Donald Richie

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Donald Richie (born 1924) is an American-born author who has written a number of books about the Japanese people and Japanese cinema. Living in Japan for half a century, he has provided insight into Japanese culture for English-speaking readers.

1 Biography
2 Books
3 Japanese cinema
4 External links

[edit] Biography

In 1947, Richie first went to Japan with the American occupation force, where he worked as a civilian staff writer for the Pacific Stars and Stripes, a job he saw as an opportunity to escape his dull life in Lima, Ohio. While in Tokyo, he became fascinated with Japanese culture, particularly Japanese cinema. He was soon writing movie reviews in the Stars And Stripes. In 1949 he enrolled at Columbia University (School of General Studies), and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953. Richie then returned to Japan as film critic for the The Japan Times and spent much of the second half of the twentieth century living there. In 1959, he published his first book, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, coauthored with Joseph Anderson. In this book, Richie distinguishes between "representational" and "presentational" approaches to filmmaking. During this time he also served as Curator of Film at the New York Museum of Modern Art for several years.

[edit] Books

Many of Richie's books show his appreciation for the people and scenery of Japan. His two most noted works in this field are The Inland Sea, a travel classic which has been converted into a PBS film, and Public People, Private People, a look at some of Japan's most significant and most mundane people. He has compiled two collections of essays on Japan: A Lateral View and Partial Views. A collection of his writings has been published to commemorate fifty years of writing about Japan: The Donald Richie Reader. The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 consists of extended excerpts from his diaries.

Author Tom Wolfe describes Richie as: "the Lafcadio Hearn of our time, a subtle, stylish, and deceptively lucid medium between two cultures that confuse one another: the Japanese and the American."

[edit] Japanese cinema

Richie's finest accomplishment has been his analysis of Japanese cinema. From his first published book, Richie has revised not only the library of films he discusses, but the way he analyzes them. With each subsequent book, he has focused less on film theory and more on the conditions in which the films were made. One thing that has remained constant throughout his works is an emphasis on the "presentational" nature of Japan's cinema, in contrast to the "representational" films of the West. His book, A Hundred Years Of Japanese Film includes a helpful guide to the availability of the films mentioned in the text. In the foreword to this book, Paul Schrader says: "Whatever we in the West know about Japanese film, and how we know it, we most likely owe to Donald Richie." Richie also has written analyses of two of Japan's greatest filmmakers: Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa.