A new book by University of Oregon’s Daisuke Miyao, associate professor of Japanese film and cinema studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, will be included in the 64th Berlin International Film Festival.
The Berlinale, one of the world's leading film festivals and most reputable media events, includes about 400 films per year, mostly international or European premieres. It runs Feb. 6-16 in Berlin.
This year’s “Retrospective” of the film festival will focus on lighting styles from specific genres and decades of film history in Japan, Europe and the United States.
Miyao’s book, “The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema,” inspired this year’s event and the careful selection of about 40 silent and sound films from the first half of the 20th century.
“Daisuke Miyao’s fascinating insights into the art of lighting, and thus into an area of Japanese film history that has hardly been studied, impressed us so greatly that we curated our film program in close cooperation with him,” said Rainer Rother, head of the retrospective and artistic director of the Deutsche Kinemathek.
Miyao’s publication explores the idea of shadows and light, and how lighting helped formulate a new Japanese cultural tradition in film. He analyzes the representation of beauty through shadows in Japanese film and argues that lighting technology was structured by conflicts of modernity in Japan in the early 20th century.
-by Sarah MacKenzie, UO Office of Strategic Communications intern