| architecture |
| calligraphy |
| ceramics |
| clothing |
| comics |
| gardens |
| lacquerwork |
| literature |
| movies |
| music |
| painting |
| poetry |
| sculpture |
| tea ceremony |
| television |
| theatre |
| weaponry |
| thematic routes |
| timeline |
| the site |
context: movies > sources
Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema by David Bordwell
When I embarked on the movies section, this was the single book I most wanted to read, thanks to the recommendation of a good friend and reading Bordwell's excellent blog. It's a large and demanding book, but I have enormous admiration for the range of thinking he shows, looking at studio practices and means of production, other directors' narrative styles when Ozu was starting out, ideas of Japaneseness and Zen aesthetics, Ozu's tastes and collaborators, the various kinds of changes through his career, and many other aspects, all with expert knowledge, care and intelligence. He's a 'post-theory' critic, I am told, and I guess that is what I want - someone who understands all the ideas that have come before and can deploy them, but isn't tied in to any of them. Elsewhere I complain about many aspects of books on Japanese arts, and the breadth of thinking and analysis Bordwell offers is a great example of what I am yearning for there. The ideas he outlines, mostly around narrational and shot strategies not related to story and theme, are backed up as well as in any critical book I've read, with hundreds of stills and sequences of stills from the films, plus solid data, like shot lengths and timings and so on. I confess that I found the second half hard going: 200 pages of analyses of his films. I haven't seen most of them, and there are only a few that I have seen recently or often enough to recall them fairly clearly. Nonetheless, I think this is probably the best book on movies I've ever read.