Morris, Garry and Battle, Gregory. "The Bright Light Film Journal"

January 16, 2000. www.brightlightsfilm.com/japan.html

Browsing through the web, there was a journal named The Bright Light Film Journal that embraced the Japanese cinema. Among actor profiles, animation, book reviews, director profiles, film reviews, interviews, and silent film, there was an indication of the contents in issue 22 and 21 that caught my attention. It was a brief, yet interesting summary about Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, two "undisputed masters from the golden age of Japanese cinema." The web site takes a journalistic approach to the history of Mizoguchi's life and correlates the economical failure of a greedy father and the selling of his sister as a geisha to the essence of the director's way of work. This example of summary can be found throughout the web site in all the categories mentioned above. Its intended audience is a casual one. Although the site provides an extensive list of film reviews, the information provided in the web site is rather superficial for any scholar work. The creators of this site considered the Journal "a popular-academic hybrid of movie analysis, history, and commentary, looking at classic and commercial, independent, exploitation, and international film from a wide range of vantage points from the aesthetic to the political. A prime area of focus is on the connection between capitalist society and the images that reflect, support, or subvert it&emdash;movies as propaganda."

Personally, I found the web site very good. It contained useful popular-academic information for a first contact with the fascinating world of Japanese Cinema. Having read the article, one is able consequently to choose where to broaden his/her studies and interests. The summaries are good enough to arouse the interest about certain movies and books that could have gone unnoticed otherwise.

Romulo Craveiro Braga