A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos [Paperback]

Widely considered the leading Western authority on Japan, Richie has a particular affinity for the nation's films, as is evident on every page of this authoritative survey. He emphasizes the collaborative nature of film, which is particularly appropriate since in Japanese culture the collective usually trumps the individual, and shows how Japanese cinema largely eschewed realism and narrative until it fell under Western influence. The section on the silent era, when live narrators, benshi, described films' stories to audiences, is particularly revelatory, since 90 percent of pre-1945 Japanese films haven't survived. Richie comments insightfully on the acknowledged masters-- Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Kurosawa--and also on other notable directors who are virtually unknown to even the most avid American cineasts. He finds less to praise about contemporary filmmakers, whose flashier, Westernized approach seems less to his liking. The impressive amount of information on films renowned and obscure and Richie's enthusiasm and critical acumen make this essential for film studies collections. Brief reviews of about 200 films, with notations on video availability, top things off nicely. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"What Boswell was to Johnson, what Gibbon was to ancient Rome, Donald Richie is to the Japanese cinema." -Premiere Magazine

"[An] essential study."-The New York Times, "Arts and Leisure"

"The guide to DVDs and videos includes the names of the principals and capsule-summaries of the films and it alone worth the price of the book. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film is both illuminating and thought-provoking." -The Bloomsbury Review

"Richie's sense of both future and past remains as sharp as ever." -Film Comment

"Donald Richie is the leading U.S. authority on Japanese film." -American Cinematographer

"Donald Richie, whom we may call the 'Emperor' of Japanese film history, has done it again! This is probably the best, extensive 'digest' on all aspects of Japanese cinema to be available today in English." -Cinemaya

"Superb." -In These Times

"A concise, beautifully realized guide to the expansive history of Japanese film." -A Magazine: Inside Asian America

"Richie's expertise is hard to miss; surely he overlooks no aspect of these films." -Library Journal

"The impressive amount of information ... and Richie's enthusiasm and critical acumen make this essential for film studies and collections." -Booklist

"Richie's awareness of various film theories and criticism and his sensitivity to historical specificity and to new trends in Japanese film make this book an extremely inspiring one." -Persimmon

"A new book by Richie is always a welcome event ... He writes with an insider's view of Japanese culture. ...Both funny and refreshingly critical. He is the perfect guide to little-known styles, directors, and studios of his adopted land... For all collections." -Choice

"Monumental. Tracing the roots of Japanese film while exploring artistic and industrial intricacies of the business, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film is encyclopedic and laced with wonderful insights." -Tucson Weekly

"Richie's journey through a century of Japanese cinema is designed to fascinate. Like a master tour guide, he uses his encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese art, theater and history to show us how and why this national cinema is so fundamentally different from others." -Pacific Reader

"A Hundred Years of Japanese Film is a well-informed, insightful, and accessible (not loaded down with jargon) product of a lifetime devoted to the study and appreciation of his subject." -Hawai'i Herald

"For a scholarly, thoughtful, in-depth analysis on just about every classic Japanese movie, as well as a meaningful overview about the genre as a whole, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film is clearly and justifiably the principle reference to consult!" -Midwest Book Review

"...Through classic works by Akira Kurosawa, Shimizu Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, and into modern day films by Takeshi Kitano, Hirokazu Kore'eda and Hayao Miyazaki. A selective guide for film aficionados of all ages." -Rafu Shimpo

"A gorgeous book, written out of love by an obsessive film fan, and its only potential drawback is that it's likely to convert readers into equally obsessive fans." -Bookreporter.com

"A fitting coda to a lifetime of work from a writer who, to no small degree, helped to save the Japanese cinema from what might have easily been one hundred years of obscurity." -Japan Times

