Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema(Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society)

An exploration of the films of Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa. It addresses the entire body of Kurosawa's work from 1943 to 1993, seeking to shift the ground upon which Japanese cinema has been built and question its dominant interpretative frameworks and critical assumptions. Arguing that Kurosawa's films arouse anxiety in Japanese and western critics because the films problematise Japan's self-image and the West's image of Japan, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto challenges widely-circulating cliches about the films and shows how these works constitute narrative answers to socio-cultural contradictions and institutional dilemmas. While acknowledging the achievement of Kurosawa as a filmmaker, Yoshimoto uses the director's work to reflect on and rethink a variety of larger issues, from Japanese film history, modern Japanese history, and cultural production to national identity and the global circulation of cultural capital. He examines how Japanese cinema has been "invented" in the discipline of film studies for specific ideological purposes and analyzes Kurosawa's role in that process of invention.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 I Japanese Cinema in Search of a Discipline 7 II The Films of Kurosawa Akira 51 Kurosawa Criticism and the Name of the Author 53 Sanshiro Sugata 69 The Most Beautiful 81 Sanshiro Sagata, Part 2 89 The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail 93 No Regrets for Our Youth 114 One Wonderful Sunday 135 Drunken Angel 138 The Quiet Duel 140 Stray Dog 147 Scandal 179 Rashomon 182 The Idiot 190 Ikiru 194 Seven Samurai 205 Record of a Living Being 246 Throne of Blood 250 The Lower Depths 270 The Hidden Fortress 272 The Bad Sleep Well 274 Yojimbo 289 Sanjuro 293 High and Low 303 Red Beard 332 Dodeskaden 334 Dersu Uzala 344 Kagemusha 348 Ran 355 Dreams 359 Rhapsody in August 364 Madadayo 372 Epilogue 375 Notes 379 Filmography 433 Bibliography 451 Index 471

About the Author :
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto is Associate Professor of Japanese, Cinema, and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.

Review :
"Yoshimoto's Kurosawa is destined to take its place along with the most important achievements of cinema studies, which is to say that it is a book about something more than cinema itself. Yet it offers a stimulating, running commentary on the films that makes one want to see them all over again, while also offering a new theory of auteurship as collective negotiation. This is a grand performance sustained by a voice of rare authority."--Fredric Jameson [*Note: We'll need to run this edit by him.] "A tour-de-force reading of Kurosawa's films. Yoshimoto adds greatly to current Kurasawa scholarship and to situating the construct 'Japanese Cinema' in a way that it has not been situated before."--[PERMISSION PENDING] [RR, PP, edited] E. Ann Kaplan, author of Looking for the Other: Feminism and the Imperial Gaze"[Yoshimoto's] primary concern, as an academic working in the United States, is with western criticism of Japanese cinema as it moved from humanism to structuralism, to post-structuralism and to postmodernism. His erudite and near-comprehensive book is about what we non-Japanese understand in the work of Kurosawa. He finds much of our understanding tainted because it views Japan and Japanese cinema in an exotic light... Yoshimoto's aim is to build up a detailed case that westerners do not understand Kurosawa. If we think we do, he implies, we are wrong, because we know so little of Japanese culture...He tries to help us by giving a full account of the context in which Kurosawa worked and in which his films were made. It is something of a crash course: cinema, theatre, society, politics, history and so on. His knowledge is encyclopedic and his scholarship impressive."--Mamoun Hassan, Times Higher Education Supplement, December 15 2000