Keisuke Kinoshita was born Masakichi Kinoshita on 5 December 1912, in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, as the fourth of eight children of merchant Shūkichi Kinoshita and his wife Tama. His family manufactured pickles and owned a grocery store.[1] A film fan already in early years, he vowed to become a filmmaker, but faced opposition from his parents.
When he was in high school, a film crew arrived in Hamamatsu for location shooting one day. He befriended actor Bando Junosuke when the latter came to his store for local products. Bando later helped him run away to Kyoto where most period films were made, but his grandfather came and took him back home the next day. His determination to become a filmmaker finally moved his parents into letting him pursue his career. His mother secured him an introduction to the Shochiku Kamata studios, where Ozu, Mikio Naruse, and other famous directors worked.[3]
Without a university education, however, Kinoshita was not allowed to work as an assistant director and had to start as a photographer; he applied to the Oriental Photography School and graduated before he was finally admitted into Shochiku. There, he first worked in the film processing laboratory, then as a camera assistant, before he became assistant director for Yasujirō Shimazu and later Kōzaburō Yoshimura.[4] In 1940, Kinoshita was drafted into the Sino-Japanese War and went to China, but returned the following year due to an injury.[1]
Film career (1943–1998)
Wartime (1943-1944)
Kinoshita re-entered Shochiku and was promoted to director in 1943. Kinoshita's first four films were all propaganda supporting the Japanese war effort, though Kinoshita would undercut the propaganda with comedy and empathetic portrayals of ordinary people suffering because of the war.[5] Adapting a popular play by Kazuo Kikuta,[6] he made the comedy Port of Flowers with a large cast and budget.[5] The same year saw the emergence of another new director, Akira Kurosawa, but it was Kinoshita who won the much coveted New Director Award at the end of that year.[citation needed]
In 1944, Kinoshita released his fourth film, Army.[5] Like his previous films, Army was propaganda.[5] Yet, the famous final scene showed a mother grieving her son's departure for the front instead of cheering him.[7][8] Although it passed the censors, Kinoshita met with harsh criticism and was not allowed to direct another film until the end of the Second World War. He later argued, "I can't lie to myself in my dramas. I couldn't direct something that was like shaking hands and saying, 'Come die.'"[9][10][11] He returned to his hometown Hamamatsu, where he waited for the war to end.[1]
Post-war (1946-1998)
Kinoshita's first post war film was Morning for the Osone Family (1946) about a family torn apart by war and conflicts between its liberal-minded and pro-militarist members. The final scene, with the remaining family greeting the rising sun, was demanded by the American censorship board against Kinoshita's objections.[12] In the following years, he worked in a variety of genres, including comedy, period and contemporary drama, ghost story, and thriller.[9] Starting with Phoenix in 1947, Kinoshita took on Masaki Kobayashi as an apprentice, who would continue to assist Kinoshita until 1953.[5] In 1949, the highly successful romantic comedy Here's to the Young Lady was released, starring Setsuko Hara.[12]
In 1951, Kinoshita travelled to France to meet his idol, French director René Clair. As Kinoshita stated, another reason for the travel was to see his home country from a different perspective.[13] The same year saw the release of the musical comedy Carmen Comes Home, Japan's first colour feature.[7] Due to technical and financial reasons, a black-and-white version was also filmed and released.[14][15]Carmen Comes Home was the first collaboration of Kinoshita with actress Hideko Takamine, who appeared in many of his later films. Early on, Kinoshita gathered a steady group of co-workers around him: Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiko Kuga, Keiji Sada and Yūko Mochizuki had repeated starring or bigger supporting roles, while his brother Chuji (also credited Tadashi) scored, and cinematographer Hiroshi Kusuda photographed many of his films. In 1953, Kinoshita wrote the script for Masaki Kobayashi's first feature length film, Sincerity.[5] Kinoshita's sister and wife of Hiroshi Kusada, Yoshiko Kusuda, wrote the screenplay for Farewell to Dream (1956).[16]
The mid-1950s marked the release of two of Kinoshita's most acclaimed films, Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), a portrait of a school teacher who sees the dreams of her young pupils fall apart due to economical constraints and the war, and You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (1955), a Meiji era period drama about the unfulfilled love between two teenagers.[7][17] Also highly popular was the lighthouse keeper drama Times of Joy and Sorrow (1957),[18] which was repeatedly remade in later years, including one version by Kinoshita himself.[19]The Ballad of Narayama (1958), a highly stylised period drama about the legendary ubasute practice, was entered into the 19th Venice International Film Festival, but met with very mixed reactions.[20]
