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"JAPONISME AND THE BIRTH OF CINEMA explores the influence and impact of traditional Japanese art on the development of early cinematic visual style, particularly with regards to the actuality films created by the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière between 1895 and 1905. Japonisme, a term coined in 1872, has historically been used to broadly describe Japanese influence on French art; in this book, film and media scholar Daisuke Miyao argues that Japonisme goes beyond French imitations of Japanese art to describe the actual application of Japanese principles, methods, and aesthetics in the production of French art. Examining the nearly 1,500 films made by the Lumière brothers, Miyao argues that far from being insignificant films that sought to capture everyday life, these short films provided a space for experimenting with aesthetic and cinematic styles imported from Japan. Furthermore, Miyao analyzes a set of Lumière films produced in Japan, and investigates how these films document a negotiation between French Orientalism and Japanese aesthetics. What emerges for Miyao is thus a refutation of Japonisme as merely Orientalism: whereas Orientalism implies a one-directional gaze from West to East that transformed the "Orient" into a static, ahistorical, entity, Miyao argues that Japonisme entailed a multipronged, in-depth engagement with the methods, principles, aesthetic sensibilities, and techniques of Japanese artists that ultimately constituted a two-way conversation between East and West. Chapter 1 argues for a reframing of the Lumière films as part of a media ecology of photography, painting, and cinema influenced by Japanese compositional and aesthetic styles. In chapter 2, Miyao focuses on the thirty-three Lumière films produced in Japan, and how the Orientalism of the films was contested by the incorporation of the ukiyo-e-style and engagement with Japanese people. Chapter 3 attends to Japanese reactions to Japonisme through the medium of Japanese filmmaking at the end of the 19th century. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of film and media studies, media archaeology, art history, aesthetics, East Asian studies, and French studies"--

Art and motion pictures --- Art and motion pictures. --- Art, Modern --- Art, Modern --- Culture in motion pictures. --- Culture in motion pictures. --- Japonism --- Japonism. --- Motion pictures --- Motion pictures --- Motion pictures, French --- Motion pictures, French. --- Motion pictures. --- Orientalism --- Orientalism. --- Japanese influences. --- Japanese influences. --- History --- History --- History --- Lumière, Auguste, --- Lumière, Auguste, --- Lumière, Louis, --- Lumière, Louis, --- 1800-1899. --- France. --- Japan.

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"While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886--1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. In this critical study of Hayakawa's stardom, Daisuke Miyao reconstructs the Japanese actor's remarkable career, from the films that preceded his meteoric rise to fame as the star of Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915) through his reign as a matinee idol and the subsequent decline and resurrection of his Hollywood fortunes. Drawing on early-twentieth-century sources in both English and Japanese, including Japanese-language newspapers in the United States, Miyao illuminates the construction and reception of Hayakawa's stardom as an ongoing process of cross-cultural negotiation. Hayakawa's early work included short films about Japan that were popular with American audiences as well as spy films that played upon anxieties about Japanese nationalism. The Jesse L. Lasky production company sought to shape Hayakawa's image by emphasizing the actor's Japanese traits while portraying him as safely assimilated into U.S. culture. Hayakawa himself struggled to maintain his sympathetic persona while creating more complex Japanese characters that would appeal to both American and Japanese audiences. The star's initial success with U.S. audiences created ambivalence in Japan, where some described him as traitorously Americanized and others as a positive icon of modernized Japan. This unique history of transnational silent-film stardom focuses attention on the ways that race, ethnicity, and nationality influenced the early development of the global film industry."--Publisher description.

Hayakawa, Sesshū

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Daisuke Miyao reveals the undetected influence that Japanese art and aesthetics had on early cinema and the pioneering films of the Lumiére brothers.

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