| Stuart Galbraith IV | |
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| Born | photo with film historian Donald Ritchie in Japan |
Stuart Galbraith IV is an American cinema historian, film critic, and DVD special features producer, essayist, and audio commentator.
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Raised in Livonia, Michigan, Galbraith first worked professionally as a film reviewer and long-running home video columnist for The Ann Arbor News. In 1993, Galbraith moved to Los Angeles, California, where he eventually earned an M.A. from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television.
Galbraith’s Japanese Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films, the first English-language book about the genre, was published in 1994, soon followed by The Japanese Filmography.
Galbraith’s 1998 book Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo! The Incredible World of Japanese Fantasy Films was an oral history of the genre, told by such filmmakers as Kinji Fukasaku, Jun Fukuda, Kihachi Okamoto, and Noriaki Yuasa, and actors Mie Hama, Kumi Mizuno, and Akira Takarada.
After graduation, Galbraith worked as an archivist for the USC-Warner Bros. Archives, and later worked at the Warner Bros. Corporate Archives before writing The Emperor and the Wolf, a joint biography of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshirō Mifune, and the first biography of either man published outside Japan. As with Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo!, the 800-page book featured original interviews with collobrators including Shinobu Hashimoto, Kyoko Kagawa, Takeshi Kato, Yoshiro Muraki, Masaru Sato, and Senkichi Taniguchi.
After that book’s publication, Galbraith returned to archive work, as a “film detective” for MGM, tracking down the original camera negatives to more than three dozen "lost" films.
On DVD, Galbraith’s essays have accompanied Criterion's three-disc Seven Samurai, Optimum's Rashomon, and BCI Eclipse's The Quiet Duel. He was an associate producer for the DVDs of the classic poolroom drama The Hustler and Sidney Lumet's The Verdict. He provided audio commentary (with director Richard Fleischer) for the Special Edition DVD of Tora! Tora! Tora!, and interviewed Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond for his audio commentary track for The Sadist. Galbraith's audio commentary for Classic Media's Invasion of Astro-Monster was released in 2007 and nominated for a Rondo Hatton Award.
Since August 2003, Galbraith has been a reviewer for the website DVD Talk, where to date he has published more than 1,000 reviews.
In 2003 Galbraith moved to Kyoto, Japan, with his wife, Yukiyo Nishi. Their daughter, Sadie, was born in 2007. In addition to his work as a cinema scholar, until 2009 Galbraith published a monthly home video column for the English-language edition of the Daily Yomiuri. He also records narration and voice-over for industrial and educational films.
Galbraith’s The Toho Studios Story was published in 2008, and Japanese Cinema, edited by Paul Duncan, was published by Taschen in 2009. Also in 2009 he recorded a commentary track for AnimEigo’s Tora-san, Our Loveable Tramp.
Galbraith is not directly related to Kilimanjaro Live music promoter Stuart Galbraith or former Ballyclare Comrades midfielder Stuart Galbraith.