Dr Isolde Standish

As a graduate of (Hollywood and European) Film and Media Studies in 1984, I found myself seeking new directions, both academic and geographical, to launch my post-graduate studies. As chance would have it, I found a teaching post in Japan where I discovered a fascinating and often different way of representing the world through cinema. My curiosity then led me to Korea and, more recently, is taking me into World Cinema.

My writing centres on the history of Japanese and Korean Cinema. My first book, Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political Reading of the Tragic Hero (Routledge/Curzon 2000), explored the ‘homosocial’ codes underpinning Japanese films from the war-retro and yakuza genres as a site of audience male pleasure. My second book, A New History of Japanese Cinema: a Century of Narrative Film (Continuum 2005) took, as its starting point, the view that the auteur theory was inadequate to explain how Japanese cinema functioned within cultural life. My third book, Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (Continuum 2011) locates the Japanese avant-garde film movement as a dissentient intellectual group of filmmakers. My fourth book is Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema (Routledge 2015).