Ozu's Anti-Cinema

[Mark Nornes]

Announcing a New Book on Ozu Yasujiro
translated by Kyoko Hirano and Daisuke Miyao

Yoshida Kiju's

Ozu's Anti-Cinema


?A rare opportunity to read a distinguished auteur discussing the work 
of a truly exceptional film artist with discerning eyes and feelings of 
affection. Yoshida Kiju?s book is permeated with a sense of sorrow, 
respect, and above all love for Ozu, who simultaneously believed in 
cinema?s possibility as an art form and revealed its fundamental 
fragility.?
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto
Associate Professor of East Asian Studies
New York University

?Yoshida Kiju?s book on Ozu Yasujiro, a colleague and mentor of 
Yoshida?s at Shochiku Studios, is rich in originality, genuinely 
challenging, and full of restrained emotions.?
Hasumi Shigehiko
Film Critic

Yoshida starts his award-winning Ozu?s Anti-Cinema with a story about 
his trip to Ozu?s deathbed. Yoshida writes that a dying Ozu whispered 
to him twice, as if speaking to himself, ?Cinema is drama, not 
accident.?  These cryptic last words troubled Yoshida for decades, and 
throughout this book he examines Ozu?s films and tries to uncover what 
Ozu really meant. The book?s main discussion concerns Ozu?s films, but 
it is also Yoshida?s manifesto on films and filmmaking. In other words, 
this book is Yoshida?s personal journey into Ozu?s thoughts on 
filmmaking and, simultaneously, into his own thoughts on the nature of 
cinema. Every page displays the sensibility of one artist discussing 
another?this is probably a book that only a filmmaker could write. 
Within Yoshida?s luminous prose lies a finely tuned, rigorous analysis 
of Ozu?s films, which have rarely been engaged as closely and 
personally as here.

Yoshida Kiju, a key filmmaker of the Shochiku New Wave cinema, entered 
Shochiku Studios as an assistant director. He worked primarily for 
director Kinoshita Keisuke, but he also found himself in close 
proximity to Ozu Yasujiro. Yoshida started directing films in 1960 and 
went independent in the mid-1960s. Over the years he has made many 
films and television documentaries. His most celebrated film is Eros 
Plus Massacre (1969).

Daisuke Miyao is a Postdoctoral Fellow in East Asian Studies at 
Columbia University and a contributor to the Japanese film magazine, 
Kinema Jumpo.  Miyao received his Ph.D degree in Cinema Studies from 
New York University. He has published widely, and he is currently 
working on a book on Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa and his silent 
stardom.

Kyoko Hirano is Director of the Film Center of the Japan Society, New 
York City.  After studying film at the University of Tokyo and the 
University of Belgrade, she finished her Ph.D. at New York University. 
For her publications and her work on introducing Japanese cinema to the 
United States, she has won the Japan Film Pen Club Award and the 
Kawakita Award.

Center for Japanese Studies Press
The University of Michigan
202 S. Thayer St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608

Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies
CLOTH: ISBN 1-929280-26-2, $55.00
PAPER: ISBN 1-929280-27-0, $22.00
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