During the 1960s and early 1970s, Japanese avant-garde filmmakers intensely explored the shifting role of the image in political activism and media events. Known as the "season of politics," the era was filled with widely covered dramatic events from hijackings and hostage crises to student protests. This season of politics was, Yuriko Furuhata argues, the season of image politics. Well-known directors, including Oshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Wakamatsu Kōji, and Adachi Masao, appropriated the sensationalized media coverage of current events, turning news stories into material for timely critique and intermedial experimentation. Cinema of Actuality analyzes Japanese avant-garde filmmakers' struggle to radicalize cinema in light of the intensifying politics of spectacle and a rapidly changing media environment, one that was increasingly dominated by television. Furuhata demonstrates how avant-garde filmmaking intersected with media history, and how sophisticated debates about film theory emerged out of dialogues with photography, television, and other visual arts.

The decade of the 1960s encompassed a "New Wave" of films whose makers were rebels, challenging cinematic traditions and the culture at large. The films of the New Wave in Japan have, until now, been largely overlooked. Eros plus Massacre (taking its title from a 1969 Yoshida Yoshishige film) is the first major study devoted to the examination and explanation of Japanese New Wave film. Desser organizes his volume around the defining motifs of the New Wave. Chapters examine in depth such themes as youth, identity, sexuality, and women, as they are revealed in the Japanese film of the sixties. Desser's research in Japanese film archives, his interviews with major figures of the movement, and his keen insight into Japanese culture combine to offer a solid and balanced analysis of films by Oshima, Shinoda, Imamura, Yoshida, Suzuki, and others.

Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is the first book to collect manifestoes from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focusing equally on political and aesthetic manifestoes, Scott MacKenzie uncovers a neglected, yet nevertheless central history of the cinema, exploring a series of documents that postulate ways in which to re-imagine the cinema and, in the process, re-imagine the world. This volume collects the major European “waves” and figures (Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bergman, Free Cinema, Oberhausen, Dogme ‘95); Latin American Third Cinemas (Birri, Sanjinés, Espinosa, Solanas); radical art and the avant-garde (Buñuel, Brakhage, Deren, Mekas, Ono, Sanborn); and world cinemas (Iimura, Makhmalbaf, Sembene, Sen). It also contains previously untranslated manifestos co-written by figures including Bollaín, Debord, Hermosillo, Isou, Kieslowski, Painlevé, Straub, and many others. Thematic sections address documentary cinema, aesthetics, feminist and queer film cultures, pornography, film archives, Hollywood, and film and digital media. Also included are texts traditionally left out of the film manifestos canon, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI's Vigilanti Cura, which nevertheless played a central role in film culture.

Written by experts in the field, this dictionary covers all aspects of film studies, including terms, concepts, debates, and movements in film theory and criticism, national, international and transnational cinemas, film history, film movements and genres, film industry organizations and practices, and key technical terms and concepts in 500 detailed entries. Most entries also feature recommendations for further reading and a large number also have web links. The web links are listed and regularly updated on a companion website that complements the printed book. The dictionary is international in its approach, covering national cinemas, genres, and film movements from around the world such as the Nouvelle Vague, Latin American cinema, the Latsploitation film, Bollywood, Yiddish cinema, the spaghetti western, and World cinema. The most up-to-date dictionary of its kind available, this is a must-have for all students of film studies and ancillary subjects, as well as an informative read for cinephiles and for anyone with an interest in films and film criticism.

In The End of Japanese Cinema Alexander Zahlten moves film theory beyond the confines of film itself, attending to the emergence of new kinds of aesthetics, politics, temporalities, and understandings of film and media. He traces the evolution of a new media ecology through deep historical analyses of the Japanese film industry from the 1960s to the 2000s. Zahlten focuses on three popular industrial genres: Pink Film (independently distributed softcore pornographic films), Kadokawa (big-budget productions as part of a transmedia strategy), and V-Cinema (direct-to-video films). He examines the conditions of these films' production to demonstrate how the media industry itself becomes part of the politics of the media text and to highlight the complex negotiation between media and politics, culture, and identity in Japan. Zahlten points to a different history of film, one in which a once-powerful film industry transformed into becoming only one component within a complex media-mix ecology. In so doing, Zahlten opens new paths for uncovering similar broad processes in other large media societies. A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

DIVRelates the history of Japanese film to the history of the capitalist transformation of Japan./div

Since the death of his wife seven years ago, documentary maker Aoyama has not dated anyone else. Now even his teenage son, Shige, thinks that he should remarry and his best friend Yoshikawa comes up with a plan: to hold fake film auditions from which, he can choose a new bride. Of the thousands who apply, it is a beautiful ballerina, Yamasaki Asami, who captivates Aoyama. Infatuated by her fragile nature and nervous smile, he ignores his increasing sense of unease, putting aside his doubts about his new love, until it may be too late... In Audition, Ryu Murakami delivers his most subtly disturbing novel yet, confirming him as Japan's master of the psycho-thriller.