textbooks, Kansai videos

[Joel Cohn]

Greetings KineJapan people-

I am a professor of Japanese language and literature at the University of
Hawaii at Manoa, serving this year as Resident Director of the
Konan-Illinois undergraduate Year-in-Japan program at Konan University in
Kobe.  Due to circumstances partly under my control, I am scheduled to
teach a Japan Film course here in the spring semester.  I have already
learned a great deal from this list, and have been very impressed with the
knowledge and enthusiasm of its contributors.  I now hope to pick your
collective brain on two subjects:

!.  Does anybody have any recommendations (or warnings) on general
introductory texts giving undergrads a grounding in basic film literacy?  I
remember being impressed with Stephenson and Debrix's _The Cinema as Art_ 
and, to a lesser extent, Montagu's _Film World_ back in the antediluvian
days when I took an undergraduate film course myself, but I assume that
they are both long out of print, and the field has, of course, moved on
since then.  Is there currently anything out there better/ cheaper/less
elaborate than Monaco's _How to Read a Film_?

2.  Konan has a number of videos of standard/classic Japanese films, but
not quite enough to fill out a semester.  Does anybody know of anyplace in
the Kansai area where course-worthy videos with English subtitles can be
bought or rented?

By the way, in case anybody is interested in such things, I published a
study of the fictional sources of _Sanju^ro^_  a while back in W.
Burgwinkle et al, eds., _Significant Others: Gender and Culture in Film and
Literature East and West_ (1993).  An expanded version is supposed to be
published in _Literature/Film Quarterly_, presumably sometime in this
millennium.  I have often wondered what else is out there on the connection
between Kurosawa and Yamamoto Shu^goro^, the popular but critically
disregarded writer whose works figure as sources for a number of Kurosawa
(and other?) films.

Thank you and yoroshiku,
Joel Cohn

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Joel R. Cohn,  Associate Director
Konan International Exchange Center (KIEC)
Konan University
8-9-1 Okamoto, Higashinada-ku, Kobe 658  JAPAN
phone: (078) 411-6221  <81-78-411-6221 from outside Japan>
fax: (078) 435-2557      <81-78-435-2557 from outside Japan>
e-mail:  joelcohn at center.konan-u.ac.jp
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