Books by Joanne Bernardi
Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams, Joshua Yumibe, eds. , 2021
Remnants of early films often have a story to tell. As material artifacts, these film fragments a... more Remnants of early films often have a story to tell. As material artifacts, these film fragments are central to cinema history, perhaps more than ever in our digital age of easy copying and sharing. If a digital copy is previewed before preservation or is shared with a researcher outside the purview of a film archive, knowledge about how the artifact was collected, circulated, and repurposed threatens to become obscured. When the question of origin is overlooked, the story can be lost. Concerned contributors in Provenance and Early Cinema challenge scholars digging through film archives to ask, "How did these moving images get here for me to see them?"
This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives.
Forthcoming Indiana University Press
Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa, eds. , 2020
The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema provides a timely and expansive overview of Japane... more The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema provides a timely and expansive overview of Japanese cinema today, through cutting-edge scholarship that reflects the hybridity of approaches defining the field.
The volume’s twenty-one chapters represent work by authors with diverse backgrounds and expertise, recasting traditional questions of authorship, genre, and industry in broad conceptual frameworks such as gender, media theory, archive studies, and neoliberalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each representing an emergent area of inquiry:
"Decentring Classical Cinema"
"Questions of Industry"
"Intermedia as an Approach"
"The Object Life of Film"
This is the first anthology of Japanese cinema scholarship to span the temporal framework of two hundred years, from the vibrant magic lantern culture of the nineteenth century, through to the formation of the film industry in the twentieth century, and culminating in cinema’s migration to gaming, surveillance video, and other new media platforms of the twenty first century.
This handbook will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Japanese studies, film studies and cultural studies more broadly.
Published August 2020
Copyright 2021
Joanne Bernardi, 2001
While most people associate Japanese film with modern directors like Akira Kurosawa, Japan's cine... more While most people associate Japanese film with modern directors like Akira Kurosawa, Japan's cinema has a rich tradition going back to the silent era. Japan's "pure film movement" of the 1910s is widely held to mark the birth of film theory as we know it and is a touchstone for historians of early cinema. Yet this work has been difficult to access because so few prints have been preserved.
Joanne Bernardi offers the first book-length study of this important era, recovering a body of lost film and establishing its significance in the development of Japanese cinema. Building on a wealth of original-language sources -- much of it translated here for the first time -- she examines how the movement challenged the industry's dependence on pre-existing stage repertories, preference for lecturers over intertitles, and the use of female impersonators.
Bernardi provides in-depth analysis of key scripts -- The Glory of Life, A Father's Tears, Amateur Club, and The Lust of the White Serpent -- and includes translations in an appendix. These films offer case studies for understanding the craft of screenwriting during the silent era and shed light on such issues as genre, authorship and control, and gender representation.
Writing in Light helps fill important gaps in the history of Japanese silent cinema. By identifying points at which "pure film" discourse merges with changing international trends and attitudes toward film, it offers an important resource for film, literary, and cultural historians.
Digital Scholarship by Joanne Bernardi
The Digital Orientalist, 2025
The Digital Orientalist, 2024
This post introduces a series on digital pedagogy, specifically, designing and implementing colla... more This post introduces a series on digital pedagogy, specifically, designing and implementing collaborative digital assignments and related hands-on classroom practices in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. This series is partly motivated by What We Teach When We Teach DH: Digital Humanities in the Classroom (edited by Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki, 2023), a recent addition to the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, with contributions that re-center the role of teaching in DH discourse to underscore its growing importance to the field over the past twenty years. The book's layout, with separate sections on teachers, students, classrooms, and collaborators, argues that teaching is shaped "not only by disciplinary training" but also by our "students, surroundings, and institutional infrastructure," factors this series will take into consideration as I share my own experiences adopting DH strategies to revamp and recharge course assignments and objectives. DH-based in-class assignments, for example, provide novel opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. Semester-long DH course projects can blur distinctions between research and teaching as students become "coinvestigators" on large-scale and/or ongoing research projects that apply technology to facilitate or amplify humanistic intellectual inquiry.
