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THE CINEMA OF GOSHO HEINOSUKE: LAUGHTER THROUGH TEARS PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Arthur Nolletti | 352 pages | 15 Apr 2005 | Indiana University Press | 9780253217257 | English | Bloomington, IN, United States Cinema: An International History Gosho and Shomin Comedy in the s, 2. Dancing Girl of Izu and the Junbungaku Movement, 3. Gosho in the s: Changing Times, Undiminished Mastery. As with other scholarly books-notes, a filmography, bibliography, and index. All in all, a great overview of Japanese film legend who has fallen into obscurity. Emil rated it liked it Feb 03, Matt Pike marked it as to-read Oct 10, Eadweard marked it as to-read Feb 24, Amar Baines marked it as to-read Jan 19, Exene Cervenka is currently reading it Mar 11, There are no discussion topics on this book yet. About Arthur Nolletti Jr. Arthur Nolletti Jr. Books by Arthur Nolletti Jr. Read more Trivia About The Cinema of Gos No trivia or quizzes yet. Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Publisher: Indiana University Press , This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. View all copies of this ISBN edition:. Synopsis About this title "The elegant, graceful, and deeply humanistic cinema of Gosho Heinosuke has found its perfect English-language explication in this equally elegant, graceful, and humanistic study by Arthur Nolletti. About the Author : Arthur Nolletti, Jr. Review : With this work Nolletti English, Framingham State College closes a gap in the anglophone literature on the history of Asian cinema. Create a Want. Other Popular Editions of the Same Title. Inhalt Gosho and Shomin Comedy in the s. Dancing Girl of Izu and the Junbungaku Movement. Blending the Shomingeki Shitamachi. Once More and Goshos Romanticism in. A New Kind of Shomingeki. Money Democracy. Adapting the Meijimono Reconfiguring. Observations on film art : Addio Bologna It is apparent that the reader is in capable and comprehensive hands; Nolletti has seen nearly every extant Gosho film, and knows them intimately. It sometimes feels as though no one gets it right but he. Gosho directed possibly more than films, and seems to have been very hit-or-miss throughout. It would seem all of the films of the s are lost, with only a fraction of those of the prolific s still surviving. In the case of his two grown daughters, the release of that burden means marrying them off, which gets accomplished early on in the film. For his young son, Kan-chan, who is probably about eight years old, the sentence will be much longer. The father considers the boy a failure and longs to be rid of him, making no secret about his feelings. Yes, there is laughter through tears here, but it seems to be our laughter in light of their tears. There are moments in the film that are so horrible that they make us laugh, but it is a sort of stunned laugh, barely empathetic. One parent excoriates the young boy, the other feels pity for him. This is clearly no way to grow up. It actually oozes that blend, and at times goes overboard with that tone of contrast, but generally keeps an even keel. In the film a young man named Seiichi has begun secretly dating a woman named Teruko, neglecting his studies and causing his concerned parents to become highly suspicious. His mother decides to invite over her brother, a married and childless man named Bunkichi, to come and talk some sense into Seiichi. The young man reveals to his uncle that he has been seeing Teruko and that she is now pregnant. The uncle makes the decision to take the fall for him, claiming that he had an affair with the woman whom he had never met up to that point , sacrificing his personal and professional life for the promising young man. The laughter and the tears are genuine and well-deserved in this film. Nolletti concludes about it:. Thus, Woman of the Mist is more than a character study or a melodrama or a shomin-geki drama. Indeed, the textures and feelings of daily life found in the shomin-geki echo into later works that could more easily be defined in terms of melodrama, psychological study, or historical picture. In the body of the book Nolletti devotes less than four pages to discussing Dispersing Clouds and then, partly used as a comparison to Elegy of the North , clearly considering it a minor work. In it a young girl from Tokyo named Masako, falls ill while on a trip to the countryside with her friends. They take her to a local inn where she is gradually nursed back to health by a kindly maid named Osen, along with the help of a country doctor, a young man who teaches her about the difficulties of living in a place with few modern amenities. She gets visited by her busy stepmother, with whom she clearly has some underlying