Joanne Bernardi - Böcker

Remnants of early films often have a story to tell. As material artifacts, these film fragments are central to cinema history, perhaps more than ever in our digital age of easy copying and sharing. If a digital copy is previewed before preservation or is shared with a researcher outside the purview of a film archive, knowledge about how the artifact was collected, circulated, and repurposed threatens to become obscured. When the question of origin is overlooked, the story can be lost. Concerned contributors in Provenance and Early Cinema challenge scholars digging through film archives to ask, "How did these moving images get here for me to see them?" This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives.

The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema provides a timely and expansive overview of Japanese cinema today, through cutting-edge scholarship that reflects the hybridity of approaches defining the field. The volume’s twenty-one chapters represent work by authors with diverse backgrounds and expertise, recasting traditional questions of authorship, genre, and industry in broad conceptual frameworks such as gender, media theory, archive studies, and neoliberalism. The volume is divided into four parts, each representing an emergent area of inquiry: "Decentring Classical Cinema" "Questions of Industry" "Intermedia as an Approach" "The Object Life of Film" This is the first anthology of Japanese cinema scholarship to span the temporal framework of 200 years, from the vibrant magic lantern culture of the nineteenth century, through to the formation of the film industry in the twentieth century, and culminating in cinema’s migration to gaming, surveillance video, and other new media platforms of the twenty-first century. This handbook will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Japanese studies, film studies, and cultural studies more broadly.

While most people associate Japanese film with modern directors like Akira Kurosawa, Japan's cinema has a rich tradition going back to the silent era. Japan's ""pure film movement"" of the 1910s is widely held to mark the birth of film theory as we know it and is a touchstone for historians of early cinema. Yet this work has been difficult to access because so few prints have been preserved. Joanne Bernardi offers a study of this important era, recovering a body of lost film and establishing its significance in the development of Japanese cinema. Building on a wealth of original-language sources she examines how the movement challenged the industry's dependence on pre-existing stage repertoires, preferences for lecturers over intertitles, and the use of female impersonators. Bernardi provides in-depth analysis of key scripts - ""The Glory of Life"", ""A Father's Tears"", ""Amateur Club"" and ""The Lust of the White Serpent"" - and includes translations in an appendix. These films offer case studies for understanding the craft of screenwriting during the silent era and shed light on such issues as genre, authorship and control, and gender representation. ""Writing in Light"" helps fill gaps in the history of Japanese silent cinema. By identifying points at which ""pure film"" discourse merges with changing international trends and attitudes toward film, it should offer an important resource for film, literary and cultural historians.