To the Close Observer: In Memory of Donald Richie

Updated February 27

Life in Japanese Film: Donald Richie from Berkeley Arts and Letters on FORA.tv

In this excerpt from The Story of Film, Mark Cousins, Donald Richie and Kyōko Kagawa discuss the life and films of the sublime Yasujiro Ozu.

What interests you about Donald Richie?
He's like my Uncle Boonmee. I think that he embodies a lot of memories about cinema, and if I work with him I almost have an excuse to research and get to know the generation of Kurosawa and Miziguchi, etc. He also lived through that time and saw the change of Japan, and I'd like to know that because it's such a fascinating country with great literature and cinema. I've only worked in Thailand, so if there's a country I want to step out and "know," it's Japan. [Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 'Interview', indieWire, May 17, 2011]

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear of the death, at the grand old age of 88, of the preeminent English-language scholar of Japanese cinema and culture Donald Richie.

Richie, author of more than thirty books (including Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character, A Lateral View, Travels in the East, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics, The Donald Richie Reader, and The Japan Journals)  was one of the must-reads of our generation but was also an experimental filmmaker of huge note, too -- see his 1968 film Five Philosophical Fables here for an example. This was one of the reasons why Apichatpong Weerasethakul (a filmmaker Richie considered to be "the new Kurosawa") was hoping to work with him - sadly, due to Donald Richie's ill health in recent years, it seems likely this intriguing collaboration did not take place.

Richie's work has featured many times over the years here at FSFF, so as well as celebrating the brilliant film studies content he produced, this blog also gives sincere thanks for his amazing scholarly generosity, placing much of his work online and in the public domain.

Key posthumous tributes to Donald Richie

• David Bordwell, 'Donald Richie', Observations on Film Art, February 25, 2013
• Peter Cowie, 'Remembering Donald Richie', Criterion Collection, February 22, 2013
• Kim Hendrickson, 'Donal Richie (1924-2013)', Criterion Collection, February 19, 2013
• Karen Severns, Donald Richie Tributes website

Online works by Donald Richie

• Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (New York: Anchor Books, 1961; Michigan Electronic Reprint 2004)
• Donald Richie, 'In the Realm of the Senses: Some Notes on Oshima and Pornography', Criterion Film Essays, April 30, 2009 
• Donald Richie, 'Remembering Kurosawa', Criterion Collection, December 9, 2009
• Donald Richie, 'Ikuru', Criterion Collection, January 5, 2004 
• Donald Richie, ' Stories of Floating Weeds', Criterion Collection, April 19, 2004 
• Donald Richie, 'Dersu Uzala', Criterion Collection, July 17, 1995
• Donald Richie, 'Tokyo Journal: Remembering Toshiro Mifune', Criterion Collection, September 30, 2008 
• Donald Richie, 'Ozu and Setsuko Hara', Criterion Collection, May 8, 2006
• Donald Richie, 'Samurai Rebellion: Kobayashi's Rebellion', Criterion Collection, October 24, 2005
• Donald Richie, 'Red Beard', Criterion Collection, November 19, 1989
• Donald Richie, 'Expressionism in Film', Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo Exhibition Catalogue, Mori Art Museum, 2006
• Donald Richie, 'The Daughter of the Samurai: a German-Japanese co-production', Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo Exhibition Catalogue, Mori Art Museum, 2006
• Donald Richie, writer and film critic, Conversations With History: "Writing, Film, and Japan: An Expatriate's View," 9/21/01
• Japan Times archive of work by Richie
• Donald Richie on Midnight Eye - Visions of Japanese cinema 

Online Interviews/Reviews, etc., about Donald Richie

• Alexander Jacoby, 'Donald Richie: A lifetime's observations of Japan', The Asi-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, August 2006
• Moving Image Source Interview, October 2006
• Richard Lloyd Parry, 'Smilingly Excluded [Review of The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 by Donald Richie]', London Review of Books, 28.16, August 2006
• Jasper Sharp, 'Inteview with Donald Richie', Midnight Eye, December 8, 2003
• A letter Hollis Frampton wrote in 1973 to Donald Richie, then the Film Curator at MoMA

For Donald Richie

• David Bordwell, 'Kurosawa's Early Spring', Observations on Film Art, December 8, 2009 
• Catherine Grant, 'On Japanese Cinema', Film Studies For Free, July 27, 2010

