The first female gaze at postwar Japanese women : Tanaka Kinuyo film director
González-López, Irene and Mayu, A. (2018) The first female gaze at postwar Japanese women : Tanaka Kinuyo film director. In: González-López, Irene and Smith, M. (eds.) Tanaka Kinuyo : nation, stardom and female subjectivity. Edinburgh Studies in East Asian Film. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9781474409698.
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Abstract
The chapter focuses on the production and reception of Love Letter (Koibumi, 1953) and The Moon Has Risen (Tsuki wa noborinu, 1955) –the first two films directed by Tanaka—to call into question the meaning and construction of the category of ‘woman director’. The chapter is divided in three parts. The first contextualises Tanaka’s decision to become a director within the post-war legal and social changes affecting women, illuminating how she positioned herself within trending discourses. The second offers a textual analysis of the representation of gender roles and power dynamics in both films to question whether Tanaka was offering new perspectives on the subject. The last part illuminates how the figure of ‘woman director’ was being defined, contextualised and negotiated in the public sphere by a detailed analysis of promotional material and reviews from the contemporaneous Japanese press.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | Book synopsis: Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka’s career spanned the industrial development of cinema – from silent to sound, monochrome to colour. Alongside featuring in films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and Kurosawa, Tanaka was also the only Japanese woman filmmaker between 1953 and 1962, and her films tackled distinctly feminine topics such as prostitution and breast cancer. Her career overlapped with a transformative period in Japanese history, and this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives, subjectivities and modes of analysis for the classical era of Japanese cinema. |
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Japanese Cinema, Gender and Film, Stardom, Female authorship |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication |
| Depositing User: | Irene Gonzalez Lopez |
| Date Deposited: | 08 Mar 2022 14:04 |
| Last Modified: | 22 Nov 2023 18:08 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/46122 |
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