Japanese cinema

From New World Encyclopedia


Japanese cinema (映画; Eiga) has a history in Japan that spans more than 100 years. It is the source of the following signature genres and subgenres: Anime (Japanese Animation, which unlike western cartoons is not always for kids), Jidaigeki (period pieces featuring samurai and sword fighting), Cult Horror Films (such as The Ring and Battle Royale known in the west as J-Horror), Kaiju (monster films such as Gojira), Pink films (softcore pornographic films often more socially-engaged and aesthically well-crafted than simple pornography) and Yakuza films about Japanese mobsters. Japanese Cinema has been the major influence on the later development of cinematic technique in all Asian countries. Japanese directors such as Akira Kurosawa were considered some of the most important and influential filmmakers in the world by Japanese and Western standards, with Kurosawa's work inspiring many American films. In recent years, more and more Japanese films have made an impact in the West.

History

The Silent Era

The first film produced in Japan was the short documentary Geisha no teodori (芸者の手踊り) in June of 1899.

Japan's first star was Matsunosuke Onoe, a kabuki actor who appeared in over 1,000 films, mostly shorts, between 1909 and 1926. He and director Shozo Makino helped to popularize the jidaigeki genre which would eventually become the bread and butter of Japanese great Akira Kurosawa.[1]

The first female Japanese performer to appear in a film professionally was the dancer/actress Tokuko Nagai Takagi, who appeared in four shorts for the American-based Thanhouser Company between 1911 and 1914.[2]

Some of the most discussed silent films from Japan are those of Kenji Mizoguchi, whose later works (e.g., The Life of Oharu) are still highly regarded today.

Most Japanese cinema theatres at the time employed benshi, narrators whose dramatic readings accompanied the film and its musical score which, like in the West, was often performed live. [3]

The 1923 earthquake, the Allied bombing of Tokyo during World War II, as well as the natural effects of time and Japan's humidity on the then more fragile filmstock have all resulted in a great dearth of surviving films from this period.

A study of the gendaigeki (contemporary/modern film drama) and writing for film in Japan in the 1910s to early 1920s, with select translations of scripts (complete as well as excerpts) is available in "Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement" (Joanne Bernardi, Wayne State University Press, 2001).

The 1930s

The first Japanese all-Sound film, The Neighbor's Wife and Mine was directed by Heinosuke Gosho in 1931. Notable talkies of this period include Kenji Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion (Gion no shimai, 1936), Osaka Elegy (1936) and The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (1939), along with Sadao Yamanaka's Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937). However, unlike Hollywood, silent films were still being produced in Japan well into the 1930s:

"A stubborn Ozu continued to make silent films up through An Inn in Tokyo (1935). A key turning point was a 1932 strike by benshi against the announced policy that had urged theaters showing foreign films to fire all of their benshi. The strike was led by Akira Kurosawa's brother, Heigo, a famous benshi who committed suicide after the strike's failure." (Rickman, Japanese Cinema to 1960)

Mikio Naruse's Wife! Be Like A Rose! (Tsuma Yo Bara No Yoni, 1935), was one of the first Japanese films to gain a theatrical release in the U.S. However, with increasing censorship, the left-leaning tendency films of directors such as Daisuke Ito also began to come under attack.

Mizoguchi, influenced in the 1920s by western art and literature, made an early impression with films such as And Yet They Go On (1931), part of a group of left-leaning "social tendency films" produced by progressive filmmakers in the early 1930s. As they decade wore on, Japan's increasingly militarist government instituted a crackdown on the political content of films, which were expected by the end of the decade to conform to a "national policy" of pro-family and pro-military values. One of the most talented Japanese directors of the 1930s, Sadao Yamanaka (1909-38) emphasized individual feelings rather than heroics in his satire of the chambara (sword-fighting) genre The Pot Worth a Million Ryo (1935), and the gentle Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937). Obviously a dissident, he was drafted and sent to the Chinese front, where he died.

"By the 1930s, and despite the worldwide depression and political turmoil that affected the nation, Japan had a thriving film industry, vertically integrated like the American film industry at the time (Japanese studios owned their own theaters as MGM, Paramount, et al, owned chains of theaters in the US). Thus the studios had guaranteed outlets for their films, allowing for the same economies of scale that made Hollywood so strong. Japanese film directors, however, had more autonomy in story selection, screenwriting, cinematography and editing than did all but a few directors working on Hollywood's assembly line." (Rickman, Japanese Cinema to 1960)

The 1940s

With the SCAP occupation following the end of WWII, Japan was exposed to over a decade's worth of American animation that had been banned under the war-time government. Thus the seeds were sewn for decades of revolutionary Japanese anime.