The authoritative guide to Japanese film, completely revised and updated. Thoroughly revised and updated, the latest edition of this authoritative volume by Donald Richie, the foremost Western expert on Japanese film, gives us an incisive, detailed, and fully illustrated history of the country's cinema. Called "the dean of Japan's arts critics" by Time magazine, Richie takes us from the inception of Japanese cinema at the end of the nineteenth century, through the achievements of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu, then on to the notable works of contemporary filmmakers. This revised edition includes analyses of the latest trends in Japanese cinema, such as the revival of the horror genre, and introduces today's up-and-coming directors and their works. As Paul schrader writes in his perceptive foreword, Richie's accounting of the Japanese film "retains his sensitivity to the actual circumstances of film production (something filmmakers know very well but historians often overlook) . . . and shows the interweave of filmmaking-the contributions of directors, writers, cinematographers, actors, musicians, art directors, as well as financiers." Of primary interest to those who would like to watch the works introduced in these pages, Richie has provided capsule reviews of the major subtitled Japanese films commercially available in DVD and VHS formats. This guide has been updated to include not only the best new movie releases, but also classic films available in these formats for the first time.

Foreword by Paul Schrader

Over the last forty years Donald Richie has written and rewritten not only the history of Japanese film but also a history of critical methodology. Whatever we in the West know about Japanese film, and how we know it, we most likely owe to Donald Richie.

He arrived in Japan in January 1946 as a civilian staff writer for the Pacific Stars and Stripes. His initial motivation was "more to get out of Lima [Ohio] than to go to Tokyo," but he was soon gravitating toward Japanese culture--cinema in particular--and writing film reviews for the PSS. It was an extraordinary time to be an American civilian in Japan. Richie made the most of it, and it made the most of Donald Richie.

His studies of Japanese film began in 1959 with The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, which he coauthored with Joseph Anderson. For me, a film student, it was a seminal instructive work. Like Borde and Chaumenton's Panorama du Film Noir, a door opened to a world of fascinating rooms. This first history used a humanistic model: the film director struggling to be an individual while, at the same, moving toward what was presumed to be the realistic norm. ("Realistic" or "representational," as opposed to "presentational"--a critical distinction central to Japanese aesthetics as well as to Richie's writing.)

The amazing--absolutely unique--nature of Richie's accomplishment is that he has not simply updated his history (like most other film historians) by appending new chapters every decade or so. Instead, he has in every later work chosen to approach his subject from another angle, rescreening the films and rethinking his assumptions--acknowledging that as history evolves so does the historian and his methodologies.

Richie, writing alone, published his second history, the Japanese Cinema: Film Study and National Character in 1971. This volume emphasized a cultural point of view: the struggle of Japanese filmmakers to be Japanese in a non-indigenous medium. It also subscribed to the critical Zeitgeist of the time--auteurism, the notion that the director is responsible for everything that appears on screen. Also, at this time, Richie wrote the initial and still definitive books on Kurosawa and Ozu.

The third of his histories, Japanese Cinema: An Introduction (1990), turned its attention to how films were actually made: the multitude of practical considerations that define a single film and its contemporaries: politics, economics, morality, intermedia competition, technological advances, personality conflicts. To achieve this, An Introduction emphasized reporting over theory.

In this new book, A Hundred Years of Japanese Films, Richie relies even less on theory. He has refined and amplified the approach of the 1990 volume, retained his sensitivity to the actual circumstances of film production (something filmmakers consider important but historians often overlook), renounced his previous methodologies and proposed a new one, one which seeks to oppose then reconcile the unconsidered assumption of a native Japanese accent and the demands of a cinematic lingua franca. He desires to show the interweave of filmmaking (the contributions of directors, writers, cinematographers, actors, composers, art directors as well as financiers). Decline-and-fall modalities are too simplistic, as is the infancy-maturity model. Film's unspoken assumptions, the how's and why's of filmmaking, the laws of supply and demand--these are now central concerns.

Fascinating issues arise: Japanese assumptions about "realism," the growing respectability of the "representational," the merging of high and low cultures, the evolution of the genre, as well as the demise of the period-film and the emergence of a dominant contemporary theme, in Ozu as elsewhere, of the failing family.

Stepping ashore in 1946, Donald Richie, the Commodore Perry of Japanese film history, was given a unique opportunity. Still in Tokyo more than fifty years later, he has--in response, as it were--given film historians a model of the modern critic: a man of restless, evolving intellect. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Former Curator of Film at the New York Museum of Modern Art, DONALD RICHIE has written some forty books on Japan and its people, including definitive works on the Japanese film directors Kurosawa and Ozu. The film version of his travel classic, The Inland Sea, has been shown on PBS and won several prizes at international film festivals, as well as the National Geographic Earth Award.

