The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan

Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-90-8964-773-3
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, 228 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 458 g

Reihe: Amsterdam University Press

This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan. Putting the cinema at the center of a ‘culture of the sound image’, it restores complexity to a media transition that is often described simply as slow and reluctant. In that vibrant sound culture, the talkie was introduced on the radio before it could be heard in the cinema, and pop music adaptations substituted for musicals even as cinema musicians and live narrators resisted the introduction of recorded sound. Taken together, the essays show that the development of sound technology shaped the economic structure of the film industry and its labour practices, the intermedial relation between cinema, radio, and popular music, as well as the architecture of cinemas and the visual style of individual Japanese films and filmmakers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Raine, Michael

Nordström, Johan

Weitere Mitwirkende

Sasagawa, Keiko

Hosokawa, Shuhei

Niita, Chie

Ueda, Manabu

Nagato, Yohei

Itakura, Fumiaki

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Freizeitsoziologie, Konsumsoziologie, Alltagssoziologie, Populärkultur
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgeschichte
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Populärkultur
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Radio

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction / Michael Raine and Johan Nordström

1. A Genealogy of kouta eiga: Silent Moving Pictures with Sound / Sasagawa Keiko

2. Katsutaro's Trilogy: Popular Song and Film in the Transitional Era from Silent Film to the Talkie / Hosokawa Shuhei

3. Japanese Cinema and the Radio: The Sound Space of Unseen Cinema / Niita Chie

4. Architecture of Sound: The Modernization of Cinematic Space in Japan / Ueda Manabu

5. 'No Interpreter, Full Volume': the Benshi and the Sound Transition in 1930s Japan / Michael Raine

6. The Image of the Modern Talkie Film Studio: Aesthetics and Technology at P.C.L. / Johan Nordström

7. The Dawn of the Talkies in Japan: Mizoguchi Kenji's Hometown / Nagato Yohei

8. The Early talkie frame in Japanese cinema / Itakura Fumiaki

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Nordström, Johan
Johan Nordström is Lecturer at the Department of Global Education, Tsuru University. He has written on various aspects of the Japanese cinema’s transition to sound, and is currently working on a book on Tokyo based early sound film studio P.C.L., later Toho.

Raine, Michael
Michael Raine is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Western University, Canada. He has written widely on Japanese cinema, with an emphasis on the transition to sound, wartime image culture, and the Japanese New Wave.