Full article: https://digitalorientalist.com/2024/05/24/exploring-digital-humanities-in-the-classroom-part-1/
The Digital Orientalist, 2023
Re-Envisioning Japan is an open-ended recuperative project based on an original collection of tou... more Re-Envisioning Japan is an open-ended recuperative project based on an original collection of tourism, travel and educational ephemera in a wide range of media. This Omeka site extends the capabilities of the first iteration of the "REJ" digital archive, built on a WordPress platform (2013-2016) . Most of the objects in the REJ collection (e.g., ephemeral films, 3-D objects, postcards, sheet music, travel brochures, etc.) are common use items; they all document personal experience, cross-cultural encounters, and changing representations of Japan and its place in the world in the early to mid 20th century. This collaborative digital humanities project is housed in the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries Digital Scholarship Lab; the collection, started in 2000, is currently transitioning to the University’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation.
A critical digital archive documenting changing representations of Japan in early-to-mid 20th cen... more A critical digital archive documenting changing representations of Japan in early-to-mid 20th century tourism, travel, and educational ephemera. The contents of this site are currently being migrated to newer Omeka site launched in January 2017; both sites coexist until that migration is complete. This project draws on a personal collection (2000 - present) of diverse media (including films, lantern slides, photographs, postcards, sheet music, travel brochures, guidebooks, souvenirs, books, magazines, etc.). This collection has been donated to the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, where it will be re-housed as The Re-Envisioning Japan Research Collection.
Book Chapters by Joanne Bernardi
In Recollecting Collecting: a Film and Media Perspective. ed. Lucy Fischer (Wayne State Universit... more In Recollecting Collecting: a Film and Media Perspective. ed. Lucy Fischer (Wayne State University Press, 2023)
"[Recollecting Collecting] draws on three vibrant currents of contemporary critical studies. The first is an interest in material culture, which is commonly understood as “the aspect of social reality grounded in the objects and architecture that surround people. It includes the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects as well as the behaviors, norms, and rituals that the objects create or take part in.” ….
The second, though less pervasive, current of thought that has influenced this volume is thing theory, which attends to the status and role of objects in human life—a corrective to the alleged academic privileging of ideas….
The third (most obvious and dominant) current of thought related to this volume is the scholarly investigation of the social and psychological aspects of collecting. While in the past this topic concentrated primarily on the established inventories of museums, libraries, and other recognized institutions, in the contemporary era the focus has shifted to the activity of individual people….
In chapter 4, “Animate Objects,” Joanne Bernardi discusses her collection of objects and ephemera related to her teaching and researching of Japanese culture and film history. It includes souvenir film programs, glass lantern slides, stereographs, advertisements, sheet music, tourism materials, small-gauge films and postcards. These items help animate the vision of twentieth-century Japan pictured in the movies that she teaches and writes about. With the help of institutions like the George Eastman Museum, she has utilized her collection to create a vast collaborative digital archive (Re-envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture) that is employed by students and researchers of Japanese culture and cinema."
Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, 2020
This chapter details the events that led to the founding of Ōta Yoneo’s Toy Film Museum in Kyoto ... more This chapter details the events that led to the founding of Ōta Yoneo’s Toy Film Museum in Kyoto in 2015, its mission, and the significance of its collection. Drawing on the author’s interviews with Ōta, newspaper articles, and Ōta’s published research, it situates the museum’s roots in Ōta’s college experiences, the addition of film studies to the academic curriculum in Kyoto and Osaka in the late 1960s and 1970s, and Ōta’s relationships with mentors Yoda Yoshikata and Miyagawa Kazuo, fellow faculty in the Osaka University of Arts Visual Concept Planning Department. These relationships led to film restorations widely screened in Japan and at international venues. From 2003-2011, Ōta directed the collaborative Toy Film Project, restoring and digitizing 800 35mm “toy films” (nontheatrical entertainment especially popular in the 1920s and 1930s) on flammable cellulose nitrate film stock and a number of small-gauge films on “safety” cellulose acetate stock, all in varying stages of degradation. The project helped advance restoration technique and an appreciation of toy films and their technology as a distinct form of film culture within the broader historical context of “home cinema,” creating new opportunities for understanding nontheatrical film production and consumption in Japan in the early-to-mid-twentieth century.
Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers. Special volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017
Re-envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture (REJ) is a... more Re-envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture (REJ) is an ongoing faculty-Digital Humanities Center project that models humanistic scholarship realized and communicated through creative curation and a collaboratively built digital environment. REJ encompasses both a digital archive and a material collection of tourism, travel, and educational ephemera in a wide range of media, documenting changing representations of Japan and its place in the world in the early-to-mid-20th c. This chapter traces REJ’s five-year development from the prospect of a scholarly monograph with a digital component to a collaborative project that functions as critical humanities scholarship. The process of re-imagining contexts of the past by connecting objects in relevant and meaningful ways has been key to REJ’s development as object-driven research: instead of using the objects and images in the REJ collection to illustrate pre-existing narratives, the REJ digital archive has evolved from questions and lines of investigation derived from the images and objects themselves, exposing the scholarship inherent in the curatorial process.
