Description
Book SynopsisDialectics without Synthesisexplores Japan's active but previously unrecognized participation in the global circulation of film theory during the first half of the twentieth century. Examining a variety of Japanese theorists working in the fields of film, literature, avant-garde art, Marxism, and philosophy, Naoki Yamamoto offers a new approach to cinematic realism as culturally conditioned articulations of the shifting relationship of film to the experience of modernity. In this study, long-held oppositions between realism and modernism, universalism and particularism, and most notably, the West and the non-West are challenged through a radical reconfiguration of the geopolitics of knowledge production and consumption.
Trade Review"Dialectics without Synthesis is a valuable addition to film studies and should be of interest not only to Japanese film specialists but to film and media theorists more broadly."
* The Journal of Japanese Studies *
"Exceptionally meticulous archival research, humanity-driven methodologies, and special attention to historical context. . . .
Dialectics without Synthesis is a step forward toward a future in which the chasm between Western and non-Western theory is significantly narrowed." * The Velvet Light Trap *
"Well-researched and persuasively argued." * Screen *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Realism, Film Theory, Japanese Cinema
1. Naturalism and the Modernization of Japanese Cinema
2. The Machine Aesthetic and Proletarian Realism
3. Literary Adaptation and Textual Realism
4. Documentary Film and Epistemological Realism
5. Neglected Traditions of Bergsonism and Phenomenology
Epilogue: Hanada Kiyoteru and Postwar Debates
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
