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Rashomon Effects: a new Kurosawa book to be published

Routledge
There is a new Akira Kurosawa book coming our way sometime towards the end of this year. Titled Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies, it is a collection of essays and articles put together by editors Blair Davis, Robert Anderson and Jan Walls. The book will be published as part of Routledge’s Advances in Film Studies series.

Routledge’s decription of the book follows:

Akira Kurosawa is arguably known as the director who opened up Japanese film to Western audiences, and following his death in 1998, a process of reflection has begun about his life’s work as a whole and its legacy to cinema. Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon has become one of the best-known Japanese films ever made, and continues to be discussed and imitated more than 60 years after its first screening.

This book examines the cultural and aesthetic impacts of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, as well as the director’s larger legacies to cinema, its global audiences and beyond. It demonstrates that these legacies are manifold: not only cinematic and artistic, but also cultural and cognitive. The book moves from an examination of one filmmaker and his immediate social context in Japan, and goes on to explore how an artist’s ideas might transcend their cultural origins to ultimately provide global influences. Discussing how Rashomon‘s effects began to multiply with the film being re-imagined and repurposed in numerous media forms in the decades that followed its initial release, the book also shows that the film and its ideas have been applied to a wider range of social and cultural phenomena in a variety of institutional contexts. It addresses issues beyond the realm of Rashomon within film studies, extending to the Rashomon effect, which itself has become a widely recognized English term referring to the significantly different interpretations of different eyewitnesses to the same dramatic event.

As the first book on Rashomon since Donald Richie’s 1987 anthology, it will be invaluable to students and scholars of film studies, film history, Japanese cinema and communication studies. It will also resonate more broadly with those interested in Japanese culture and society, anthropology and philosophy.

Routledge has also made the book’s contents list available. While many of the essays and articles included in Rashomon Effects have been published earlier in other publications, there appears to be a number of new writings as well, the titles of which make the book quite promising.

  1. Introduction (Blair Davis, Robert Anderson, Jan Walls)
  2. From Konjaku and Bierce to Akutagawa to Kurosawa: Ripples and the Evolution of Rashomon (Jan Walls)
  3. ‘Smiled on by Lady Luck: Rashomon’ (Teruyo Nogami)
  4. The Production History of Rashomon (Donald Richie)
  5. Rashomon Perceived – The Challenge of Forging a Transnationally Shared View of Kurosawa’s Legacy (Andrew Horvat)
  6. Rashomon as a Twelfth Century Period Picture and Occupation Period Social Critique (Janice Matsumura)
  7. What is the Rashomon Effect? (Robert Anderson)
  8. The Rashomon Effect: Considerations of Existential Anthropology (Nur Yalman)
  9. Screening Truths: Rashomon and Cinematic Negotiation (Blair Davis & Jef Burnham)
  10. Reflections on Rashomon, Kurosawa and the Japanese Audience (Donald Richie)
  11. Kurosawa’s International Legacy (Stephen Prince)
  12. Dialogue on Kurosawa: Nationality, Technique, Life Work (Donald Richie and Stephen Prince)
  13. Conclusion: Ripples and Effects (Robert Anderson, Blair Davis & Jan Walls)

The book is 224 pages and is currently scheduled for a November 2015 publication. No cover image has yet been made available.

As for the book’s three editors, Blair Davis is an Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies in the College of Communication at DePaul University in Chicago, USA, and the author of several books on film and graphic novels. Robert Anderson is a Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Jan Walls is a Professor Emeritus in the Humanities Department at Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies is already available for pre-order from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Routledge, and many other places.

For information about books currently available in English about Akira Kurosawa and his works, see the section on Kurosawa books.


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