Covert dissent in wartime cinema?

[Peter High]

Mark Nornes <amnornes at umich.edu> wrote:


> Has any scholar blessed with fluency in both languages thought of 
> producing a volume of selected translations of important articles 
> written about Japanese cinema by Japanese scholars?
>

Actually, there is one, but it's unpublished. I've never seen it, but 
Paul Schrader's brother translated a collection of Japanese criticism 
way back in, what?, the 1970s. I think the PFA in San Francisco has a 
copy.


 

--->That would be my good friend LEONARD Schrader who was nominated for an Oscar for his script version of "Kiss of the Spider Woman," wrote the scripts for Hasegawa Kazuo!s "The Man Who Stole the Sun" and a Tora-san film and  is currently head of the script-writing division of the American Film Institute. Leonard took up the task around 1970, selecting materials organized around a fairly wide selection of key directors (Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kinoshita Keisuke, etc.) Since he himself could not/cannot read Japanese, he had a friend and coleague at Doshisha Univertsity in Kyoto do the actual translation work for him Then he set about smoothing the language and perhaps even a bit of "tactical" re-writing with the purpose of making it accessible to as wide a range of readers as possible. In th very early seventies, considering the rather low level of aquaintance with Japanese source material at the time, such a practice was perfectly acceptable. With the passage of time and the emerge!
 nce of
 scholars able to deal with such source material in original, however, our criteria have probably changed. Needless to say it would be a great boon to have the work published and made widely available, but one would have to use it with a certain amount of trepidation . To paraphrase a Japanese phrase, there are a "couple of pillows" between his translation.and the Japanese original."  But do take a look. I'm sure you will find it quite worthwhile.
Peter


		
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