Biographie

17 avril 1924 · Lima, Ohio, États-Unis

19 février 2013 · Tokyo, Japon (insuffisance cardiaque)

Donald Steiner Richie

Author who wrote about the Japanese people and Japanese cinema.

Formed the collective Film Independant with Nobuhiko Ôbayashi and Takahiko Iimura in 1964.

He virtually invented the discipline of Japanese film studies in English with his pioneering survey books on Japanese cinema and his classic studies of the works of Yasujirô Ozu and Akira Kurosawa.

[on movies] One learns a great deal from the movies. One learns comportment, one learns philosophy, one learns metaphysics, and one learns the meaning of life. I suppose that when one goes to the movies, it sort of seeps in through osmosis, and one learns a lot without knowing it -- even the latest violent flick, one does still does learn something. If you go to a film that thinks, then you learn a great deal more. I think this is true of the appeal of the films. I think that people approach films not only as an escapist drama of one kind or another. These are the great cathedrals of learning. People learn things. I remember in high school, some girls watched how June Allyson went down the steps, which was very graceful. And soon they were all doing it. Betty Grable taught me how to make eggs. You do use it for learning. I mean, role models: Gary Cooper taught me always to be noble and honest. And Johnny Weismuller taught me how to yodel and go through trees! You learn things, right?

[on writing] When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn't have, and I could order this environment in the way that I couldn't in my actual life. Then, when I learned to write, I learned that I could do this not only for myself, but for other people. I could create whole things that were believable, at least to myself, at that point. And in this way, I began to wield an authority and a power that I had not had before. In other words, every child goes through this. Some pick football and some pick the library. I picked the library.

[on movies] What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movies and I soon grew to prefer the life of the movies to my own life. The reality that the movies offered was preferable to the reality that I was experiencing. I became a child movie addict. I would go in with great pleasure and I'd never look at what was playing -- what was playing was unimportant. The fact was that I was entering a new world, an environment where not only was it much more attractive than my life was ordinarily, but also I could manipulate it to an extent by coming and going, and by looking at scenes or not, which I could not in my own life. I was subjected to my own domestic life. But I discovered a kind of power at the movies.