Books in the Edinburgh Studies in East Asian Film series

The first comprehensive collection on the subject of Hong Kong neo-noir cinema, this book examines the way Hong Kong has developed its own unique and culturally specific version of the neo-noir genre, while at the same time drawing on and adapting existing international noir cinemas.

This book offers a new interpretation of Ozu Yasujiro career, from his earliest work in the 1920s up to his death in 1963, focusing on Ozu's depiction of the everyday life and experiences of ordinary Japanese people during a time of depression, war and economic resurgence.

This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Her career overlapped with a transformative period in Japanese history, and this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives, subjectivities and modes of analysis for the classical era of Japanese cinema.

By giving shape to Imamura Shohei's career, this collection positions him as a stylistic innovator as well as an ethnographic investigator into Japanese culture and tradition; the preeminent examiner of the hidden, barely repressed underpinnings of Japanese society.

Examines how the Chinese Reform Era is contrusted and felt in the films of Jia Zhangke, using the concept of structures of feeling

This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Her career overlapped with a transformative period in Japanese history, and this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives, subjectivities and modes of analysis for the classical era of Japanese cinema.

By giving shape to Imamura Shohei's career, this collection positions him as a stylistic innovator as well as an ethnographic investigator into Japanese culture and tradition; the preeminent examiner of the hidden, barely repressed underpinnings of Japanese society.

This book focuses on how the 'Reform Era' has been constructed in the work of the director Jia Zhangke, analysing the archetypal class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual and entrepreneur that are found in his films.

There has been an explosion in Chinese independent documentary making since the turn of the twenty-first century. How are we to understand this vibrant burst of activity? Are these films brave expressions of dissidence? Or a more complex attempt to expand the terms of public discourse in the People's Republic? This timely study is based on detailed interviews with Chinese documentary makers rarely available in English, and insights gained by the author while working as a journalist in Beijing. It considers the relationship between independent documentaries and China's official film and television sectors, exploring the ways in which independent films probe, question and challenge the dominant ideas and narratives circulating in the state-sanctioned public sphere. Detailed analyses of key contemporary documentaries reveal a sustained attempt to forge an alternative public sphere where the views and experiences of petitioners, AIDS sufferers, dispossessed farmers and the victims of Mao's repression can be publicly aired for a small, but steadily growing, public.

Eclipsed Cinema explores the under-investigated aspects of colonial film culture such as the representational politics of colonial cinema, the film unit of the colonial government, the social reception of Hollywood cinema in relation to emerging Korean nationalism, Japanese settlers'film culture, and gendered film spectatorship.