Academic Article - Lone Wolf, The Street Fighter

[Guest vectortv]

Hi all,

am currently writing an academic article for publication on the role of Anti-hero in 70's Japanese Martial Arts cinema. Choosing to focus on Lone Wolf, and The Street Fighter. Have had trouble finding a lot of academic or non fan-based writing on these films. Just wondering if anyone has any reference material or can point me in the direction of articles that might help.

The main focus of the article will be on the protagonist being anti-hero. I would like to discuss the relationship and influences of other genres in visual style such as the Spaghetti Western.

Any help, thoughts, ideas, suggestions, appreciated.

regards

Andrew McKenzie

[Guest KClosson]

Something that might be helpful is to hunt down the book Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History. In that book is an article by David Desser, “Toward a Structural Analysis of the Postwar Samurai Filmâ€. He talks about the various categories of samurai films. One category he calls the “Sword Film†(Chambara) he discusses and outlines the patterns these movies usually follow. The Lone Wolf series is referred to a few times and the whole article you might find useful.

The Samurai Film by Alain Silver covers a lot of the modern samurai films. If you go to a college library and look in the foreign film sections and see what they have for Japanese cinema you might find a few things. If you are limiting it to the 70’s, the problem is a lot of books will be dedicated to Kurosawa or really old movies. Yojimbo is usually considered the first of the post-war anti-hero’s, but Japanese anti-hero’s go all the way back to the silent era.

KC