Ozu Yasujiro's moving family drama, Tokyo monogatari/Tokyo Story (1953), is universally acknowledged as one of the most significant Japanese films ever made, and regularly cited as one of the greatest films of all time in polls of leading critics and filmmakers around the world. Telling the story of an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children, the film contrasts the behaviour of their children, who are too busy to pay their parents much attention, and their widowed daughter-in-law who treats them with hospitable kindness. In its complex portrait of human motivation and lively sense of social space, it offers a profound and poignant insight into the generational shifts of postwar Japan. Alastair Phillips combines a close analysis of the film and its key locations - the city of Tokyo, the town of Onomichi and the coastal resort of Atami - with a discussion of its representation of Japanese society at a time of great cultural change. Drawing upon Japanese and English language sources, he situates the film within various contemporary critical and industrial contexts and examines the multiple international dimensions of Tokyo Story's long after-life to understand its enormous contribution to global film culture.

Japanese Cinema includes twenty-four articles on key films of Japanese cinema, from the silent era to the present day, providing a comprehensive introduction to Japanese cinema history and Japanese culture and society.

Studying a range of important films, from Late Spring, Seven Samurai and In the Realm of the Senses to Godzilla, Hana-Bi and Ring, the collection includes discussion of all the major directors of Japanese cinema including Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Oshima, Suzuki, Kitano and Miyazaki.

Each chapter discusses the film in relation to aesthetic, industrial or critical issues and ends with a complete filmography for each director. The book also includes a full glossary of terms and a comprehensive bibliography of readings on Japanese cinema.

Bringing together leading international scholars and showcasing pioneering new research, this book is essential reading for all students and general readers interested in one of the world's most important film industries.

'Paris in the Cinema' offers a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen. Bringing together a wide range of renowned French and Anglophone specialists in film, television, history, architecture and literature, the volume introduces, challenges and extends ideas about the city as the locus of screen modernity. Through a range of concrete and historically-specific case studies, ranging from particular districts such as Saint-Germain-des-Pres and les banlieues (the suburbs) in French cinema, to iconic figures such as the detective Maigret and the lovers, and from locations such as the hotel, the building site and the Eiffel Tower to filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, this unique text demonstrates how the cinematic city of Paris now constitutes a major archive of French cultural history and memory.

Japanese Cinema includes twenty-four chapters on key films of Japanese cinema, from the silent era to the present day, providing a comprehensive introduction to Japanese cinema history and Japanese culture and society. Studying a range of important films, from Late Spring, Seven Samurai and In the Realm of the Senses to Godzilla, Hana-Bi and Ring, the collection includes discussion of all the major directors of Japanese cinema including Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Oshima, Suzuki, Kitano and Miyazaki. Each chapter discusses the film in relation to aesthetic, industrial or critical issues and ends with a complete filmography for each director. The book also includes a full glossary of terms and a comprehensive bibliography of readings on Japanese cinema. Bringing together leading international scholars and showcasing pioneering new research, this book is essential reading for all students and general readers interested in one of the world's most important film industries.

The Japanese Cinema Book provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world's most fascinating and widely admired filmmaking regions. In terms of its historical coverage, broad thematic approach and the significant international range of its authors, it is the largest and most wide-ranging publication of its kind to date. Ranging from renowned directors such as Akira Kurosawa to neglected popular genres such as the film musical and encompassing topics such as ecology, spectatorship, home-movies, colonial history and relations with Hollywood and Europe, The Japanese Cinema Book presents a set of new, and often surprising, perspectives on Japanese film. With its plural range of interdisciplinary perspectives based on the expertise of established and emerging scholars and critics, The Japanese Cinema Book provides a groundbreaking picture of the different ways in which Japanese cinema may be understood as a local, regional, national, transnational and global phenomenon. The book's innovative structure combines general surveys of a particular historical topic or critical approach with various micro-level case studies. It argues there is no single fixed Japanese cinema, but instead a fluid and varied field of Japanese filmmaking cultures that continue to exist in a dynamic relationship with other cinemas, media and regions. The Japanese Cinema Book is divided into seven inter-related sections: * Theories and Approaches * * Institutions and Industry * * Film Style * * Genre * * Times and Spaces of Representation * * Social Contexts * * Flows and Interactions

This essay collection offers a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen. Bringing together a wide range of renowned French and Anglophone specialists in film, television, history, architecture and literature, Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau introduce, challenge and extend ideas about the city as the locus of screen modernity. Through a range of concrete and historically-specific case studies, this unique text demonstrates how the cinematic city of Paris now constitutes a major archive of French cultural history and memory. This is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, French Studies, European or Transnational Studies, Visual Studies, and Urban Studies. Fresh and engaging, this fascinating text will also appeal to lovers of French cinema and the capital city that comprises its major home.

"Du rififi chez les hommes" (1955), directed by the exiled American film director Jules Dassin, recounts the nail-biting tale of a Parisian gangster heist gone wrong. Famed for its extended dialogue free robbery sequence, it is both a classic French film noir and one of the greatest, most influential crime films. In this lively companion to the film, Alastair Phillips reveals Dassin's role as a director of socially conscious Hollywood film noir and argues that his seminal contribution to the regeneration of the thriller in post war France therefore uniquely complicated relations between French genre cinema and American mass culture.

Phillips also examines the film's innovative narrative construction and use of sound, its performance style and mise-en-scene, and discusses the film's legacy, showing how even today, the term "Rififi" remains a byword for both criminal glamor and the enduring virtues of French popular classical filmmaking.