A well-known director (American Gigolo, Affliction) and screenwriter (Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ), PAUL SCHRADER also has a strong feeling for Japan and its films. Not only did he write and direct Mishima, considered by many to be his masterpiece, he also contributed to the very first appreciation of the Japanese yakuza film genre and wrote the seminal Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer.

* Beginnings and the Benshi
Film began in Japan, as in most countries, during the last few years of the nineteenth century. The Cinematographe Lumiere made its Osaka debut in 1897. Within weeks, Thomas Edison's Vitascope was also seen there and, shortly after that, in Tokyo as well. In the same year the first motion-picture camera was imported by photographer Asano Shiro of the Konishi Camera Shop, and he was shortly shooting street scenes around the capital. At nearly the same time the Mitsukoshi Department Store formed a photography department and its cameramen, Shibata Tsunekichi and Shirai Kanzo, began taking shots of the Ginza and of geisha.

By early 1899, Asano had turned to geisha as well, capturing a series of dances. Komada Koyo, also originally with the Konishi Camera Shop and soon to be one of the leading benshi (silent-film narrators), later remembered the trouble they had with the focus and with keeping the dancers within the sight-lines they had drawn on the floor. Nonetheless, after much struggle, they finally produced a Japanese motion picture.

Geisha were chosen as subjects not because they were quintessentially Japanese but because their appeal was so strong. Asano and Komada had both noticed that among the various popular photographic postcards their stores sold, those of geisha outsold any other. Geisha were therefore a commodity popular enough to warrant the necessary cinematic outlay.

By the middle of 1899, Komada had acquired enough capital to leave the camera store and form the Association of Japanese Motion Pictures. This organization now sponsored an entire program of such geisha dances, all newly filmed, all in focus, at the Tokyo Kabuki-za, and the event was well attended even at the inflated admission prices common to that venue. Thus inspired, other camera-wielding businessmen began producing their own programs.

Shibata, at the request of a local dramatic troupe, filmed a scene from one of its plays, Armed Robber: Shimizu Sadakichi (Pisutoru Goto Shimizu Sadakichi, 1899, n.s.), and later in the year he approached kabuki itself and filmed excerpts from Maple Viewing (Momijigari, 1899) and Ninin Dojoji (Two People at Dojo Temple, n.s.). The latter was tinted (another Japan first) by the Yoshizawa Company, later one of the first film production companies.

Originally, the leading kabuki actor Ichikawa Danjuro IX was against the idea of motion pictures, dismissing them as (apparently unlike kabuki) merely vulgar amusement. In fact, kabuki actors--though not Danjuro himself--had already appeared before the Lumiere cameramen when they visited Japan, but this apparent contradiction was acceptable since those performances were for export. However, Danjuro was eventually won over by the argument that his appearance would be a gift for posterity.

Consequently, joined by Onoe Kikugoro V, Danjuro went through three short scenes for the camera. Shibata had decided to shoot in a small outdoor stage reserved for tea parties behind the Kabuki-za, but that morning there was a strong wind. Stagehands had to hold the backdrop, and the wind carried away one of the fans Danjuro was tossing. Reshooting was out of the question, and so the mistake stayed in the picture. Later, Shibata remembered that some viewers remarked that the accident gave the piece a certain charm. As one of the earliest Japanese films to survive, Maple Viewing can still be appreciated today, with the "flying fan" scene intact.

In the same year, the active Komada appeared at the Kinkikan, a small theater in Tokyo's Kanda district where Vitascope premiered. Dressed in formal evening wear and carrying a silver-headed cane, he greeted his guests and began explaining what they were seeing--in this case, a series of American Vitascope shorts.

Although this benshi lecturer-commentator had his counterparts in most early cinemas, the role was retained longer in Japan than elsewhere. The need for a live narrator had faded in the United States by 1910, but in Japan the benshi survived well into the era of sound, and was not really challenged until 1932. Eventually, the profession was done in by the enormous popular success of Josef von Sternberg's early talkie, Morocco (1930). --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.