On Japanese Cinema at FSFF

• On Japanese Cinema
• Emperor of the Senses: RIP Nagisa Oshima 1932-2013
• Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013), a Tribute by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
• On Kazuo Hara and Japanese Documentary Film
• Reassessing Anime: Japanese cinema and animation
• Animation Studies: Three Fabulous Online Resources
• Horror Ad-Nauseam!
• War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction
• Dreaming Movies: RIP Satoshi Kon (1963-2010)

On Japanese Cinema

Last updated: August 3, 2010

Film Studies For Free wanted to make sure its readers didn't miss the video embedded above. It's another great offering from Fora.tv, this time a very entertaining and informative interview with Donald Richie about his internationally celebrated work on Japanese cinema and culture. FSFF heard of this via David Hudson and the Japan Society Film Blog.

In addition, FSFF has assembled some links below to openly accessible and very high quality scholarship on Japanese cinema (including numerous full-length studies), with work by Donald Richie, and many other excellent items which are indebted to his studies of Japanese cinema.

This was quite a broad category to research online, so FSFF will inevitably have missed some good resources: suggestions for any high quality additions are, therefore, even more welcome than usual! (Update: See comments  below for some of these, including the tip to link to Eigagogo's bookmarks at Delicious which lists some further great resources).

•  Kaori Ashizu, 'Kurosawa’s Hamlet?', Shakespeare Studies 33 (1995): 71-99

• Sarah M. Ball, The Uncanny in Japanese and American Horror Film: Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s Ring, MA thesis, North Carolina State University, 2006  

• Colette Balmain, 'Inside the Well of Loneliness: Towards a Definition of the Japanese Horror Film', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Discussion Papers, 2006 

• Colette Balmain, '“Vengeful Virgins in White”: Female Monstrosity in Asian Cinema', in Niall Scott (ed), Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2004) [scroll down through pdf to p. 123]

• David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)

• David Bordwell, 'Review of Noël Burch's "To the Distant Observer"', Wide Angle vol. 3, no. 4 (1980): 70–73

• Mio Bryce, Christie Barber, James Kelly, Siris Kunwar and Amy Plumb, 'Manga and Anime: Fluidity and Hybridity in Global Imagery', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2010

• Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (London : Scholar Press, 1979)

• Robert Castle, 'The Radical Capability of Rashomon', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 33, October 2003

• Ryan Cooke, 'Review of Jay McRoy, Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2008', Screening the Past,Issue 23, 2008

• Christopher J. Coyne, 'Culture, Common Knowledge and Post-Conflict Reconstruction', Journal of Intercultural Communication, No 13 (2007)

• Darrell William Davis, Saving Face: Spectator and Spectacle in Japanese Theatre and Film (LEWI Working Paper Series/David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, October 2004)

• Darrell William Davis, 'Reigniting Japanese Tradition with Hana-Bi', Cinema Journal 40, No. 4, Summer 2001

• Rayna Denison, 'On Susan J. Napier's From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West', Participations, Volume 6, Issue 2 (November 2009)

• Freda Freiberg, 'The Unkindest Cut of All? Some Reflections on the Recent Cinematic Release of the Uncut Version of Nagisa Oshima's Ai no corrida', Senses of Cinema, Issue 12, Feb-Mar 2001

• Freda Freiberg, 'Pale Flower', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010

• Freda Freiberg, 'Miyazaki's Heroines', Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, 2010

• New Jinshi Fujii, 'Films That Do Culture : A Discursive Analysis of Bunka Eiga, 1935-1945', Iconics 6, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 2002

• New Hideaki Fujiki, 'Dual Persona : Onoe Matsunosuke as Japan's Early Cinema Star', Iconics 7, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 2004

• Tag Gallagher, 'Mizoguchi and freedom', Screening the Past, Issue 13, 2001

• Aaron Gerow, 'One print in the age of mechanical reproduction: film industry and culture in 1910s Japan', Screening the Past, 2000 (11), 11 January 2000

• New Aaron Gerow, 'The Benshi's New Face : Defining Cinema in Taisho Japan', Iconics 3, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1994

• Andrew Grossman, 'Gohatto-or the End of Oshima Nagisa?', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 33, 2001 July

• New Masato Hase, 'Cinemaphobia in Taisho Japan : Zigomar, delinquent boys and somnambulism', Iconics 4, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1998