Japanese Cinema, ed. Nikki J.Y. Lee and Julian Stringer. London and New York: Routledge, 2015
Reprinted from Bernardi, Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movemen... more Reprinted from Bernardi, Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (Detroit: Wayne State University Press) 2001, 21-66.
Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, ed. Jeffrey Geiger and R.L. Rutsky. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005
2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Co., 2013, 240-261
Bellezza e Tristezza: Il cinema di Mizoguchi Kenji, ed. Dario Tomasi. Milano: Editrice Il Castoro, 2009
Yoshikata Yoda and Kenji Mizoguchi's early collaborative relationship, with an analysis of Yoshik... more Yoshikata Yoda and Kenji Mizoguchi's early collaborative relationship, with an analysis of Yoshikata Yoda's screenplay for Sisters of the Gion (Gion no kyodai, 1936).
Original English language manuscript for "Dare vita alla pagina: la collaborazione con Yoda Yoshi... more Original English language manuscript for "Dare vita alla pagina: la collaborazione con Yoda Yoshikata" (ed. Dario Tomasi, Milano: Editrice Il Castoro, 2009, 159-171)
In Godzilla's Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage, ed. William M. Tsutsui and Michiko Ito. New York: Palgrave, 2006
Asian Cinema–Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, ed. Myung-Kyu Park. Seoul: Korean Film Archive, 2002
Proceedings, Asian Cinema--Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, FIAF (International Federation of Film ... more Proceedings, Asian Cinema--Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) 58th Congress, Seoul, April 22, 2002.
Currents in Japanese Culture: Translations and Transformations, ed. Amy Vladeck Heinrich. New York: Columbia University Press., 1997
Film and the First World War, ed. Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995
Journal articles by Joanne Bernardi
Film History, 1997
Kaeriyama was a founding editor of Kinema Record (originally Film Record, 1913), Japan's self-pro... more Kaeriyama was a founding editor of Kinema Record (originally Film Record, 1913), Japan's self-proclaimed (in English) 'illustrated leading cinema trade journal', and the author of Katsudo shashingeki no sosaku to satsuei ho (The Production and Photography of Moving Picture Drama, 1917), the only technical handbook of its kind at the time. The appendix to this article is a translation (by J. Bernardi) of his scenario for The Glory of Life (1918-1919), pages 377-387.
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Books by Joanne Bernardi
This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives.
Forthcoming Indiana University Press
The volume’s twenty-one chapters represent work by authors with diverse backgrounds and expertise, recasting traditional questions of authorship, genre, and industry in broad conceptual frameworks such as gender, media theory, archive studies, and neoliberalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each representing an emergent area of inquiry:
"Decentring Classical Cinema"
"Questions of Industry"
"Intermedia as an Approach"
"The Object Life of Film"
This is the first anthology of Japanese cinema scholarship to span the temporal framework of two hundred years, from the vibrant magic lantern culture of the nineteenth century, through to the formation of the film industry in the twentieth century, and culminating in cinema’s migration to gaming, surveillance video, and other new media platforms of the twenty first century.
This handbook will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Japanese studies, film studies and cultural studies more broadly.
Published August 2020
Copyright 2021
Joanne Bernardi offers the first book-length study of this important era, recovering a body of lost film and establishing its significance in the development of Japanese cinema. Building on a wealth of original-language sources -- much of it translated here for the first time -- she examines how the movement challenged the industry's dependence on pre-existing stage repertories, preference for lecturers over intertitles, and the use of female impersonators.
Bernardi provides in-depth analysis of key scripts -- The Glory of Life, A Father's Tears, Amateur Club, and The Lust of the White Serpent -- and includes translations in an appendix. These films offer case studies for understanding the craft of screenwriting during the silent era and shed light on such issues as genre, authorship and control, and gender representation.
Writing in Light helps fill important gaps in the history of Japanese silent cinema. By identifying points at which "pure film" discourse merges with changing international trends and attitudes toward film, it offers an important resource for film, literary, and cultural historians.
Digital Scholarship by Joanne Bernardi
Full article: https://digitalorientalist.com/2024/05/24/exploring-digital-humanities-in-the-classroom-part-1/
Book Chapters by Joanne Bernardi
"[Recollecting Collecting] draws on three vibrant currents of contemporary critical studies. The first is an interest in material culture, which is commonly understood as “the aspect of social reality grounded in the objects and architecture that surround people. It includes the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects as well as the behaviors, norms, and rituals that the objects create or take part in.” ….
