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Brushed in Light: Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema
Drawing on a millennia of calligraphy theory and history, Brushed in Light examines how the brushed word appears in films and in film cultures of Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and PRC cinemas. This includes silent era intertitles, subtitles, title frames, letters, graffiti, end titles, and props. Markus Nornes also looks at the role of calligraphy in film culture at large, from gifts to correspondence to advertising. The book begins with a historical dimension, tracking how calligraphy is initially used in early cinema and how it is continually rearticulated by transforming conventions and the integration of new technologies. These chapters ask how calligraphy creates new meaning in cinema and demonstrate how calligraphy, cinematography, and acting work together in a single film. The last part of the book moves to other regions of theory. Nornes explores the cinematization of the handwritten word and explores how calligraphers understand their own work.
Figure 0.3. Itomi Keinan’s famous calligraphy for People Whose Work Is Necessary Murder (Hissatsu shigotonin, 1972) and the scroll painting a friend gave me, evidencing the iterability built into calligraphy. A wedding present, Itomi left out the characters for “necessary murder”; however, the vigorous movement of Itomi’s body during the act of inscription is viscerally palpable and points to the show’s violence.
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