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Explores the experiences spectators have when they watch a film collectively in a cinema.
Maiko Masquerade explores Japanese representations of the maiko, or apprentice geisha, in films, manga, and other popular media as an icon of exemplary girlhood. Jan Bardsley traces how the maiko, long stigmatized as a victim of sexual exploitation, emerges in the 2000s as the chaste keeper of Kyoto’s classical artistic traditions. Insider accounts by maiko and geisha, their leaders and fans, show pride in the training, challenges, and rewards maiko face. No longer viewed as a toy for men’s amusement, she serves as catalyst for women’s consumer fun. This change inspires stories of ordinary girls—and even one boy—striving to embody the maiko ideal, engaging in masquerades that highlight questions of personal choice, gender performance, and national identity.
Based on a close reading of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s extant films, this book provides insights into the ways the director created narrative structures and used symbolism to construct meaning in his films. Against critics’ insistence that Ozu was indifferent to plot and unlikely to use symbols, Geist demonstrates otherwise, revealing the director’s subtle iconographic paradigms. Her incisive understanding of the historical and cultural context in which the films were conceived amplifies her analysis of the films’ structure and meaning. Ozu: A Closer Look guides the reader through Ozu’s early, silent films and his sound films made during Japan’s wars in Asia and the subsequ...
Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered presents diverse approaches to the vibrant commercial film industry known as Taiwanese-language cinema (taiyupian). After a long period of neglect, films are being restored and made available with subtitles.Taiwanese-language cinema was a cycle of over 1,000 dramatic feature films produced between the mid-50s and early 70s in the local Minnanhua Chinese language most commonly spoken on the island, also known as "e;Taiwanese"e; (taiyu). The rediscovery of Taiwanese-language cinema is stimulating new scholarship, both in Chinese in Taiwan and in other languages, which challenges our conventional understandings of Taiwanese film history and opens up new approaches to the films themselves. This volume includes a mix of new English-language scholarship material with key essays by Taiwanese scholars newly translated from Chinese for the volume.
Go beyond Kurosawa and discover an up-to-date and rigorous examination of historical and modern Japanese cinema In A Companion to Japanese Cinema, distinguished cinematic researcher David Desser delivers insightful new material on a fascinating subject, ranging from the introduction and exploration of under-appreciated directors, like Uchida Tomu and Yoshimura Kozaburo, to an appreciation of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema from the point of view of little-known stars and genres of the 1950s. This Companion includes new resources that deal in-depth with the issue of gender in Japanese cinema, including a sustained analysis of Kawase Naomi, arguably the most important female director in Japa...
This prize-winning study of Levantine migration to Mexico brings “a new and revelatory light” to the subject (Christina Civantos, author of Between Argentines and Arabs). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, migration from the Middle East brought hundreds of thousands of people to the Americas. After a pause during World War I, this intense mobility resumed in the 1920s and continued through the 1940s under the French Mandate. A significant number of these migrants settled in Mexico, building transnational lives. The Mexican Mahjar provides the first global history of Middle Eastern migrations to Mexico. Making unprecedented use of French colonial archives and historical...
Through provocative essays by specialists in different aspects of Japanese culture, this book provides an historical and analytical survey of the presence of Goddesses in Japanese audiovisual culture from its origins to the present day. It shows how these feminine myths are represented in Japan; not only as beneficial or creative deities, but also the archetypal strong or dominant woman that sometimes overshadows masculine figures and heroes, or as influential figures. Therefore, it analyzes this rich dialectic of the feminine and how the audiovisual culture has represented it thus far in film, TV series, and video games made in Japan. While many theories have been proposed to explain the presence of Goddesses in Japan, this book’s focus on audiovisual culture explores how this corpus challenges the traditional conceptions of the feminine as related to Goddesses.
Skin-lightening is currently one of the most common forms of potentially harmful body modification practices in the world and African women are among some of the most widely represented users of skin-lightening products. The overall objective of this book is to provide up-to-date evidence-based recommendations for reducing the global burden of cosmetic skin bleaching and preventing injuries related to skin bleaching in sub-Saharan Africa and Africans in diaspora. The book aims to: offer an appraisal of all relevant literature on cosmetic bleaching practices to-date, focusing on any key developments; identify and address important medical, public health issues as well as historical, genetic, psychosocial, cultural, behavioural, socioeconomic, political, institutional and environmental determinants; provide guideline recommendations that would help attenuate the burden and possibly eliminate the injuries related to skin bleaching; discuss potential developments and future directions.
Die Beiträge dieses zweisprachigen Bandes ordnen die Ästhetik von Yasujirō Ozus Filmen in die seiner Zeitgenossen ein. Dabei rückt der Blick auf die zahlreichen Resonanzen und Synchronismen zwischen Ozu und dem globalen Film. Ozu und der Westen, das sind schon in den 1920er Jahren keine bloßen Gegensätze, sondern sich überlagernde Felder. Ozu entkontextualisiert Darstellungselemente des westlichen Films, kombiniert sie, reißt sie mitunter aus dem Zusammenhang und ordnet sie um, erfindet sie neu. Mit Beiträgen von Kayo Adachi-Rabe, Andreas Becker, Marcos P. Centeno Martín, Kerstin Fooken, Simon Frisch, Woojeong Joo, Stefanie Kreuzer und Jörg Schweinitz.
The only Japanese director to have won the Palme d'Or from Cannes more than once, and second only to Ozu Yasujiro in the number of times he has won the prestigious Kinema Jumpo Best One award, the late Imamura Shohei was one of Japan's leading and most controversial film directors. This book is one of the first to study all of Imamura's major films alongside his television and theatrical documentaries, focusing on his major themes and concerns. By giving shape to Imamura's career, the book positions him as a stylistic innovator as well as an ethnographic investigator into Japanese culture and tradition; the preeminent examiner of the hidden, barely repressed underpinnings of Japanese society.