Tag: books

August 14, 2016 · 0 comments

By Jasper Sharp. The clammy deathly-blue pallor, the single drooping eye leering through lank, matted black hair, the white cotton smock, the slow, spasmodic, Butoh-esque movements: there must be few out there unfamiliar with the imagery of the Japanese ghost since the shuffling form of Sadako first seeped into Western consciousness in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu […]

August 8, 2016 · 1 comment

By Andrew Osmond. “You may marry him, murder him, or do what you like with him.” So declared Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, when actor William Gillette asked if it would be acceptable to have the Great Detective fall in love in a stage play. Doyle’s comment probably reflected his weariness […]

July 18, 2016 · 1 comment

By Hugh David. There has never been a better time to be a media fan. Commentaries and spin-offs, blogs and podcasts can open up entire worlds of fandom, even to the hopeless couch potato. Long gone are the days when fan publications relied on obsessive collections of memorabilia, and the need to remember details a […]

July 12, 2016 · 0 comments

Jonathan Clements reviews a book on Japan’s landmark censorship cases. It began with newsboys in the Tokyo streets with stacks of a racy foreign book, wearing jackets that proclaimed “WARNING! CHATTERLEY.” For the first big test of Japan’s new free-speech constitution was the publication of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1951, when the country […]

July 3, 2016 · 1 comment

By Jonathan Clements. Although the title of Sean Macdonald’s new book is Animation in China: history, aesthetics, media, it keeps largely to an account of the group of animators and facilities that formed the nucleus of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in 1957. He has plainly realised that a little coverage of the pre-war Wan […]