By the mid 1960s, Kinoshita had turned solely to television work. Film historian Donald Richie saw the period war drama The River Fuefuki (1960) and The Scent of Incense (1964), which follows a troubled mother-daughter-relationship over a span of 4 decades, as the director's last notable works.[21][22] Alexander Jacoby also found the 1960 satire Spring Dreams noteworthy, which he called "quirkily enjoyable".[7]
Like directors of the previous generation as Ozu and Naruse, Kinoshita stayed loyal to one film studio (Shochiku) before turning to television, and often worked for Shochiku even in later years,[23] while other directors of his generation as Yoshimura and Kaneto Shindō, and even the older Heinosuke Gosho, had started working independently for different studios by the early 1950s.[12][24]
Although few concrete details have emerged about Kinoshita's personal life, his homosexuality was widely known in the film world. Screenwriter and frequent collaborator Yoshio Shirasaka recalls the "brilliant scene" Kinoshita made with the handsome, well-dressed assistant directors he surrounded himself with.[25] His 1959 film Farewell to Spring has been called "Japan's first gay film" for the emotional intensity depicted between its male characters.[26]
Kinoshita died on December 30, 1998, of a stroke.[27] His grave is in Engaku-ji in Kamakura, very near to that of his fellow Shochiku director, Yasujirō Ozu.
Although not limited to a certain genre, the two main veins of Kinoshita's work were comedy and melodrama. A major theme was the depiction of national history in personal terms, chronicling families or communities over a certain span of time. Also, his films often concentrated on the sufferings of children in oppressive circumstances, and showed a general sympathy with the socially marginalised. Working less on an analytical but an intuitive level, Kinoshita's films showed, according to Alexander Jacoby, an occasional simplicity and naivety, yet in the cases of Twenty-Four Eyes and You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum, they were among the most purely moving of Japanese cinema.[7] Donald Richie also pointed out the satire and comedy of character in Kinoshita's comedy films, and an emotional earnestness which exceeded sentimentality in his serious films.[13] Sometimes critical of his later work, Richie detected an increasing traditionalism in films like The Ballad of Narayama, The River Fuefuki and Scent of Incense.[28]
Although he often adapted literary works from writers like Tōson Shimazaki, Kunio Kishida and Isoko Hatano, many of his screenplays were based on his original idea. Kinoshita explained his prolific output with the fact that he "can't help it. Ideas for films have always just popped into my head like scraps of paper into a wastebasket."[29] Some of his scripts were realised by other directors, including the acknowledged directorial debut of actress Kinuyo Tanaka, Love Letter (1953).
Kinoshita was also an avid stylist who experimented with cinematic form in his films. He used expressionist camera angles in Carmen's Innocent Love,[7]daguerreotype-like framing of images in She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum,[30] or partial tinting to evoke the impression of Japanese woodblock prints in The River Fuefuki.[21] In A Japanese Tragedy, he interspersed newsreel footage, and drew upon kabuki stage effects in The Ballad of Narayama.[31]The Snow Flurry told its story in a fragmented, nonlinear manner, preceding the New Wave.[32]
Legacy and cultural impact
Kinoshita's birth town Hamamatsu established the "Keisuke Kinoshita Memorial Museum" to commemorate him.[33]
A retrospective on Kinoshita with 15 of his films was held at the Lincoln Center, New York, in 2012.[34] In 2013, five of Kinoshita's films — Jubilation Street (1944), Woman (1948), Engagement Ring (1950), Farewell to Dream (1956) and A Legend or Was It? (1963) — were screened in the Forum section of the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival.[35]
Reputation among filmmakers
In 1946 Masaki Kobayashi became Kinoshita's assistant[36] and later formed with him, Akira Kurosawa, and Kon Ichikawa a directors group called Shiki no kai (The Four Horsemen Club). The goal was to produce films for a younger audience, but only one project was realised, Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-den (1970).[37]
Director Tadashi Imai was an outspoken admirer of Kinoshita's work,[38] and Nagisa Ōshima named The Garden of Women as the film which led to his decision to become a filmmaker himself in his 1995 documentary 100 Years of Japanese Cinema.[39]
Masaki Kobayashi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter, best known for the epic trilogy The Human Condition (1959–1961), the samurai films Harakiri (1962) and Samurai Rebellion (1967), and the horror anthology Kwaidan (1964). Senses of Cinema described him as "one of the finest depicters of Japanese society in the 1950s and 1960s."
