The Aesthetics of Shadow

The Aesthetics of Shadow is sophisticated and superbly researched, breaking new ground with the richness of its historical detail. Daisuke Miyao's innovative approach opens up the field beyond the usual focus on genre, stars, and key authors. It will serve as an example for the writing of histories outside of Japanese cinema. -Frances Guerin, author of A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany The Aesthetics of Shadow tracks through Japanese film history with an eye on the cultural and technological underpinnings of aesthetic change. Many people have written on the aesthetic transformations of Japanese film in the first half of the twentieth century, but no one has done it with such close attention to the material basis of cinema. It is a refreshingly new approach to Japanese history. Daisuke Miyao delivers a lively and fascinating account of cinematography in the first half century of Japanese cinema. -Abe Mark Nornes, author of Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary Film-history texts can often be dull, lack real insight beyond a litany of factual information, and plod along to foregone conclusions, structured as simply a lecture, where content overrides form. Daisuke Miyao's The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema isn't only an exception to these rules, but establishes a benchmark for which contemporary film-history research should aim...[H]e achieves this, at least in part, by structuring his scholarship as more of a thriller, than merely the standard (and soporific) fact-upon-fact approach. -- Clayton Dillard Slant Magazine The book is grounded by exhaustive research; Miyao captures the debates surrounding shifts in lighting trends impeccably, ... [it has an] interdisciplinary applicability to the fields of film, cultural studies and art history. The work articulates such a detailed understanding of cinematography and lighting practices that it would also be of great interest to cinematographers and related film practitioners. -- Jessica Balanzategui Media International Australia In conclusion, the central thesis of this book problematizes much of what has been published in English on early Japanese cinema to date. As such, the work is a welcome addition to existing studies by Joanne Bernardi, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, and Aaron Gerow. -- Isolde Standish Journal of Japanese Studies This is a solid work, creating an insightful and persuasive argument for the relationship between a particular aesthetic and a particular ideological environment. -- Timothy Iles Pacific Affairs [Miyao] provides an... abundance of detail, but the overall approach is revelatory, culminating in a chapter about Japan's most celebrated cinematographer, Miyagawa Kazuo... -- Jasper Sharp Sight & Sound The Aesthetics of Shadow is an important contribution to the scholarship on cinema and modernity in Japan... Anyone with a basic knowledge of Japanese film history will find the book accessible, but specialists in particular will welcome this study as an important and comprehensive new reference, especially as it pertains to Shochiku and Toho. -- Diane Wei Lewis Monumenta Nipponica