Kenji Mizoguchi made The 47 Ronin, Parts 1 and 2 (1941), a faithful adaptation of the oft-filmed feudal epic Chushingura about the protracted revenge of a disgraced lord's samurai, and the only Mizoguchi film released on DVD. It employs the long-take, highly mobile camera technique that makes the director's films visual masterpieces. Many of Mizoguchi's films are jidaigeki, period films employing a heightened, dispassionate vision that downplays immediate drama - all of the famed violence of the Chushingura saga takes place off-camera in Mizoguchi's version - in favor of tragic contemplation.

Akira Kurosawa made his feature film debut with Sugata Sanshiro in 1943 and went on to make the drama The Most Beautiful (1944), Sanshiro Sugata Part II, The Men Who Tread On the Tiger's Tail in 1945, Those Who Make Tomorrow, and No Regrets for Our Youth in 1946, the romantic comedy One Wonderful Sunday (1947) and the first of his many collaborations with legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune in Drunken Angel (1948). Two more Kurosawa Mifune pairings followed in 1949, The Quiet Duel and Stray Dog.

1949 saw recognized Japanese film visionary Yasujiro Ozu's first collaboration with leading lady Haruko Sugimura in the chaste drama Late Spring.

The 1950s

The 1950s were the zenith of Japanese cinema, and three of its films (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Tokyo Story) made the Sight & Sound's 2002 Critics and Directors Poll for the best films of all time.[4] The decade started with Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and marked the entrance of Japanese cinema onto the world stage. It was also the breakout role for legendary star Toshiro Mifune.[5] 1952 and 1953 saw another Kurosawa film, Ikiru, as well as Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story.

The year 1954 saw two of Japan's most influential films released. The first was the Kurosawa epic Seven Samurai, about a band of hired samurai who protect a helpless village from a rapacious gang of thieves, which was remade in the West as The Magnificent Seven.

That same year Ishirō Honda released the anti-nuclear horror film Gojira, which was translated in the West as Godzilla. Though it was severely edited for its Western release, Godzilla became an international icon of Japan and spawned an entire industry of Kaiju films. In 1955, Hiroshi Inagaki won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Part I of his Samurai Trilogy.

Kon Ichikawa directed two anti-war dramas: The Burmese Harp (1956), and Fires On The Plain (1959), along with Enjo (1958), which was adapted from Yukio Mishima's novel Temple Of The Golden Pavilion.

Masaki Kobayashi made two of the three films which would collectively become known as the The Human Condition Trilogy: No Greater Love (1958), and The Road To Eternity (1959). The trilogy was completed in 1961, with A Soldier's Prayer.

Kenji Mizoguchi directed The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954). He won the Silver Bear at the Venice Film Festival for Ugetsu.

Mikio Naruse made Repast (1950), Late Chrysanthemums (1954), The Sound of the Mountain (1954) and Floating Clouds (1955).

Yasujiro Ozu directed Good Morning (1959) and Floating Weeds (1958), which was adapted from his earlier silent A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), and was shot by Rashomon/Sansho the Bailiff cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa.

The 1960s

Akira Kurosawa directed the 1961 classic Yojimbo, which is considered a huge influence on the Western. Yasujiro Ozu made his final film, An Autumn Afternoon, in 1962. Mikio Naruse directed the widescreen melodrama When a Woman Ascends the Stairs in 1960; his final film was Scattered Clouds, the second of two films he completed in 1967.

Technicolor arrived in Japan in the 1960s. Kon Ichikawa captured the watershed 1964 Olympics in his three-hour documentary Tokyo Olympiad (1965). Seijun Suzuki was fired by Nikkatsu for "making films that don't make any sense and don't make any money" after his surrealist yakuza flick Branded to Kill (1967).

Nagisa Oshima, Kaneto Shindo, Susumu Hani and Shohei Imamura emerged as major filmmakers during the decade. Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth, Night and Fog in Japan and Death By Hanging became three of the better-known examples of Japanese New Wave filmmaking, alongside Shindo's Onibaba, Hani's She And He and Imamura's The Insect Woman.

Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes (1964) won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film Oscars. Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (1965) also picked up the Special Jury Prize at Cannes.

