Voices from the Japanese Cinema

VOICES FROM THE JAPANESE CINEMA is one-of-a-kind. Author/interviewer Joan Mellen is largely unobtrusive, and what emerges through this expansive collection of interviews with a great many of the finest postwar Japanese filmmakers is something of a rambling history of Japanese cinema, touching upon numerous trends and movements, along with the wide range of global influences that crept in (Lubitsch, Disney, Antonioni, John Ford, Godard and Bresson all get mentioned more than once). Filmmakers included: Daisuke Ito, Akira Kurosawa, Kaneto Shindo, Tadashi Imai, Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Susumu Hani, Tochiro Narushima, Masahiro Shinoda, Nagisa Oshima and Shuji Terayama. Actress Sachiko Hidari, set designer Setsu Asakura and curator/distributor Mme. Kashiko Kawakita are also profiled and interviewed. Each of these interviews manage to be extremely interesting, though I would mention a few (notably Nagisa Oshima, Hiroshi Teshigahara and Kon Ichikawa) that make one want to track down the many individual films... As several of these creative individuals are either no longer with us, or are no longer active, Mellen's compendium stands as an essential piece of history, and many of the interviews cast a somewhat autumnal glance back at the golden ages of the first 50s discovery of Japanese cinema, and the new wave that quickly follwed in the 60s. Any cinephile should have a copy. -David Alston