Voices From the Japanese Cinema

by Joan Mellen

One of the world's great cinemas has remained largely unexplored in Western books. What emerges from this one is in fact the first inside view of Japanese films, directors, and artists published in English. Among the great directors whose views are presented here are Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Koayashi, and the great master, Akira Kurosawa.

Also included, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Nagisa Oshima, Susumu Hani, Shuji Terayama, and others.

Genres: Film, Japan

295 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Joan Mellen is the bestselling author of twenty books, including A Farewell to Justice, her biographical study of Jim Garrison s New Orleans investigation of the Kennedy assassination. She has written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Baltimore Sun. Mellen is a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.

(from http://www.booksandbooks.com/book/978...)

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great book of interviews which is very heavy on film criticism and theory, but not so much on the technical and anecdotal side of film.

Was expecting a little more from this book, but overall a good journey deep into classic Japanese cinema. Perhaps it's not as much about the filmmaking side of Japanese Cinema, but about the ideology behind and within it.

I had heard about the while reading Stephen Prince's book on Kobayashi, A Dream of Resistance. Primarily, I wanted to track it down because I was particularly interested in those Japanese Filmmakers who curiously don't have many (or any) books written about them or formally published interviews. Particularly Shindo, Ichikawa but especially Teshigahara and Shinoda.

The book opens with very thorough and captivating introductory essay about Japanese culture after World War 2 and how it shaped ideas, art and cinema throughout the 50s and 60s. This may actually be the best summary I've read about Post-War Japan and the impact on Cinema.

What follows is a collection of interviews with several members of the Japanese film industry. Not just a handful of directors, but Mellen also speaks with an actress, writers, a cinematographer, a production designer and even a well known patron of the cinema, Mme. Kashiko Kawakita.

I'll be honest, I was mostly interested in the interviews with directors who's films I'd seen or at least heard of before. Sadly, even these interviews kind of left me wanting more.

I think the biggest issue I had with the interviews has way more to do with my personal tastes as opposed to the writing itself. You can tell that Mellen is very intelligent and a great writer, and possibly one of the best critical minds in her field. What happens then, is that these interviews become highly critical pieces, and maybe overly intellectual. They're not really interviews, but a conversation (or debate) about ideas between Mellen and her subjects. The conversations all seem to be primarily focused on the filmmakers social and political views, thoughts on Freud and Marx (I think they are mentioned in every interview), and how all of this either shapes their art or how it is expressed in their art.

This may sound ideal to people who are interested in studying, reading or even writing film criticism and theory on a deeper level. You can tell that it's an important conversation that's happening in each interview. I'm also certainly not opposed to reading the filmmaker's thoughts on the world around them. I just would have found it more insightful, and enjoyable, to have it balanced out with some technical and even anecdotal questions. It almost seems like you need a filmmaker/fan asking some of these questions to maintain this balance, like Bogdanovich does in Who the Devil Made it.

It was an easy enough read that I was able to find some nuggets in here to round out my knowledge and interest in those filmmakers who are among my favorites. I particularly loved the interview with Shinoda, who I'm fascinated with. Kurosawa and Kobayashi are profiled, and make for interesting reads, but they've been profiled so much that none of it seemed new to me.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading Joan Mellen’s seminal Voices From The Japanese Cinema, out-of-print published in 1975 and based on interviews from 1974. Audie Bock used several quotations from this book in her fascinating study, Japanese Film Directors. The big difference between the books lies in the fact that Mellen wrote an introduction about each figure and then provided the interview that she had with each subject. Mellen has definite opinions each subject’s body of work and makes a point of singling out which works are most worthwhile, which I found very useful. In addition, the subjects weren’t just directors, although most of them were film directors-she also included some like Kashio Kawakita-a foreign film promoter, set designer Setsu Asakura, and the actress Sachiko Hidari. I think that these conversations were shaped by Mellen’s insight and knowledge of Japanese cinema and her political consciousness. She asked her subjects about serious issues like the legacy of feudalism and totalitarianism, women’s rights, and seminal westerns influences on Japanese culture from the likes of Marx and Freud, as well as the rising interest in sex in contemporary film in Japan at that time. Mellen interviews several of the most famous directors like Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Shinoda, Imamura, Oshima, etc. However, there were several directors have been introduced to me for the first time and seem intriguing by her descriptions of their works and the comments they made in their interviews. Some of these figures are Daisuke Ito (who made jidai-geki films), Kaneto Shindo (a script writer and known for typically tragic family films), Susumu Hani and Tadashi Imai (know for realistic and sentimental films). I found this book to be extremely useful and thought provoking look at Japanese cinema from the 40s to the early 70s. I found her style lively and engaging and order her short book length study on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. I see that she has also written several books on a variety of subjects including one on the film The Battle of Algiers.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know too much about the author Joan Mellen, but she put together a series of interviews with all the current Japanese directors at the time of this book being published (early 70's). So it covers Ozu to Oshima and it's a fascinating snapshot of one of my favorite cultural areas of the world.