Abé Markus Nornes

A report on the state of independent documentary filmmaking in China in 2009, covering in particular the Yunnan Multicultural Visual Festival (or Yunfest, as it is known) in Kunming and the China Documentary Film Festival in Songzhuang. A variety of factors have converged to make an anti-authoritarian documentary movement possible, but it may be ending as directors become professionalized.

Name of Periodical: Film Quarterly

Name of Periodical: Film Quarterly

Volume Number: 52

Issue Number: 3

Year of Publication: 1999

British documentary filmmaker and author Paul Rotha had a great influence on filmmakers in prewar Japan. In fact, translations of his book "Documentary Film" were the "Bible" for both militarist and leftist documentarists and critics. Various translations of Rotha's book, however, displayed the marks of self-imposed censorship or misreading and changed his socialist leanings into support for the imperial state of Japan. Such cross-cultural discourse allowed the Rotha volume to become the site of politicized thought in the Japanese film community.

Nornes spawns an interesting proposition when he states that Japanese directors--focusing on the victim's suffering--sentimentalize the nuclear issue and divert the audience from a true understanding of the atrocity. He concludes that a cold, scientific approach is essential in unveiling the terrifying violence of the bombings and cites The Effect of The Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a documentary that chillingly assumes the point of view of the bomb.

Name of Periodical: 1989 - Present

Collectively known as Hallyu, Korean music, television programs, films, online games, and comics enjoy global popularity, thanks to new communication technologies. In recent years, Korean popular culture has also become the subject of academic inquiry. Whereas the Hallyu’s impact on Korea’s national image and domestic economy, as well as on transnational cultural flows, have received much scholarly attention, there has been little discussion of the role of social media in Hallyu’s propagation. 

Contributors to Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media

The Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies provides a snapshot of all the archival and bibliographic resources available to students and scholars of Japanese cinema. Among the nations of the world, Japan has enjoyed an impressively lively print culture related to cinema. The first film books and periodicals appeared shortly after the birth of cinema, proliferating wildly in the 1910s with only the slightest pause in the dark days of World War II. The numbers of publications match the enormous scale of film production, but with the lack of support for film studies in Japan, much...

In this wide-ranging work, Abé Mark Nornes examines the relationships between moving-image media and translation and contends that film was a globalized medium from its beginning and that its transnational traffic has been greatly influenced by interpreters. Nornes—who has written subtitles for Japanese cinema—discusses such topics as the translation of film theory, interpretation at festivals and for coproductions, and “talkies,” subtitling, and dubbing.

Among Asian countries—where until recently documentary filmmaking was largely the domain of governments—Japan was exceptional for the vigor of its film industry. And yet, Japanese documentary remains largely unstudied outside of Japan. The first English-language study of the subject, this book provides an enlightening look at the first fifty years of documentary film theory and practice in Japan.