Naoki Yamamoto

Biography

Naoki Yamamoto specializes in film theory, Japanese cinema, Marxist criticism, documentary films, avant-garde art, post-colonial studies, and Japanese cultural history. His new book Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in A Global Frame (California, 2020) explores Japan’s active but previously unrecognized participation in the global circulation of film theory during the first half of the twentieth century. He has published widely in both English and Japanese, covering topics such as the reception of early American cinema in 1910s Japan, wartime Japanese-German film co-productions, Japanese New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s, and recent Hollywood blockbuster films. He is also the co-editor of Tenkeiki no Mediologī (Shinwasha, 2019), an anthology in Japanese on media theory and practice in 1950s Japan.