Shōhei Imamura was a Japanese film director. His main interest as a filmmaker lay in the depiction of the lower strata of Japanese society. A key figure in the Japanese New Wave, who continued working into the 21st century, Imamura is the only director from Japan to win two Palme d'Or awards.
Kinuyo Tanaka was a Japanese actress and film director. She had a career lasting over 50 years with more than 250 acting credits, but was best known for her 15 films with director Kenji Mizoguchi, such as The Life of Oharu (1952) and Ugetsu (1953). With her 1953 directorial debut, Love Letter, Tanaka became the second Japanese woman to direct a film, after Tazuko Sakane.
The Ballad of Narayama is a 1958 Japanese historical drama film directed by Keisuke Kinoshita. It is based on the 1956 novella of the same name by Shichirō Fukazawa. The film explores the legendary practice of ubasute, in which elderly people were carried to a mountain and abandoned to die.
Shima Iwashita is a Japanese stage and film actress who has appeared in films of Yasujirō Ozu, Keisuke Kinoshita, Masaki Kobayashi and most frequently of Masahiro Shinoda, her husband.
Chishū Ryū was a Japanese actor who, in a career lasting 65 years, appeared in over 160 films and about 70 television productions.
Donald Richie was an American-born author who wrote about the Japanese people, the culture of Japan, and especially Japanese cinema. Although he considered himself primarily a film historian, Richie also directed a number of experimental films, the first when he was seventeen.
Mikio Naruse was a Japanese filmmaker who directed 89 films spanning the period 1930 to 1967.
Hideko Takamine was a Japanese actress who began as a child actress and maintained her fame in a career that spanned 50 years. She is particularly known for her collaborations with directors Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita, with Twenty-Four Eyes (1954) and Floating Clouds (1955) being among her most noted films.
Shōshimin-eiga, literally "petty bourgeois film" or "lower middle class film", is a genre of Japanese realist films which focus on the everyday lives of ordinary or middle class people. An alternate term for the shōshimin-eiga is the pseudo-Japanese word shomin-geki, literally "common people drama", which had been invented by Western film scholars. The term shōshimin-eiga as a definition of a specifically Japanese film genre presumably first appeared in 1932 in articles by critics Yoshio Ikeda and Ichiro Ueno.
Yoshiko Kuga, was a Japanese actress.
Tadashi Imai was a Japanese film director known for social realist filmmaking informed by a left-wing perspective. His most noted films include An Inlet of Muddy Water (1953) and Bushido, Samurai Saga (1963).
Mariko Okada is a Japanese stage and film actress who starred in films of directors Mikio Naruse, Yasujirō Ozu, Keisuke Kinoshita and others. She was married to film director Yoshishige Yoshida.
Yoshishige Yoshida, also known as Kijū Yoshida, was a Japanese film director and screenwriter.
Yūko Mochizuki, also billed as Mieko Mochizuki, was a Japanese stage and film actress who appeared in films of directors such as Keisuke Kinoshita, Mikio Naruse and Tadashi Imai.
The River Fuefuki is a 1960 Japanese historical drama film directed by Keisuke Kinoshita and starring Hideko Takamine. It is based on a novel by Shichirō Fukazawa.
Kazui Nihonmatsu was a Japanese film director.
The Snow Flurry is a 1959 Japanese drama film written and directed by Keisuke Kinoshita.
Woman is a 1948 Japanese drama film written and directed by Keisuke Kinoshita.
The Kii River is a 1966 Japanese drama film directed by Noboru Nakamura, based on the novel The River Ki by Sawako Ariyoshi.
↑ Hipkins, Danielle; Plain, Gill, eds. (2007). War-torn Tales: Literature, Film and Gender in the Aftermath of World War II. Bern: Peter Lang. p.129. ISBN978-3-03-910552-6.
1 2 3 Hirano, Kyoko (1992). Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945–1952. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN1-56098-157-1.
1 2 Anderson, Joseph L.; Richie, Donald (1959). The Japanese Film – Art & Industry. Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company. pp.372–376.
1 2 Richie, Donald (2005). A Hundred Years of Japanese Film (Reviseded.). Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International. p.144. ISBN978-4-7700-2995-9.
↑ Anderson, Joseph L.; Richie, Donald (1982). The Japanese Film – Art and Industry (Expandeded.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. p.460. ISBN0-691-05351-0.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
