Book
日本戦前映画論集—映画理論の再発見 / Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory－An Anthology (excerpt)
(2018)
Abstract
Nihon senzen eigaronshu: Eiga riron no saihakken is a groundbreaking publication, collecting many of the most exciting writings about the nature of cinema written before 1945 in Japan. If Euro-American film scholars have largely ignored film theory produced by the non-West—Noel Burch, for instance, once asserted that “the very notion of theory is alien to Japan”—and if Japanese scholars have mostly ignored their own tradition of film theory, this anthology proves that a rich and vibrant history of deep thinking about motion pictures existed from the 1910s on.
The volume is 746 pages in length with over 65 selections from over 50 authors. It covers writings on cinema before 1945, and is divided into 13 chapters, covering a variety of topics such as early cinema, sound, montage, machine art, Marxism, criticism, audiences, animation, Japanese film, psychology, time and the frame, and nation. Each chapter has its own commentary, and features four to six pieces, each piece accompanied by a specially written commentary.
The excerpt features the table of contents, plus the the introduction and the commentary for chapter one that I wrote.
Keywords
- film theory,
- Japan,
- cinema,
- film criticism
Disciplines
Publication Date
2018
Editor
Aaron Gerow, Markus Nornes, Iwamoto Kenji
Publisher
Yumani Shobo
Citation Information
Aaron Gerow, Markus Nornes and Kenji Iwamoto. 日本戦前映画論集—映画理論の再発見 / Rediscovering Classical Japanese Film Theory－An Anthology (excerpt). (2018) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/aarongerow/58/