Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book

Title The culture of the sound image in prewar Japan / edited by Michael Raine and Johan Nordström
Published Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, [2020]
©2020

Copies

Description 1 online resource (227 pages) : illustrations
Contents Introduction / Michael Raine and Johan Nordström -- 1. A Genealogy of Kouta eiga: Silent Moving Pictures with Sound / Sasagawa Keiko -- 2. Katsutarō'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, translated by Michael Raine -- 8. The Early talkie frame in Japanese cinema / Itakura Fumiaki
Summary 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
Analysis Media history, transition to sound, cultural history, sound culture
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes In English
Print version record
Subject Motion pictures -- Japan -- History and criticism
Sound in motion pictures.
Motion picture music -- Japan
Film, TV and radio.
Film theory and criticism.
Music recording and reproduction.
Social and cultural history.
PERFORMING ARTS -- Film & Video -- History & Criticism.
Motion picture music
Motion pictures
Sound in motion pictures
Japan
Genre/Form essays.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Essays
Essays.
Essais.
Form Electronic book
Author Raine, Michael (Associate professor of film studies), editor.
Nordström, Johan (Lecturer on Japanese film industry), editor.
ISBN 9789048525669
9048525667