• New Kyoko Hirano, 'The Banning of Japanese Period Films by the American Occupation,' Iconics 1, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1987

• Lori Hitchcock, 'Third Culture Kids: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Language and Multiculturalism in Swallowtail Butterfly', Scope, February 2004

• Hikari Hori, 'Representing a Woman’s Story: Explicit Film and the Efficacy of Censorship in Japan', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts

• Yuwen Hsiung, 'Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and East Asia's Macbeth', CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004)

• Lee Wood Hung, 'Natural Culturalism in The Ballad of Narayama: A Study of Shohei Imamura's Thematic Concerns', Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2003

• Timothy Iles, 'Are We There Yet? Travelling Toward the Self in Contemporary Japanese Cinema', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 2007

• Mizuko Ito, 'The Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix', A position paper prepared for the workshop and conference on Girls 'n' Games, May 8-9, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006

• New Kenji Iwamoto, 'Film Criticism and the Study of Cinema in Japan：A Historical Study', Iconics 1, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1987

• Brian Jarvis, 'Anamorphic allegory in The Ring, or, seven ways of looking at a horror video', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 3, 2007

• Lei Jin, 'Silence and Sound in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood', CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 6.1 (2004) 

• Journal of the Imaginary and Fantastic Vol. 1.  No. 2.:  The Films of Hayao Miyazaki

• Sato Kenji, 'More animated than life', Japan Echo, Dec 1997; 24, 5; International Module pg. 50

• Chika Kinoshita, '"Choreography of desire: analysing Kinuyo Tanaka's acting in Mizoguchi's films', Screening the Past, Issue 13, 2001

• New Futoshi Koga, 'A Review of Pornographic Images in the 1970s in Japan: Centered Around Nikkatu Roman Porno Film"', Iconics 2, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1992

• Colleen A. Laird, 'Japanese cinema, the classroom, and Swallowtail Butterfly', Jump Cut, No. 52, Summer 2010

• Annie Manion, 'Discovering Japan: Anime and Learning Japanese Culture', A Master's Thesis Submitted to the East Asian Studies Center, USC

• Dolores Martinez, 'Where the human heart goes astray: Rashomon, Boomtown and subjective experience', Film Studies, Issue 11, Winter 2007

• Yuji Matson, The Word and The Image: Collaborations between Abe Kôbô and Teshigahara Hiroshi, Masters Thesis, University of Victoria, 2007 

• Bonnie Melchior, 'King Lear and Ran: Identity Translated and Transformed', East-West Connections: Review of Asian Studies Volume 5, Number 1 (2005) [scroll to p. 41 in PDF]

• New Kiseko Minaguchi, 'Yamamoto Satsuo's Haha no kyoku (Mother's Melody) : Making a Father's Story of Stella Dallas', Iconics 6, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 2002

• Gary Morris, 'The Spirit Moves: The World of Kenji Mizoguchi',  Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 22, 1999

• New Hisashi Nada, 'An Aspect of the Reception of Avant Garde Films in Japan', Iconics 2, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1992

• New Hisashi Nada, 'The Little Cinema Movement in the 1920s and the Introduction of Avant-Garde Cinema in Japan', Iconics 3, Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences, 1994

• Lindsay Nelson, 'Ghosts of the Past, Ghosts of the Future: Monsters, Children, and Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema', Cinemascope, Issue 13, July-December 2009

• Eimi Ozawa , 'Remaking Corporeality and Spatiality: U.S. Adaptations of Japanese Horror Films, 49th Parallel, Conference Special Edition, Autumn 2006

• Chris Payne, 'Burying the Past: Nihonjinron and the Representation of Japanese Society in Itami's The Funeral', Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies, 1: 1 (2003), 13-20

• Michael Francis Phillips, 'A Cinematic Challenge to Modernity Critical Theory in Postwar Japanese Cinema: An Introduction to Fukasaku Kinji', eCommons@Texas State University, May 2009

• Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (New York: Anchor Books, 1961; Michigan Electronic Reprint 2004)

• Donald Richie, 'Expressionism in Film', Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo Exhibition Catalogue, Mori Art Museum, 2006

• Donald Richie, 'The Daughter of the Samurai: a German-Japanese co-production', Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo Exhibition Catalogue, Mori Art Museum, 2006

• Donald Richie, writer and film critic, Conversations With History: "Writing, Film, and Japan: An Expatriate's View," 9/21/01

