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Freda Freiberg

18 Sepetmber, 1933 — 26 April, 2024

Book Reviews

Catheine Russell, The cinema of Naruse Mikio book cover

Catherine Russell, The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity

At long last, Naruse Mikio’s cinema has received serious attention in the first book-length study of his work in the English language. Western scholars of Japanese cinema have neglected Naruse, favouring the more attention-grabbing classic maestros – Kurosawa Akira, Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujiro – who have all been discussed extensively and long accepted into the pantheon of great film directors. Like Mizoguchi, Naruse was a great director of star actresses and women’s films; like Ozu, he was trained at Shochiku’s Kamata studios and was a reliable company employee; like Kurosawa, he served a long apprenticeship – in fact, the young Kurosawa worked as Naruse’s assistant director in his early years at Toho.

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Kurosawa book cover

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema and Keiko McDonald, From Book to Screen: Modern Japanese Literature in Film

Unlike most of the literature on Japanese cinema in English, these two books are written by native speakers of Japanese and make substantial use of Japanese sources. Trained and teaching in American academic institutions, both authors seek to fill gaps in the understanding of Japanese cinema and redress the formalist and culturalist biases of American film critics, by stressing the significance of industrial issues, literary sources, theatre practices and social issues in their analyses of film texts.

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