The second, though less pervasive, current of thought that has influenced this volume is thing theory, which attends to the status and role of objects in human life—a corrective to the alleged academic privileging of ideas….
The third (most obvious and dominant) current of thought related to this volume is the scholarly investigation of the social and psychological aspects of collecting. While in the past this topic concentrated primarily on the established inventories of museums, libraries, and other recognized institutions, in the contemporary era the focus has shifted to the activity of individual people….
In chapter 4, “Animate Objects,” Joanne Bernardi discusses her collection of objects and ephemera related to her teaching and researching of Japanese culture and film history. It includes souvenir film programs, glass lantern slides, stereographs, advertisements, sheet music, tourism materials, small-gauge films and postcards. These items help animate the vision of twentieth-century Japan pictured in the movies that she teaches and writes about. With the help of institutions like the George Eastman Museum, she has utilized her collection to create a vast collaborative digital archive (Re-envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture) that is employed by students and researchers of Japanese culture and cinema."
Journal articles by Joanne Bernardi
This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives.
Forthcoming Indiana University Press
The volume’s twenty-one chapters represent work by authors with diverse backgrounds and expertise, recasting traditional questions of authorship, genre, and industry in broad conceptual frameworks such as gender, media theory, archive studies, and neoliberalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each representing an emergent area of inquiry:
"Decentring Classical Cinema"
"Questions of Industry"
"Intermedia as an Approach"
"The Object Life of Film"
This is the first anthology of Japanese cinema scholarship to span the temporal framework of two hundred years, from the vibrant magic lantern culture of the nineteenth century, through to the formation of the film industry in the twentieth century, and culminating in cinema’s migration to gaming, surveillance video, and other new media platforms of the twenty first century.
This handbook will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Japanese studies, film studies and cultural studies more broadly.
Published August 2020
Copyright 2021
Joanne Bernardi offers the first book-length study of this important era, recovering a body of lost film and establishing its significance in the development of Japanese cinema. Building on a wealth of original-language sources -- much of it translated here for the first time -- she examines how the movement challenged the industry's dependence on pre-existing stage repertories, preference for lecturers over intertitles, and the use of female impersonators.
Bernardi provides in-depth analysis of key scripts -- The Glory of Life, A Father's Tears, Amateur Club, and The Lust of the White Serpent -- and includes translations in an appendix. These films offer case studies for understanding the craft of screenwriting during the silent era and shed light on such issues as genre, authorship and control, and gender representation.
Writing in Light helps fill important gaps in the history of Japanese silent cinema. By identifying points at which "pure film" discourse merges with changing international trends and attitudes toward film, it offers an important resource for film, literary, and cultural historians.
Full article: https://digitalorientalist.com/2024/05/24/exploring-digital-humanities-in-the-classroom-part-1/
"[Recollecting Collecting] draws on three vibrant currents of contemporary critical studies. The first is an interest in material culture, which is commonly understood as “the aspect of social reality grounded in the objects and architecture that surround people. It includes the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects as well as the behaviors, norms, and rituals that the objects create or take part in.” ….
The second, though less pervasive, current of thought that has influenced this volume is thing theory, which attends to the status and role of objects in human life—a corrective to the alleged academic privileging of ideas….
The third (most obvious and dominant) current of thought related to this volume is the scholarly investigation of the social and psychological aspects of collecting. While in the past this topic concentrated primarily on the established inventories of museums, libraries, and other recognized institutions, in the contemporary era the focus has shifted to the activity of individual people….
In chapter 4, “Animate Objects,” Joanne Bernardi discusses her collection of objects and ephemera related to her teaching and researching of Japanese culture and film history. It includes souvenir film programs, glass lantern slides, stereographs, advertisements, sheet music, tourism materials, small-gauge films and postcards. These items help animate the vision of twentieth-century Japan pictured in the movies that she teaches and writes about. With the help of institutions like the George Eastman Museum, she has utilized her collection to create a vast collaborative digital archive (Re-envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture) that is employed by students and researchers of Japanese culture and cinema."
Co-Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor, from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Department of Art & Art History, Department of English, Department of Modern Languages & Cultures, Film & Media Studies, Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, the Digital Scholarship Lab, and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in the Digital Humanities at the University of Rochester.