Author Archive for: ‘Freda Freiberg’
Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture
Christine L. Marran, Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ISBN: 978 0816647279 US$22.50 (pb) 264pp (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) This book adopts a Cultural Studies approach to Japanese studies It examines the representation of the female criminal in Japan over the last 130 years – from early Meiji …
Read MoreImitation of Life
Fannie Hurst, Imitation of Life. Edited and introduced by Daniel Itzkovitz Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 8223 3324 4 352pp US$19.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Many of the classic women’s melodramas produced in Hollywood studios were adapted from best sellers written by women. The male directors who specialized in this lowly genre have been …
Read MoreItalian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz
Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8020-9189-5 US$29.95 (pb with dvd) 224pp (Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press) Millicent Marcus has taught Italian film and literature, and co-taught courses on Holocaust literature and film, at the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Toronto, …
Read MoreA Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors: From the Silent Era to the Present Day
Alexander Jacoby, A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors: From the Silent Era to the Present Day. Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-1933330 53 2 US$22.95 (pb) 398pp Aaron Gerow, A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan. Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2008 ISBN: …
Read MoreComprehensive connections: the film industry, the theatre and the state in the early Japanese cinema.
Uploaded 1 November 2000 Women in cinema Introduction In 1931 Japanese critics rated the Shochiku company’s first full talkie, Madamu to nyobo (The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine, dir. Gosho Heinosuke), the best Japanese film of the year. Though superficially a typical Shochiku lightweight domestic comedy, it can be read allegorically in two ways: as an allegory of the transition to sound in …
Read MoreLife is Beautiful
Life is Beautiful (1998): An Appreciation Uploaded 16 April 1999 | Modified 7 June 1999 Many serious critics, at home and abroad, have acknowledged the charms of Benigni’s film, Life is Beautiful, but maintain a principled resistance to those charms. Their grounds are familiar ones: linking pleasure and humour with the Holocaust, that most horrific chapter in modern Jewish history, is …
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