Book Description
Drawing on early-twentieth-century English-language, Japanese American, and Japanese sources including newspaper reviews and fan magazines, 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. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
Publisher comments
"This is the definitive work on Sessue Hayakawa. It is a work of great originality, a truly unique attempt not only to give a thorough account of the career of one of the first and most unusual stars of silent cinema but also to approach Hayakawa from the perspective of his identity as an ethnic Japanese gaining worldwide stardom. That Daisuke Miyao is able to interrogate not only Japanese sources but the Japanese-language newspapers in the United States makes this perhaps the most thorough--and complex--treatment of the ethnicity of a movie star ever offered by a film historian. And Miyao's placing of Hayakawa's stardom within the context of the political and cultural relations between the United States and Japan is nothing less than masterful."--Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity
"Sessue Hayakawa has not received the attention he deserves as one of the most popular and prolific stars of the American silent screen, and this book brings a wealth of material to light. Without replicating existing research, Daisuke Miyao makes an important contribution to three developing areas within film studies: new approaches to the history of early silent film, studies of the impact of Asian Americans on Hollywood, and studies of transnational links among various film industries around the world."--Gina Marchetti, author of From Tian'anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997 --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .
