The Japanese Cinema Book

The Japanese Cinema Book provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world's most fascinating and widely admired film-making regions. In terms of its historical coverage, broad thematic approach and the significant international range of its authors, it is the largest and most wide-ranging publication of its kind to date. The Japanese Cinema Book is designed to appeal to the largest possible readership and includes an unusually plural range of critical perspectives based on the expertise of established and emerging scholars and critics. As such, it provides a groundbreaking picture of the different ways in which Japanese cinema may be understood as a local, regional, national, transnational and global phenomenon.The book is structured around seven inter-related sections, addressing theories and approaches; institutions and industry; film style; genre; times and spaces of representation; social contexts, and flows and interactions.Ranging from internationally renowned directors such as Akira Kurosawa to neglected popular genres such as the film musical and encompassing topics such as ecology, spectatorship, home-movies, colonial history and relations with Hollywood and Europe, The Japanese Cinema Book presents a set of new, and often surprising, perspectives on Japanese film.The book's innovative multi-focal approach combines general surveys of a particular historical topic or critical approach with various curated themes at a more micro level. It argues there is no single fixed Japanese cinema, but instead a fluid and varied field of Japanese film-making cultures that continue to exist in a dynamic relationship with other cinemas and regions.To underline its historical and geographical diversity, The Japanese Cinema Book also offers a genuinely inter-disciplinary dialogue with related fields of study. It explores the multi-faceted wealth of Japanese cinema through the eyes not only of renowned film scholars, but also writers with backgrounds in Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, the Performing Arts, History, and Cultural Studies.