The Russian Kurosawa
Transnational Cinema, or the Art of Speaking Differently
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:3rd May '23
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The Russian Kurosawa offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in postwar debates on cultural and political reconstruction.
Film studies is awash with books on renown Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, but Olga Solovieva manages to deliver a dazzling and genre-defying monograph on the household name that is unlike any other. The Russian Kurosawa weaves together an epic of Russian literature and comparative, Japanese history and Slavic, film history and theory. Like the brilliant tableaus in Kurosawa's Russianmade Dersu Uzala (the director's only non-Japanese film), Solovieva's prose immerses the reader in an arresting tale of the political turmoil that surrounded the production of Kurosawa's filmography. * The Russian Review *
Solovieva, a comparative literature specialist..., analyses Kurosawa's obsession with Russia, evident in several films, his autobiography and many comments made over the years. The Russia that entranced Kurosawa was not the expansionary state that fought a brutal war with Japan in 1904-05, let alone the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin. It was not a place at all, but a humane literary culture constructed by a remarkable series of writers and thinkers. ... Solovieva is a highly creative interpreter of Kurosawa's work, ... her thorough knowledge of the source material sheds valuable new light on Kurosawa's choices. * Asia Nikkei *
Solovieva, a comparative literature specialist..., analyses Kurosawa's obsession with Russia, evident in several films, his autobiography and many comments made over the years. The Russia that entranced Kurosawa was not the expansionary state that fought a brutal war with Japan in 1904-05, let alone the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin. It was not a place at all, but a humane literary culture constructed by a remarkable series of writers and thinkers. ... Solovieva is a highly creative interpreter of Kurosawa's work, ... her thorough knowledge of the source material sheds valuable new light on Kurosawa's choices. * Asia Nikkei *
ISBN: 9780192866004
Dimensions: 26mm x 164mm x 241mm
Weight: 776g
368 pages