The 1970s

Nagisa Oshima directed In the Realm of the Senses (1976), a World War II period piece about Sada Abe, a woman infamous for erotically asphyxiating her husband and then castrating him and carrying his genitals around in her handbag. Staunchly anti-censorship, he insisted that the film would contain hardcore pornographic material; as a result the exposed film had to be shipped to France for processing, and an uncut version of the film has still, to this day, never been shown in Japan. However, the pink film industry became the stepping stone for young independent filmmakers of Japan.

Yoji Yamada introduced the commercially successful Tora-San series, while also directing other films, notably the popular The Yellow Handkerchief.

Kinji Fukasaku completed the epic Battles Without Honor and Humanity series of yakuza films.

New wave filmmakers Susumu Hani and Shohei Imamura retreated to documentary work, though Imamura made a dramatic return to feature filmmaking with Vengeance Is Mine (1979).

The 1980s

Hayao Miyazaki adapted his manga Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind into a feature film in 1984. Katsuhiro Otomo followed suit with his Akira in 1988. New anime movies were run every summer and winter with characters from popular TV anime. Shohei Imamura won the Golden Palm at Cannes for The Ballad of Narayama (1983).

Akira Kurosawa directed Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985). Likewise, Seijun Suzuki made a comeback, beginning with Zigeunerweisen in 1980.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira Kurosawa) debuted, initially with pink films and genre horror, though growing beyond this (and generating international attention) beginning in the mid 1990s.

The 1990s

Shohei Imamura again won the Golden Palm (shared with Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami), this time for The Eel (1997), joining Alf Sjöberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Bille August as only the fourth two-time recipient.

Takeshi Kitano emerged as a significant filmmaker with works such as Sonatine (1993), Kids Return (1996) and Hana-bi (1997), which was given the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Takashi Miike launched a prolific career, making up to 50 films in a decade, building up an impressive portfolio with titles such as Audition (1999), Dead or Alive (1999) and The Bird People in China (1998).

Former documentary filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda launched an acclaimed feature career with Maborosi (1996) and After Life (1999).

Hayao Miyazaki directed two mammoth box office and critical successes, Porco Rosso (1992) which beat E.T. (1982) as the highest-grossing film in Japan, and Princess Mononoke (1997) which also claimed the top box office spot until Titanic (1997) beat it.

2000 and after

Battle Royale was released, based on a popular novel by the same name. It gained cult film status in Japan and in Britain. Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement to direct Spirited Away (2001), breaking Japanese box office records and winning the U.S. Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. In 2002, Dolls was released, followed by a high-budget remake, Zatoichi in 2003, both directed and written by Takeshi Kitano. The J-Horror films Ringu, Kairo, Dark Water, Yogen, and the Grudge series were remade in English and met with commercial success. In 2004, Godzilla: Final Wars, directed by Ryuhei Kitamura, was released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Godzilla. In 2005, director Seijun Suzuki made his 56th film, Princess Raccoon. Hirokazu Koreeda claimed film festival awards around the world with two of his films Distance and Nobody Knows.


Footnotes

  1. Who's Who in Japanese Silent Films (html). Matsuda Film Productions. Retrieved 2007-01-05.
  2. Cohen, Aaron M.. Tokuko Nagai Takaki: Japan's First Film Actress (html). Bright Lights Film Journal 30 (October 2000). Retrieved 2007-01-05.
  3. For more on benshi, see the books:
  4. http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/
  5. Prince, Stephen (1999). The Warrior's Camera. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01046-3. , p.127.
Dym, Jeffrey A. (2003). Benshi, Japanese Silent Film Narrators, and Their Forgotten Narrative Art of Setsumei: A History of Japanese Silent Film Narration. Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 0-7734-6648-7. (review) and
(2001) The Benshi-Japanese Silent Film Narrators. Tokyo: Urban Connections. ISBN 4-900849-51-0.  [1])

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Bowyer, Justin (2004). 24 Frames: The Cinema of Japan and Korea. Wallflower Press, London. ISBN 1-904764-11-8. 
  • Mellen, Joan (1976). The Waves At Genji's Door: Japan Through Its Cinema. Pantheon, New York. ISBN 0-394-49799-6. 
  • Prince, Stephen (1999). The Warrior's Camera. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01046-3. 
  • Richie, Donald (2005). A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos. Kodansha America. ISBN 4-7700-2995-0. 

External links

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