Directed by Yasujiro Ozu

First published in 1983, Shiguéhiko Hasumi's Directed by Yasujirō Ozu has become one of the most influential books on cinema written in Japanese. This pioneering translation brings Hasumi's landmark work to an English-speaking public for the first time, inviting a new readership to engage with this astutely observed, deeply moving meditation on the oeuvre of one of the giants of world cinema. Complemented by a critical introduction from acclaimed film scholar Aaron Gerow and rendered fluidly in Ryan Cook's agile translation, this volume will grace the shelves of cinephiles for many years to come.

Table of Contents:
Contents List of Illustrations  Translator’s Introduction: Directed by Shiguéhiko Hasumi  RYAN COOK Critical Introduction: Shiguéhiko Hasumi and Viewing Film Studies Anew  AARON GEROW  Prologue: The Rules of the Game  1. Negating  2. Eating  3. Changing Clothes  4. Inhabiting  5. Looking  6. Holding Still  7. Radiating  8. Getting Angry  9. Laughing  10. Being Surprised  Conclusion: Pleasure and Cruelty  Appendix: Interview with Yuˉ haru Atsuta  Index  About the Author  About the Translator and Contributor 

About the Author :
Shiguéhiko Hasumi (1936–) is a film and literary critic and scholar. He received his doctorate from the University of Paris, Sorbonne, and was the twenty-sixth president of the University of Tokyo (1997–2001). He has received numerous awards, including the Yomiuri Bungaku Award for Anti-Nihongoron (Han-Nihongoron, 1977), the Geijutsu Senshō Award for Portrait of a Mediocre Artist: On Maxime Du Camp (Bonʻyō na geijutsuka no shōzō: Makushimu Dyu Kan-ron, 1988), and L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Commandeur from the French Ministry of Culture (1999). His many other works include Lectures on Hollywood Film History (Hariuddo eigashi kōgi, 1993), Godard, Manet, Foucault (Godāru, Manē, Fūkō, 2008), On Madame Bovary (Bovarī fujin-ron, 2014), What Is a Shot? (Shotto to wa nani ka, 2022), and On John Ford (Jon Fōdo-ron, 2022), all untranslated. Hasumi's productive relationships with influential filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Manoel de Oliveira, Theo Angelopoulos, Wim Wenders, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Pedro Costa, Leos Carax, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Shinji Aoyama, and Ryūsuke Hamaguchi are well documented.   Aaron Gerow is A. Whitney Griswold Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, and of Film and Media Studies, at Yale University. He is the author of Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925.   Ryan Cook is a film scholar, translator, and librarian. He completed a PhD in Japanese film history at Yale University and has taught at Yale, Harvard, and Emory University.  

Review :
"For those of us who don't read kanji, or who struggle to make their way through Hasumi 's sentences, whose length rivals Proust or Henry James, this meticulous and precise version, in direct contact with the text, with a side, a maverick supplement, will be a landmark." "Hasumi’s Directed by Yasujirō Ozu is a distinctive view of a much- discussed director, making this an overdue but very  timely and welcome publication." "Although Shiguéhiko Hasumi is among the world’s great critics and philosophers of cinema, his writings are strangely hard to come by in the Anglosphere. This makes the University of California Press publication of his Directed by Yasujiro Ozu, translated by Ryan Cook and deftly contextualized in an introduction by Aaron Gerow, a publishing event of immense proportions. . . .It is sure to change standard Anglophone interpretations of this central figure in the history of cinema." "Highly recommended." "The English that [Ryan Cook] has produced is extremely readable and elegant, the claims and arguments cogent . . . .It is a boon to have this important book finally available in English." "Not only for its insightful, inventive, and instructive positions on Ozu’s films, but as a general framework for approaching any text, this English translation of Hasumi’s writing introduces a revitalising perspective, which serves as an antidote to a critical landscape littered with hopelessly abstracted writing, ensnared within thickets of endlessly iterative conceptual constructs."