Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (A John Hope Franklin Center Book) [Paperback]

Daisuke Miyao (Author)

Book Description

Series: A John Hope Franklin Center Book | Publication Date: March 28, 2007

While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886–1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. In this critical study of Hayakawa’s stardom, Daisuke Miyao reconstructs the Japanese actor’s remarkable career, from the films that preceded his meteoric rise to fame as the star of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) through his reign as a matinee idol and the subsequent decline and resurrection of his Hollywood fortunes.

Drawing on early-twentieth-century sources in both English and Japanese, including Japanese-language newspapers in the United States, Miyao illuminates the construction and reception of Hayakawa’s stardom as an ongoing process of cross-cultural negotiation. Hayakawa’s early work included short films about Japan that were popular with American audiences as well as spy films that played upon anxieties about Japanese nationalism. The Jesse L. Lasky production company sought to shape Hayakawa’s image by emphasizing the actor’s Japanese traits while portraying him as safely assimilated into U.S. culture. Hayakawa himself struggled to maintain his sympathetic persona while creating more complex Japanese characters that would appeal to both American and Japanese audiences. The star’s initial success with U.S. audiences created ambivalence in Japan, where some described him as traitorously Americanized and others as a positive icon of modernized Japan. This unique history of transnational silent-film stardom focuses attention on the ways that race, ethnicity, and nationality influenced the early development of the global film industry.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Fascinating . . . an exceptionally rich and provocative study of race and national imagery at the beginnings of the Hollywood film industry.”—Richard Peña, Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Professor of Film Studies, Columbia University

“Sessue Hayakawa has not received the attention he deserves as one of the most popular and prolific stars of the American silent screen, and this book brings a wealth of material to light. Without replicating existing research, Daisuke Miyao makes an important contribution to three developing areas within film studies: new approaches to the history of early silent film, studies of the impact of Asian Americans on Hollywood, and studies of transnational links among various film industries around the world.”—Gina Marchetti, author of From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989–1997

“This is the definitive work on Sessue Hayakawa. It is a work of great originality, a truly unique attempt not only to give a thorough account of the career of one of the first and most unusual stars of silent cinema but also to approach Hayakawa from the perspective of his identity as an ethnic Japanese gaining worldwide stardom. That Daisuke Miyao is able to interrogate not only Japanese sources but the Japanese-language newspapers in the United States makes this perhaps the most thorough—and complex—treatment of the ethnicity of a movie star ever offered by a film historian. And Miyao’s placing of Hayakawa’s stardom within the context of the political and cultural relations between the United States and Japan is nothing less than masterful.”—Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity

From the Publisher

"Fascinating . . . an exceptionally rich and provocative study of race and national imagery at the beginnings of the Hollywood film industry."--Richard Peña, Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Professor of Film Studies, Columbia University

"This is the definitive work on Sessue Hayakawa. It is a work of great originality, a truly unique attempt not only to give a thorough account of the career of one of the first and most unusual stars of silent cinema but also to approach Hayakawa from the perspective of his identity as an ethnic Japanese gaining worldwide stardom. That Daisuke Miyao is able to interrogate not only Japanese sources but the Japanese-language newspapers in the United States makes this perhaps the most thorough--and complex--treatment of the ethnicity of a movie star ever offered by a film historian. And Miyao's placing of Hayakawa's stardom within the context of the political and cultural relations between the United States and Japan is nothing less than masterful."--Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity

"Sessue Hayakawa has not received the attention he deserves as one of the most popular and prolific stars of the American silent screen, and this book brings a wealth of material to light. Without replicating existing research, Daisuke Miyao makes an important contribution to three developing areas within film studies: new approaches to the history of early silent film, studies of the impact of Asian Americans on Hollywood, and studies of transnational links among various film industries around the world."--Gina Marchetti, author of From Tian'anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (March 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822339692
• ISBN-13: 978-0822339694
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,614,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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0 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema, October 8, 2010

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Kenneth M. Henderson "Michael Moviespast" (Australia) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (A John Hope Franklin Center Book) (Paperback)

Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (A John Hope Franklin Center Book)

I am currently reading this book & I am past 100 pages. This book from an academic point of view is very good but I think it would bore a lot of people as it has too much detail about Japanese people & their relevance in USA during the early days of the 20th Century. Whilst it is very interesting and compares very well as to what happened in Australia where I live, it is a little too much and is associated with picture content of films that no longer exist so that the reader cannot watch these films and make up their own mind. So, I would say it is a scholarly work by an academic that limits it readership by such repetitive material. I would further make up my mind when I have finished the book. But at this point it does not have the flow or attention of other books I have read & maybe part of my archive from this period if I bought said books(I read a lot from city libraries that are otherwise not available in book shops or sections of major department stores). I do like books that flow as such that I cannot bare to put down(but, obviously have to) till I finish. I like thinking about what I read & compare what I already know of the period in film & do find a lot of errors in some books besides bad proofreading. So far I have found no literals in this well produced book in a common paper cover on acid-free paper.

I must admit that I do like to read about a subject's origins & the people and companies these people worked for. I guess you could call it the Life & Times of the subject but there is a lot repetition along the way taking up valuable space in this tome.

As I say, let me finish the book & hope to get back to this review and add something if necessary.