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Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory: An Anthology

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It’s finally out!

As many of you know, Markus Nornes and I have been working on an anthology of Japanese film theory for over a decade. The English one is still in the works, but the first volume of the Japanese edition is finally out from Yumani Shobo under the title Nihon senzen eigaronshu: Eiga riron no saihakken. The title in English is Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory: An Anthology.

It is really the first of its kind even in Japan. There have been collections of writings on film in Japan, but whenever there is a collection of “film theory” (eiga riron), almost all the authors are foreign. It is as if “film theory” did not or does not exist in Japan. This is a problem I have called the “theory complex” in a previous article (available here). 

There is and has been, however, a plethora of fascinating and stimulating writing about the nature of cinema—what anyone would call “theory”—in Japan since the first years of cinema, some of which I have been introducing for over two decades, starting with the work of Gonda Yasunosuke (an example is here). Others have been investigating Japanese film theory as well, and so Markus and I started putting together a table of contents for what could become an anthology of the more interesting theoretical pieces on Japan. The themed issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society I edited in 2010 was a test run of such an anthology. 

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