• Juneko J. Robinson , 'Review: Jay McRoy (2007) Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. Amsterdam: Rodopi', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010 

• Caroline Ruddell, 'Breaking Boundaries The Representation of Split Identity in Anime', Animation Studies – Vol.2, 2007

• Chi-Yun Shin, 'Art of branding: Tartan "Asia Extreme" films', Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008

• Greg M. Smith, 'Critical reception of Rashomon in the West', Asian Cinema, Fall/Winter 2002

• Ayumi Suzuki, 'A nightmare of capitalist Japan: Spirited Away', Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009

• Donato Totaro, 'Tokyo Sonata: Flirting with the Fantastic: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008', Offscreen Journal,Vol . 13, Issue 5, 2009

• William Tsutsui, 'Godzilla And Postwar Japan', East-West Connections: Review of Asian Studies Volume 5, Number 1 (2005) [Scroll to p. 1 in PDF]

• Paul Waley, 'Re-scripting the city: Tokyo from ugly duckling to cool cat', Japan Forum 18(3) 2006: 361–380

• Gregory A. Walle, Narrating the new Japan: Biograph's The Hero of Liao-Yang (1904) Screen 2006 47: 43-65

• Craig Watts, 'Blood Spear, Mt. Fuji: Uchida Tomu's Conflicted Comeback from Manchuria', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 33, July 2001

• Erica Lee Zilleruelo, Shakespeare by Any Other Word? Shakespeare's King Lear and Macbeth Reivented in the Films of Akira Kurosawa, Masters Thesis, Wichita State University, 2002

Film 'Conversations With History': Stanley Cavell, Oliver Stone, Robert Wise, and others

Stanley Cavell, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard University, joins UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler to talk about his life as a philosopher and his passion for movies as part of Kreisler's Conversations with History series.

Thanks a lot for your nice comments about Film Studies For Free's A-Z of Favourite Scholarly blogs post. If it had its fun time compiling the list all over again, the rather absent-minded FSFF would add the following two favourite items: f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g and Latest Articles on Moving Image Source (indeed they, and one or two others, will be added when the list joins the right-hand menus of this blog).

Today, Film Studies For Free is thrilled to bring you links to the great videos and transcripts of interviews with filmmakers and filmthinkers that form part of UC Berkeley's Conversations with History series. All the videos last roughly an hour, so these are rich resources indeed. The full film-related index is HERE.

• Stanley Cavell; Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus; Harvard: "A Philosopher Goes to the Movies," 2/7/02 video link here
  
• Shima Iwashita, actress: "The Movie Experience," 2/27/99
  
• Ken Jacobs, Film Artist: "Film and the Creation of Mind," 10/14/99 video link here
  
• Nathaniel Rich, Associate Editor, Paris Review: "San Francisco in Film Noir," 6/23/05 video link here
  
• Donald Richie, writer and film critic: "Writing, Film, and Japan: An Expatriate's View," 9/21/01
  
• Masahiro Shinoda, film director: "The Movie Experience," 2/27/99
  
• Oliver Stone, Filmmaker: "History and the Movies," 4/17/97 and 6/27/97 video link here
  
• Robert Wise, Filmmaker: "The Wise Touch," 2/28/98

See also Harry Kreisler's Conversations with History Blog for further updates about this series.

New Links to Free Film Studies E-books

Thanks to some rifling around at the great UPenn.edu search tool The Online Books Page, the always bountiful Film Studies For Free can now proudly present you with some wonderful new links to the following, online and freely accessible, Film Studies E-books (most of these 'scholarship editions' were made available online by the mighty University of California Press - thank you UC!):

• Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (eds), Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes


• Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub


• Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company


• John M. Frame, Theology at the Movies


• Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies


• Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany


• William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film

These join Film Studies For Free's existing links to the following great books:

• David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema


• Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema


• Jennifer E. Langdon, Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood


• Robert Philip Kolker, The Altering Eye

Happy E-reading, folks!

[Addendum - at 16.43: An old friend from my early Kent days, Dr David Sorfa [now Managing Editor of the peerless (...but peer-reviewed!) Open-Access journal Film-Philosophy, and Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Liverpool John Moores University], got in touch with two further and very welcome additions to the E-books list. Both these classics are offered up courtesy of the Centre for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan:

• Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema
• Nöel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema

Díky moc / Arigatou gozaimasu / Thank you very much!]