![]() ![]() “ Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom brings superb research and historical rigor to Hayakawa, an underrated Japanese silent film star, and to transnational film spectatorship during the early years of Hollywood. lluminating.” - David Cozy, Asahi Shimbun Miyao's scrupulous reading of each of Hayakawa's major films makes this clear. “ How was that possible in an age that-we would like to believe-was less tolerant and multicultural than our own? Miyao's consideration of Hayakawa's career moves us some way toward an answer to this question and also suggests that it was as surprising then as it would be now for an Asian male's star to shine as brightly as Hayakawa's. This unique history of transnational silent-film stardom focuses attention on the ways that race, ethnicity, and nationality influenced the early development of the global film industry. audiences created ambivalence in Japan, where some described him as traitorously Americanized and others as a positive icon of modernized Japan. Hayakawa himself struggled to maintain his sympathetic persona while creating more complex Japanese characters that would appeal to both American and Japanese audiences. Lasky production company sought to shape Hayakawa’s image by emphasizing the actor’s Japanese traits while portraying him as safely assimilated into U.S. Hayakawa’s early work included short films about Japan that were popular with American audiences as well as spy films that played upon anxieties about Japanese nationalism. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) through his reign as a matinee idol and the subsequent decline and resurrection of his Hollywood fortunes.ĭrawing on early-twentieth-century sources in both English and Japanese, including Japanese-language newspapers in the United States, Miyao illuminates the construction and reception of Hayakawa’s stardom as an ongoing process of cross-cultural negotiation. In this critical study of Hayakawa’s stardom, Daisuke Miyao reconstructs the Japanese actor’s remarkable career, from the films that preceded his meteoric rise to fame as the star of Cecil B. While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886–1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. ![]() ![]() Labor and Working-Class History Association.Association for Middle East Women's Studies.Author Resources from University Presses.Permissions Information for Journal Authors.Journals fulfilled by DUP Journal Services. ![]()
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