tensions, and then by her yet busier father, but she seems in no hurry to return to the city. Getting to know the maid and the doctor, she finds that both also come from Tokyo originally, but have come to the countryside to escape from their painful pasts and to become immersed in a different and less hectic way of life. She goes with the doctor to a rural village where he wants to open a clinic for local children. In spite of Masako learning a lesson about caring for others in the village it is always apparent that she will eventually have to return to Tokyo. Avowedly auteurist as the book is, Nolletti says relatively little about cinematography. The bulk of the technical discussion concerning how the images form the narratives is dominated by editing, which is given such thoughtful and in- depth treatment as to more than make up for separate deficiencies. At times he tries to portray Gosho as an auteur with a vision that radically breaks with accepted norms, but never entirely follows through with the thought, always leaving it at the wayside. If not altogether radical, films from this period at least have relevance to call their own. Nolletti explains:. They compel us to care. If one wanted a better idea of what Gosho was like as a person, they may turn to his autobiography. But when does anyone read an autobiography to get a truthful perspective on a personality? Through the fog comes Elegy of the North , a sort of twisted Brief Encounter , representing an atypical take on romance straight out of Gosho Land. Two others about which he writes at some length are The Fireflies an attempt at a straightforward war drama and Yellow Crow a film that experiments with color to create a portrait of a troubled young boy. The heroine of the film, infinitely more complex than that of Dispersing Clouds , is unusual for any sort of film, she being deformed both physically and emotionally. Like Masako, she gets compared to the Mona Lisa and, like Masako, she is without her mother. She registers emotions, but we can visibly see how they come to her through a filter of cognitive distortion, all blunted to become disquietingly single-pointed. To Reiko, torturing other people is sport. She goes on dates with Katsuragi, a married man who, unable to understand her, settles for being possessed by her. He sketches pictures of Angkor Wat, a place he visited a long time ago, and which Reiko looks at with fascination. Meine Mediathek Hilfe Erweiterte Buchsuche. Indiana University Press Amazon. Arthur Nolletti. Inhalt Gosho and Shomin Comedy in the s. Dancing Girl of Izu and the Junbungaku Movement. Blending the Shomingeki Shitamachi. Once More and Goshos Romanticism in. A New Kind of Shomingeki. Money Democracy. Adapting the Meijimono Reconfiguring. New Challenges and the Quest to Create. Verify your identity We can start by asking how such features might contribute to a causal explanation. We might say that Japanese aesthetic traditions and Zen precepts simply pervade the culture, and as a Japanese Ozu is naturally drawing on them. But this dispositional explanation is inadequate. Not all Japanese directors fit the 'Zen aesthetics' case, so Ozu's living in Japanese society is not enough to cause its presence in his work. A causal explanation must specify why Ozu's work embodies these qualities more than other directors' works do. The logical step would be to posit an urge in Ozu to present these qualities in his films. This urge might be spontaneous and unreflective, or calculating and strategic. To prove either case, we would have Zeman might try to show that Ozu's early life gave him an unusual interest in the traditional arts, Schrader and Richie that he was a devout Buddhist or that he had a keen interest in Zen. Unfortunately, these critics adduce no such evidence. Indeed, I can find virtually nothing that would support an explanation of this type. As we have seen, Ozu's youth was consumed by a passion for Western culture. Apart from one remark about Japanese verse, which needs to be interpreted carefully see p. The widescreen frame reminds him not of emaki-mono, or scroll painting, but of toilet paper. And he once remarked of foreign critics: 'They don't understandthat's why they say it is Zen or something like that. In certain ways, they do. But I can spell out those ways only by showing that the very concepts 'Zen Buddhism' and 'Japanese aesthetics' need to be understood within particular historical contexts. Japanese Buddhism is not a unitary phenomenon. The variety of sects, the shifting relations between Buddhism and Confucianism, and Buddhism's mixture of otherworldly and purely pragmatic concerns have made it subject to periodic revision, often for immediate social ends.

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