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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Much more than a study on Kurosawa, March 22, 2006
This review is from: Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) (Paperback)
Although the book covers every film of Kurosawa's career, this is not a work of 'auteur' criticism. In fact, Yoshimoto addresses the very shortcomings of such an approach in the introduction of his text. As suggested by the book's secondary title, the work tackles something much more broad in scope and does so more critically than any other work related to the films of Kurosawa.
First and foremost, what sets this work apart from most studies of either Kurosawa or more generally Japanese cinema (that are published in English) is Yoshimoto's close and careful attention to history. Not only does he 'historicize' both Kurosawa-as-author and his catalogue of films but he also does the same to the recent tradition of criticism on Japanese cinema that has become so popular in Western academia. He convincingly critiques the previous work of Donald Richie, Noel Burch, Stephen Prince (and more briefly David Desser and James Goodwin), and his analysis of Western criticism on Japan as falling into 3 phases (humanist - formalist/marxist - 'cross-cultural') is most helpful.
When I suggest that he 'historicizes' these three methods of critique, I mean he demonstrates how these approaches perhaps worked not to better illuminate the objects 'Kurosawa' and 'Japanese cinema' but to 'naturalize' or legitimate other historical developments 'outside' the intended object of scrutiny. For instance, Yoshimoto argues that humanist and auteur forms of criticism (that were popular in the 1960s) when applied to Kurosawa's films did less to interpret the films-themselves and instead worked to legitimate the contemporaneous formation of 'film studies' as a proper field of scholarship. He goes on to critique the other phases of critical approach in a similar fashion.
Yoshimoto also performs historical critiques of other interpretive frameworks that are often assumed to make sense of Japanese film production. He puts into question the category 'samurai film' as assumed by critics like David Desser by demonstrating its 'orientalist' function in recent 'cross-cultural' discourse. He challenges careless appeals to 'zen' that do less to make sense of films and more to 'essentialize' certain contingent aspects of Japanese culture. Also, he reads the typical grouping of Japanese film into two genres, 'jidaigeki' and 'gendaigeki', in the context of current historical struggles by showing this division to function as a kind of effacement of certain contradictions and invasions that took place in recent global events. These are only some of the enlightening points made throughout this book - mainly the ones that really stuck with me.
As stated before, this book is more than an investigation of Kurosawa - this is a convincing challenge to the practice of 'Japanese film studies' as a discipline. However, in relation to Kurosawa, the highlites (in my opinion) are his readings of 'Stray Dog', 'Seven Samurai', 'Throne of Blood', and 'High and Low'. Personally, I wish there was more on both 'Rashomon' and 'Yojimbo' - but that, in no way, alters my high opinion of this work. By far, this is the best work on Japanese film I have ever read. His writing is clear - his arguments are convincing, and his ideas are original. This is a 5 star work of scholarship.
Also, I recommend reading his article "The Difficulty of Being Radical: The Discipline of Film Studies and the Postcolonial World Order" in 'boundary 2' (Autumn 1991).
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Japanese Cinema in Search of a Discipline, September 28, 2006
This review is from: Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) (Paperback)
Sometimes a marginal position in a faculty department or a personal discomfort with established disciplines can provide an impregnable view on the academic world. The tools that academics use for cognition and recognition--assigning people a place in the academic field, distinguishing between major and minor subjects, establishing traditions and ruptures in a particular area of inquiry--are turned inwards and become revealers of one's own position. By understanding his or her own social conditions of production and the position he or she occupies in society, the scholar is able to expose the whole social space that players fully caught in the game can only partially reveal. This act of reflexive lucidity is often perceived as an unforgivable aggression by insiders, who confuse analysis with denunciation, precision with envy, and realism with cynicism. Pierre Bourdieu, who applied this kind of reflexive sociology to the French academic world, was thus the object of constant criticism.
Although he doesn't quote Bourdieu, Matsuhiro Yoshimoto applies a similar methodology to the field of Japanese film studies. By putting Japanese cinema in search of a discipline, he not only reveals the limitations of film studies as an academic discipline, but also the difficulty in aligning a study of a Japanese filmmaker with other intellectual pursuits in the humanities, such as literary criticism, Japanese scholarship, area studies, comparative literature, post-structuralist theory or the new, post-disciplinary discourse of cultural studies.
As noted in his introductory chapter, Japanese cinema played a significant role in the establishment of film studies as a discrete discipline and in the legitimation of cinema as an object of serious academic research. Yet the history of American scholarship on Japanese cinema also reveals the impasse in which the discipline has fallen. From the cult of the auteur that started with Rashomon's Kurosawa to the theoretical turn of post-marxist or structuralist scholarship and the identity politics of cross-cultural studies, Yoshimoto documents the analytical flaws and methodological shortcomings in scholarly discourse on Japanses cinema (and as he wrily notes, "dropping theorists' names [Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan, Barthes] or their key terms [differend, meconnaissance, punctum, grand recit] does not make an analysis of Japanese cinema automatically theoretical.")
If film studies and their mechanical application of what passes as theory in humanities departments have exhausted their critical vein to the point of being "totally repetitive and uninteresting", then can one anchor the study of Japanese cinema in another supporting discipine? Unfortunately, none is in a position to offer much to the kind of film criticism that the author has in mind. For Yoshimoto, Japanese studies suffer from the original sin of their contribution to the wartime effort and the postwar attempt to "modernize" Japan. Besides, because film cannot be either "translated" or "annotated," traditionnally trained literary scholars do not know what to do with Japanese cinema. Movie critics who see in Japanese movies a reflexion of abstract values and Japaneseness are not of much help either. Comparative literature seems at first a more welcoming discipline, but failed to develop a strong body of research methods and results and recently suffered from the onslaught of cultural studies. Indeed, it is under this last label, conceived as post-disciplinary practice or "a tactical intervention in the structures and practices of the established disciplines", that Yoshimoto decides to record his study of Kurosawa movies.
This introductory chapter on Japanese Cinema in Search of a Discipline is itself worth acquiring the book. But the remainder is even more fascinating: after having cleared the space from unwanted cliches and cumbersome interpretations, Yoshimoto then attempts to build his own strand of film studies through a fine-grained and detailed analysis of each and every movie directed by Akira Kurosawa. Each chapter, of variable length, provides a unique perspective to Kurosawa's movies. The book will prove a valuable read not only to film studies scholars, but also to every Kurosawa fan who will discover more reasons to revere their favorite director.
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6 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
quite a low-leveled discussion on famous kurosawa, May 12, 2007
This review is from: Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) (Paperback)
I am a Japanese Kurosawa fan. This book is full of already-known knowledges, and fatally lacks detailed analyses of Kurosawa films. The book is full of quotations from the contemporry Japanese banal film reviews, which are not worthy of quoating. Yoshimoto, the author of the book, cannot make original discussions on Kurosawa. He does anything but persuasive discussions. To the Japanese readers, the book is boring to death, full of banal opinions. Yoshimoto has no status to call himself a film scholar. If he reads this book by any chance, Kurosawa must weep in the heaven. Duke University Press should not have published the book, if it wants to be an aclaimed publisher.
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