Books

The following are books that I authored or edited that have come out or are in press. I have other books in the works on 1990s Japanese cinema, Japanese film theory and other topics, so stay tuned for those.

Kitano Takeshi


id153_textmedium

Kitano Takeshi (BFI, 2007)

From the blurb:

“The award-winning art film Hana-Bi, the stoic gangster elegy Sonatine, the surfer romance A Scene at the Sea, the absurdist comedy Getting Any?, the entertainment samurai spectacle Zatoichi—very different films made under one name, Kitano Takeshi. Who is Kitano Takeshi?—an artistic auteur in the traditional sense or a new kind of star who manages multiple identities, strategically changing them from film to film and situation to situation? This book explores issues of auteurship and stardom in the films of Kitano Takeshi, especially as they relate to problems of personal and national identity in a Japan confronting an age of globalization. Aaron Gerow combines a detailed account of Japanese film and criticism with unique close analyses of Kitano's films from Violent Cop to Takeshis'.”

Donald Richie has written a very kind review in the Japan Times.

Bibliographic info and purchasing info at the Macmillan website

Support your local independent bookstore!


In Praise of Film Studies


makino_textmedium

In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of Makino Mamoru. Edited by Aaron Gerow and Abé Mark Nornes. (Kinema Club, 2001)

A unique and somewhat peculiar book collecting essays written in either English or Japanese in honor of Makino Mamoru, a Japanese film scholar and collector whose research and mentorship has helped so many of us movie researchers. It also contains translations of some of his representative articles on such topics as film censorship and left-wing film movements and a bibliography of his work.

More information, including the full text of the introduction, is available on the Trafford Publishing website.

You can also access the full text of the entire book on Google Books. 

A Page of Madness


page1_textmedium

A Page of Madness (Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, forthcoming in Fall 2008)

My long-awaited monograph on Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1926 silent masterpiece, an experimental work made with contributions by Nobel Prize winning novelist Kawabata Yasunari. The book features not only a detailed account of the film’s production circumstances, using documents heretofore unavailable, and a close analysis of the film, but also translations of contemporary reviews and the shooting notes for scenes missing from the existing print.

A colleague informs me that a DVD of the film will finally be released in 2009, so stay tuned for info on that as well.

Visions of Japanese Modernity


taishokan_textmedium

Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation and Spectatorship, 1895-1925. (temporary title; University of California Press, forthcoming in 2009).

Another long-awaited work that analyses how cinema was defined, debated and controlled during the first thirty years after its arrival in Japan. A Japanese version will be published by the University of Tokyo Press

Everything © Aaron Gerow. Send comments and suggestions to webmaster@aarongerow.com