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Film / Japan / Asian History / World War II

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The Imperial Screen Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years' War, 1931–1945 Peter B. High Wisconsin Studies in Film David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Vance Kepley Jr., Series Editors "Who could have predicted that the most detailed and precise analysis of our country's wartime propaganda would come from an American scholar born and educated in the postwar era?" —Kawamoto Saburo, film historian, Mainichi newspaper From the late 1920s through World War II, film became a crucial tool in the state of Japan. Detailing the way Japanese directors, scriptwriters, company officials, and bureaucrats colluded to produce films that supported the war effort, The Imperial Screen is a highly-readable account of the realities of cultural life in wartime Japan. Widely hailed as "epoch-making" by the Japanese press, it presents the most comprehensive survey yet published of "national policy" films, relating their montage and dramatic structures to the cultural currents, government policies, and propaganda goals of the era. Peter B. High's treatment of the Japanese film world as a microcosm of the entire sphere of Japanese wartime culture demonstrates what happens when conscientious artists and intellectuals become enmeshed in a totalitarian regime. This English language edition is revised and expanded from the the original Japanese edition. "One is filled with admiration for the author's breadth of perspective, the objectivity of his approach, the vast reaches of material he covers and the care with which he analyzes each film and document."— Iwamoto Kenji, professor of film, Waseda University, Tosho Shimbun "In bringing the English-language reader through the duration of wartime cinema under Imperial Japan up to the tensions that characterized film under the American occupation, The Imperial Screen  is an essential complement to the scholarship by Dower, Hirano, and Buruma on war, culture, and memory."—Joanne Bernardi, associate professor of Japanese and film, University of Rochester Peter B. High is professor of film and language at Nagoya University in Japan. Peter High's The Imperial Screen has won the Kovács Book Award Committee of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. For more details see their site Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

February 2003 544 pp.   88 b/w photographs   6 x 9 ISBN 0-299-18130-8  Cloth $60.00s ISBN 0-299-18134-0  Paper $24.95s To order, you can accumulate titles in the Shopping Cart by clicking on the bulleted lines below. You can submit your order electronically, paying for it with MasterCard or Visa. Click here for further explanation of shopping cart feature. Never ordered from us before? Read this first.

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