The Benshi's New Face (From Old)

I've been meaning for sometime to add some of my old articles to the site, but have not gotten around to it (sorry!). But I was searching around on the internet for something else and found that one of my first published articles is available online. I have added it to the Internet Articles section. 

The piece is called "The Benshi's New Face: Defining Cinema in Taisho Japan" and it was published in 1994, when I was still a doctoral student. It considers how discourses attempting to define cinematic institutions such as the benshi served not only to articulate the medium, but also to enmesh cinematic practices in the operations of power. It is a foundational article for the thinking that leads up to my book on early Japanese film culture, but it was published in journal with limited circulation, so it is not well known. Iconics is the international edition of the journal of the Nihon Eizo Gakkai (Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences), the main academic society in Japan that includes the study of cinema. I was later editor of that journal, as well as a managing director (jonin riji) of the JASIAS. 

Some of the articles from Iconics are now available online through CiNii, the Scholarly and Academic Information Navigator of Japan's National Institute of Informatics. You can look for other articles in this interesting journal, or use CiNii to search Japanese journals and libraries. It's a valuable resource.

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