front cover of Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema
Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema
Daisuke Miyao
Duke University Press, 2020
In Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, Daisuke Miyao explores the influence of Japanese art on the development of early cinematic visual style, particularly the actualité films made by the Lumière brothers between 1895 and 1905. Examining nearly 1,500 Lumière films, Miyao contends that more than being documents of everyday life, they provided a medium for experimenting with aesthetic and cinematic styles imported from Japan. Miyao further analyzes the Lumière films produced in Japan as a negotiation between French Orientalism and Japanese aesthetics. The Lumière films, Miyao shows, are best understood within a media ecology of photography, painting, and cinema, all indebted to the compositional principles of Japonisme and the new ideas of kinetic realism it inspired. The Lumière brothers and their cinematographers shared the contemporaneous obsession among Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists about how to instantly and physically capture the movements of living things in the world. Their engagement with Japonisme, he concludes, constituted a rich and productive two-way conversation between East and West.
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Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, vol. 61, no. 1
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Michigan Publishing Services, 2022

The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies is the peer-reviewed, scholarly publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). The journal was renamed (from Cinema Journal) in October 2018.

JCMS’s basic mission is to foster engaged debate and rigorous thinking among humanities scholars of film, television, digital media, and other audiovisual technologies. We are committed to the aesthetic, political, and cultural interpretation of these media and their production, circulation, and reception.

To that end, JCMS is dedicated to intellectual diversity of all kinds. We publish critical inquiry into the global, national, and local circulation of a wide variety of media. We seek to promote a range of approaches to film and media studies and attendant fields, including (but not limited to) digital media, sound studies, visual culture, video game studies, fan studies, and avant-garde and experimental film and media practices. We do not adhere to any methodological approach to media studies, nor do we focus on particular emphases in the field. The journal is open to all areas of humanities-oriented scholarship in media studies, including digital humanities.

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