The Russian Kurosawa: Transnational Cinema, or the Art of Speaking Differently

The Russian Kurosawa offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in postwar debates on cultural and political reconstruction.

Author: Olga V. Solovieva
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 08/03/2023
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.70lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.50w x 1.50d
ISBN13: 9780192866004
ISBN10: 0192866001
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Collections | Asian | Japanese
- Literary Criticism | Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology
- Political Science | History & Theory | General

About the Author

Olga V. Solovieva, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago

Olga V. Solovieva studied at the Moscow State University, Freie Universität Berlin, and Yale and currently teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Christ's Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Japan's Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm (Cambria University Press, 2021).