Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in a Global Frame

by Naoki Yamamoto

Dialectics without Synthesis  explores Japan’s active but previously unrecognized participation in the global circulation of film theory during the first half of the twentieth century. Examining a variety of Japanese theorists working in the fields of film, literature, avant-garde art, Marxism, and philosophy, Naoki Yamamoto offers a new approach to cinematic realism as culturally conditioned articulations of the shifting relationship of film to the experience of modernity. In this study, long-held oppositions between realism and modernism, universalism and particularism, and most notably, the West and the non-West are challenged through a radical reconfiguration of the geopolitics of knowledge production and consumption.

248 pages, Paperback

Published August 25, 2020

About the author

Naoki Yamamoto ( 山本直樹 Yamamoto Naoki) is a male Japanese manga artist. In his early years, he also used a pen name Tou Moriyama (森山 塔?) as well as Mori Touyama (塔山 森?) for his adult-oriented works, but nowadays he no longer uses it.