"The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai" at Pole Pole

[Jim Harper]

I don't know if that's what you're referring to Aaron, but much of the material in the recent Edinburgh University book on Japanese horror falls firmly into the latter category. It's hard to find any enthusiasm for the films being discussed in many of the essays, a common symptom of works that heavily favour the analytical approach.
   
  I think it's definitely possible to find a path between the two extremes, although I suspect my own work leans a little too closely to your first category. Books on Japanese horror are still pretty scarce, but I think Pete Tombs' 'Mondo Macabro' manages to successfully combine both approaches; it's just a shame that he wasn't able to devote an entire book to the subject! 
   
  Jim Harper. 

Aaron Gerow <gerowaaron at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
  This is still a problem with studies of Japanese film genres like 
anime, horror or action: the tendency to still use rather old notions 
of film art and auteurism to look at genre films, thus ignoring the 
entire problem of popular genre. Then there's the problem that those 
who avoid that trap tend to fall into another one: studying genre film 
through a purely reductionist model that reduces every film to some 
socio-political or psycho-cultural pattern, thus utterly ignoring 
what's particularly cinematic about them (much written on recent 
Japanese horror film falls into this trap). How do we weave our way 
between these two traps?
  



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