A Hundred Years of Japanese Films, A: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos by Donald Richie

A Hundred Years of Japanese Films, A: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos by Donald Richie

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.

Edward Seidensticker, 1921-2007, was a distinguished translator and scholar who was responsible for introducing the works of a number of important modern Japanese novelists to the English-speaking world. At the time of the writing of this book, he was spending half of the year in New York where he was Professor of Japanese at Columbia University and half of the year in Tokyo.

Donald Richie, novelist, essayist, journalist, and film scholar, was born in Lima, Ohio, in 1924, but has spent most of the last sixty years (except for time at Columbia University in the early 1950s and as curator of film at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1968-73) witnessing and reporting on the transformation of Japan from postwar devastation to twenty-first century economic and cultural powerhouse. He is the author of some forty books of fiction and non-fiction, dozens of speeches and essays, and hundreds of book, film, and arts reviews. Recent collections include The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan (2001) and Japan Journals 1947-2004 (2004), based on his detailed record of his life in Japan. He still lives and writes in Tokyo.

Paul Waley is a geographer at the University of Leeds in Britain who spent many years living in Japan where he worked as an editor, translator and writer. During that period he wrote a historical guidebook to Tokyo, Tokyo Now and Then, later republished in revised form as Tokyo, City of Stories. He visits Tokyo regularly, researching and writing both on the history of the city and on Tokyo's changing dynamics in contemporary Japan.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9784770029959
ISBN 10	4770029950
Title	A Hundred Years of Japanese Films, A: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos
Author	Donald Richie
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Kodansha America, Inc
Year published	2005-06-29
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.