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context: movies > sources
Reading A Japanese Film: Cinema In Context by Keiko I. McDonald
I guess if you are forced to read a book, it can afford to be completely boring. This is designed for some sort of Japanese Film 101 course, and if you know nothing about the subject and are made to read it, you will actually learn a little. Its selection is bizarre - 16 films are discussed, only 6 of them from before 1981. It includes two Kurosawas: Drunken Angel and Madadayo. We get Ozu and Mizoguchi, but no Ichikawa, Teshigahara, Oshima. Its observations are dull, its analyses predictable, but it is reasonably knowledgeable about how movies work and about Japanese culture, so I could see how it would work in a course. However, my confidence was rather dented when she got the plot of Seven Samurai wrong, and then said there were a dozen films about Musashi Miyamoto, when there are around fifty - given that she devotes a chapter to a trilogy about him, this suggests at best sloppy research. She's also 10 years out on his birth, meaning she claims he was fighting in wars from the age of six.