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The Russian Kurosawa
Transnational Cinema, or the Art of Speaking Differently
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Book Presentation:
• Provides a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa
• Discusses the Russian-Japanese cultural movement
The Russian Kurosawa offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in postwar debates on cultural and political reconstruction.
About the Author:
Olga V. Solovieva, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago Olga V. Solovieva studied at the Moscow State University, Freie Universität Berlin, and Yale and currently teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Christ's Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Japan's Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm (Cambria Press, 2021).
Press Reviews:
"Film studies is awash with books on renown Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, but Olga Solovieva manages to deliver a dazzling and genre-defying monograph on the household name that is unlike any other. The Russian Kurosawa weaves together an epic of Russian literature and comparative, Japanese history and Slavic, film history and theory. Like the brilliant tableaus in Kurosawa's Russianmade Dersu Uzala (the director's only non-Japanese film), Solovieva's prose immerses the reader in an arresting tale of the political turmoil that surrounded the production of Kurosawa's filmography." - Anna Tropnikova, The Russian Review
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
See the complete filmography of Akira Kurosawa on the website: IMDB ...
> On a related topic:
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Art and the Human Experience
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Subject: Director > Akira Kurosawa
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Kurosawa, Rashomon and their legacies
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Ishiro Honda (2023)
A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa
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Subject: Director > Ishirô Honda
Negative, Nonsensical, and Non-conformist (2023)
The Films of Suzuki Seijun
Subject: Director > Suzuki Seijun
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