Alluring, nurturing, dangerous, and vulnerable the yamamba, or Japanese mountain witch, has intrigued audiences for centuries. What is it about the fusion of mountains with the solitary old woman that produces such an enigmatic figure? And why does she still call to us in this modern, scientific era? Co-editors Rebecca Copeland and Linda C. Ehrlich first met the yamamba in the powerful short story "The Smile of the Mountain Witch" by acclaimed woman writer Oba Minako. The story revealed the compelling way creative women can take charge of misogynistic tropes, invert them, and use them to tell new stories of female empowerment. This unique collection represents the creative and surprising ways artists and scholars from North America and Japan have encountered the yamamba.

The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema draws readers into the first 13 feature films and 5 of the documentaries of award-winning Japanese film director Kore-eda Hirokazu. With his recent top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters, Kore-eda is arguably Japan's greatest living director with an international viewership. He approaches difficult subjects (child abandonment, suicide, marginality) with a realistic and compassionate eye.The lyrical tone of the writing of Japanese film scholar Linda C. Ehrlich perfectly complements the understated, yet powerful, tone of the films. From An Elemental Cinema, readers will gain a special understanding of Kore-eda's films through a novel connection to the natural elements as reflected in Japanese traditional aesthetics.An Elemental Cinema presents Kore-eda's oeuvre as a connected whole with overarching thematic concerns, despite frequent generic experimentation. It also offers an example of how the poetics of cinema can be practiced in writing, as well as on the screen, and helps readers understand the films of this contemporary director as works of art that relate to their own lives.

To coincide with the recent DVD release of The Spirit of the Beehive, this paperback collection of essays focuses on the work of acclaimed Spanish director, Victor Erice. Originally published in hardcover under the title An Open Window, this expanded edition draws on original essays, reprints, and new translations from an international group of writers. New to this edition are four essays from noted film scholars-including editor Linda C. Ehrlich-as well as three added essays from the filmmaker himself. Both the original and new material provide a deeper appreciation of Erice's three feature-length films-The Spirit of the Beehive [El espiritu de la colmena] (1973), El Sur (1982), and Dream of Light [aka The Quince Tree Sun, El sol del membrillo] (1992), as well as his shorter works, including his most recent accomplishment, La morte rouge (2006). This anthology examines the aesthetic, historical, and sociological forces at work in Erice's films and includes an extensive interview with the director. This broad array of writings provides insight into not only three unforgettable films, but also into twentieth-century Spanish society, as well as world cinema. The Cinema of Victor Erice: An Open Window will serve as an important resource to measure the career of this director who-along with Bunuel, Saura, and Almodovar-has helped show the world the creative range of Spanish cinema. With additional essays, translations, and illustrations, this paperback edition explores new avenues of expression pursued by one of the most poetic of modern filmmakers.

The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema draws readers into the first 13 feature films and 5 of the documentaries of award-winning Japanese film director Kore-eda Hirokazu. With his recent top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters, Kore-eda is arguably Japan's greatest living director with an international viewership. He approaches difficult subjects (child abandonment, suicide, marginality) with a realistic and compassionate eye.The lyrical tone of the writing of Japanese film scholar Linda C. Ehrlich perfectly complements the understated, yet powerful, tone of the films. From An Elemental Cinema, readers will gain a special understanding of Kore-eda's films through a novel connection to the natural elements as reflected in Japanese traditional aesthetics.An Elemental Cinema presents Kore-eda's oeuvre as a connected whole with overarching thematic concerns, despite frequent generic experimentation. It also offers an example of how the poetics of cinema can be practiced in writing, as well as on the screen, and helps readers understand the films of this contemporary director as works of art that relate to their own lives.

China and Japan both have traditional art forms that have been highly developed and long studied. In these original essays, noted film and art scholars explore how the spatial consciousness, compositional techniques, and construction of images in these traditional and modern art forms also inform filmmaking in the two countries, so that film and art share the same culturally defined "methods of seeing."

This first major study of the relationship between Chinese and Japanese art and film brings together writers from the United States, Europe, Australia, China, and Japan, including Japan's well-known film critic Sato Tadao and Beijing Film Academy's Ni Zhen, screenwriter of the Oscar-nominated film Raise the Red Lantern. The essays discuss the influence of the traditional arts, including scroll painting and printmaking, on Chinese and Japanese cinema and demonstrate that national cinemas cannot be completely understood without considering their indigenous traditions.

Through provocative essays by specialists in different aspects of Japanese culture, this book provides an historical and analytical survey of the presence of Goddesses in Japanese audiovisual culture from its origins to the present day. It shows how these feminine myths are represented in Japan; not only as beneficial or creative deities, but also the archetypal strong or dominant woman that sometimes overshadows masculine figures and heroes, or as influential figures. Therefore, it analyzes this rich dialectic of the feminine and how the audiovisual culture has represented it thus far in film, TV series, and video games made in Japan. While many theories have been proposed to explain the presence of Goddesses in Japan, this book's focus on audiovisual culture explores how this corpus challenges the traditional conceptions of the feminine as related to Goddesses.

The 29 prose poems in Cinematic Reveries: Gestures, Stillness, Water provide distinctive points of entry into a select group of films through attention to evocative gestures, a sense of stillness, and images of water. These original writings offer film criticism in a new form, with a tone that is at once exploratory, familiar, and elegiac. They explore the precious nature of water; they point to gestures both eloquent and obscure. They offer us moments of arrested motion as well as longer contemplative sequences in films from Asia, Europe, New Zealand, and the U.S. To cite a sentiment expressed by filmmaker Raul Ruiz in his Poetics of Cinema 2, these are tributes to great films that "recognize [us] like an old relative." The reader is encouraged to explore Cinematic Reveries as a portrait of the cinema which is at times lyrical, sometimes comic, and often tinged with pathos. This celebration of the art film is richly illustrated, with suggestions for further readings and viewings.