Approaching Spectators of Japanese Cinema

KankyakuA great new anthology has just come out in Japanese that takes up the broad issue of spectatorship of Japanese film from a variety of perspectives. I had written about this earlier.

Kankyaku e no apurochi (観客へのアプローチ)

Ed. Fujiki Hideaki (藤木秀朗)

Shinwasha (森話社), 2011. ISBN 978-4-86405-020-3

It is part of the excellent Nihon eigashi sosho series put out by Shinwasha, but somewhat different in that it is just bigger (apparently Nagoya University, where Fujiki-san teaches, helped out with the publication).

The book features a splendid variety of scholars from Japan and abroad, including some of the best working on Japanese film and image culture. 

The contents include Miyao Daisuke writing about Hayashi Chojiro's (Hasegawa Kazuo's) female fans, Nakamura Hideyuki (who also contributed to my film theory publication) writing on 3-D film in Japan, Kato Atsuko on film industry market surveys, Kim Donghoon on cinema in 1920s colonial Korea, Fujiki Hideaki on film as social education in interwar Japan, Kinoshita Chika on Makino Masahiro's Onna keizu, Kitamura Hiroshi on Yodogawa Nagaharu, Thomas LaMarre on otaku consumption, Usui Michiko on utsushie, Joseph Murphy on film and literature in 1920s Japan, Sasakawa Keiko on Mizoguchi Kenji's The Downfall of Osen in Osaka (the film is available with subtitles as part of the Talking Silents series), and Hata Ayumi on 1970s movement cinema. 

I made a contribution, one that discusses the history of Japanese film criticism in light of its uneasy relation with theory. I would like to thank Dogase Masato for translating it.

You can get the book through Amazon.jp.

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