This anthology brings together many well-known authors who have contributed to our understanding of Japanese cinema, and for that reason alone it constitutes an important addition to the literature. The tendency to link Japanese films to classical historical forms is most familiar from the work of Noël Burch (and it is echoed here by Linda Ehrlich when she posits renga verse as a source of Tampopo’s discursive form) but we do well to remember that Asian cinemas are fast-changing entities which are evolving in relation to all kinds of contemporary determinants that are both international and national. ![]() Closer to our own time, the emergence of a new master like Kore-eda Hirokazu and vigorous commercial genres such as J-horror and anime demand constant updating. Recent subtitled film and dvd releases of work by directors such as Shimizu, Yamanota, Naruse and Uchida, have provided westerners with fresh insights into the breadth of Japanese studio era filmmaking. The other compelling argument for the importance of this anthology is that there has recently been a significant increase in the scope of available film offerings at both chronological ends of the Japanese cinema. The editors’ introductory section also includes useful short survey overviews of Japanese cinema history and historiography, indicating a primary interest in the undergraduate textbook market. A comparison between Darrell Davis’s essay on Hana-bi (Japan 1997) in this anthology and his 2001 Cinema Journal article on the same film will give an immediate sense of the more text centred and accessible approach adopted by the contributors. Most of these essays are written in an English which is admirably clear and they begin from the modest assumption of a reader who has seen a film and is interested in it. The first is the pragmatic one that most undergraduate teaching of cinema studies is still based around screening films. There are also a couple of more immediate justifications for the approach which underpins this collection. Isolde Standish’s chapter on Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (Japan/France, 1976) similarly situates that film in industrial contexts of both genre and the censorship system, while maintaining a focus on the broader context of changing conceptions of subjectivity in Japan, as the wartime ideology of a spiritual and self-less subject was contested by a postwar emphasis on the more individualised and bodily incarnated subject. She is finally interested in the way the film responds to the changing nature of Japanese modernity, but she arrives at this through a careful combination of textual analysis, genre frameworks, contemporary critical response and social context. Catherine Russell’s essay on Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums(Japan 1954) is a fine example of analysis starting from an individual film and working its way upwards to a consideration of larger abstractions. This is not to say that these more modest approaches are in any way anti-theoretical. This type of approach is a welcome response to calls for smaller scale, “bottom up” studies in cinema to replace the large abstractions of Theory with their fondness for re-casting the plurality of film production in terms of vague yet capacious terms such as desire and modernity. The main justification they offer for this film-centred approach is that the diversity of different films is important to foreground as a way of putting off larger generalisations which inevitably produce false unities. Phillips and Stringer cite as their main model for this, Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau’s French Cinema: Texts and Contexts, which first appeared in 1990, though they also reference Chris Berry’s more recent anthology Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes (2003). ![]() The chapters are organised around individual films rather than invoking some unifying theme or theoretical paradigm. ![]() The essays are organised chronologically beginning with Ozu’s I Was Born But… (Japan 1932) and extending through to Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (Japan 2001). The editors of this anthology, Alistair Phillips and Julian Stringer (from the Universities of Warwick and Nottingham respectively) have brought together 24 chapters, each limited to about 5000 words and based on a single film. The first is, of course, the quality of the films, but beyond this, there has always been the sense that the social, cultural and industrial contexts of Japan are so distinctively different from those of other countries that they provide a particularly strong case in establishing the importance of such contexts to any understanding of the films themselves. The study of Japanese cinema has typically held a high place among national cinema studies for a couple of reasons. Alistair Phillips and Julian Stringer (eds.),
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