“A major scholar of the cinema of Japan, Daisuke Miyao is especially adept at discerning the connections between Japanese and other film cultures. His new book, which explores the cultural relationship between Japan and France, brings many aspects of cinema's earliest years to light. He uncovers a tremendous amount of new material in Japanese and French that specialists in Japanese cinema and the invention of cinema will find fascinating.” - Tom Gunning, coauthor of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema
“In this remarkably ambitious study Daisuke Miyao complicates our understanding of Orientalism in early cinema: instead of being something that the West does to a passive East, Orientalism becomes a multipronged adaptation of artistic techniques that originated in Japan and were exported to France. Along the way we learn a great deal about the emergence of female film actors in Japan and the interrelationship between image composition in painting and cinema. An excellent and important book.” - Michael Bourdaghs, author of Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop
"This fascinating study examines the relationship between the birth of Japanese cinema and the Lumière brothers' company in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. . . . The author is careful and succinct in making his point, and he provides myriad citations. This well-documented book will be valuable for art historians and Asia specialists as well as for those studying film. Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, professionals." - G. R. Butters Jr, Choice
"This is both a focused and wide-ranging book which will beguile scholars of cinema, art historians, and anyone interested in east-west relations and in the part played by contingency in the history of cultural exchange." - Akane Kawakami, French Studies
"This is a fascinating book, well researched and well illustrated, which sheds light on an important two-way intersection between Japanese and Western artistic cultures and on how that intersection shaped the technique, imagery and narrative strategies of an emerging artistic medium." - Alexander Jacoby, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
"A very timely and provocative attempt to decipher the entangled relationships among Orientalism, early cinema, and Japanese modernization." - Naoki Yamamoto, The Journal of Japanese Studies
"The book is written in accessible prose for both a specialist and wider audience, while the main arguments are clear and coherent, and easy to follow. . . . Miyao examines the transnational flows of cinema between Japan and France, and the crosscultural exchanges between fine arts, photography and cinema in the early period, and provides a fertile reading of the development of early cinema at the time of imperialist projects, and charts new avenues for future research on the relationship between cinema and visual cultural studies. This book would certainly appeal to scholars working in areas of early cinema, cultural history, art history, Japanese cinema, French cinema, and transnational cinema." - Ana Grgic, Early Popular Visual Culture
"Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema fills a gap between film history, Japonisme, and the Orientalist discourse and brings a new perspective into these fields. Backed up by a close examination of a large number of primary sources, including the 1428 Lumière films and plenty of photographs and paintings, Miyao not only presents a solid statement about the correlation between Japonisme and the birth of cinema and the two-way communication between Japanese culture and the Western world but also provides a unique approach to the discussion of Eurocentrism and the West/East opposition." - Ruoyi Bian, Film Criticism
"Miyao’s account of the birth of cinema is remarkable in a number of respects. Not only does it open new dimensions for aesthetic analysis of early cinema but it also does so through a serious engagement with its transnational formation and local specificity, without losing sight of the ways in which the aesthetic potential of cinematic expression lent itself to different kinds of capture. Perhaps most remarkably, Miyao makes the history of early cinema feel newly relevant to how we understand the global culture of contemporary Japan. Looking at cinema when it was new allows him to discover something about it that was never old." - Thomas Lamarre, Art Journal
