Kore-eda Hirokazu (Contemporary Film Directors)

Kore-eda Hirokazu (Contemporary Film Directors)
by: Marc Yamada (Author)
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Publication Date: 4 July 2023
Language: English
Print Length: 176 pages
ISBN-10: 0252045122
ISBN-13: 9780252045127
Book Description
Films like Shoplifters and After the Storm have made Kore-eda Hirokazu one of the most acclaimed auteurs working today. Critics often see Kore-eda as a director steeped in the Japanese tradition defined by Yasujirō Ozu. Marc Yamada, however, views Kore-eda’s work in relation to the same socioeconomic concerns explored by other contemporary international filmmakers. Yamada reveals that a type of excess, not the minimalism associated with traditional aesthetics, defines Kore-eda’s trademark humanism. This excess manifests in small moments when a desire for human connection exceeds the logic of the institutions and policies formed by the neoliberal values that have shaped modern-day Japan. As Yamada shows, Kore-eda captures the shared spaces formed by bodies that move, perform, and assemble in ways that express the humanistic impulse at the core of the filmmaker’s expanding worldwide appeal.

About the Author

Review “Marc Yamada reveals how Kore-eda’s films connect to global audiences through their focus on figures like children suffering from neglect and families surviving at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Yamada provides new approaches towards understanding Kore-eda’s work in terms of a broader critique of neoliberalism.”–Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, author of Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s”A close read of the works of one of the world’s most deeply human writer-directors. The section studying 2018’s Shoplifters is especially strong. But his entire corpus is shown to be well worth analyzing. ” –Film Stage About the Author Marc Yamada is associate professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Locating Heisei in Japanese Fiction and Film: The Historical Imagination of The Lost Decades.