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Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese filmmaker and painter who directed thirty films in a career spanning over five decades. He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Kurosawa displayed a bold, dynamic style, strongly influenced by Western cinema yet distinct from it; he was involved with all aspects of film production.
The cinema of Japan has a history that spans more than 100 years. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; as of 2021, it was the fourth largest by number of feature films produced. In 2011 Japan produced 411 feature films that earned 54.9% of a box office total of US$2.338 billion. Films have been produced in Japan since 1897, when the first foreign cameramen arrived.
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki was a Japanese author who is considered to be one of the most prominent figures in modern Japanese literature. The tone and subject matter of his work ranges from shocking depictions of sexuality and destructive erotic obsessions to subtle portrayals of the dynamics of family life within the context of the rapid changes in 20th-century Japanese society. Frequently, his stories are narrated in the context of a search for cultural identity in which constructions of the West and Japanese tradition are juxtaposed.
Teinosuke Kinugasa was a Japanese filmmaker. He was born in Kameyama, Mie Prefecture and died in Kyoto. Kinugasa won the 1954 Palme d'or at the Cannes Film Festival for Gate of Hell.
Asian cinema refers to the film industries and films produced in the continent of Asia. However, in countries like the United States, it is often used to refer only to the cinema of East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia. West Asian cinema is sometimes classified as part of Middle Eastern cinema, along with the cinema of Egypt. The cinema of Central Asia is often grouped with the Middle East or, in the past, the cinema of the Soviet Union during the Soviet Central Asia era. North Asia is dominated by Siberian Russian cinema, and is thus considered part of European cinema.
Benshi (弁士) were Japanese performers who provided live narration for silent films. Benshi are sometimes called katsudō-benshi (活動弁士) or katsuben (活弁).
The Japanese New Wave is a group of loosely-connected Japanese filmmakers during the late 1950s and into the 1970s. Although they did not make up a coherent movement, these artists shared a rejection of traditions and conventions of classical Japanese cinema in favor of more challenging works, both thematically and formally. Coming to the fore in a time of national social change and unrest, the films made in this wave dealt with taboo subject matter, including sexual violence, radicalism, youth culture and delinquency, Korean discrimination, queerness, and the aftermath of World War II. They also adopted more unorthodox and experimental approaches to composition, editing and narrative.
Satsuo Yamamoto was a Japanese film director.
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).
Norimasa Kaeriyama was a pioneering Japanese film director and film theorist.
Musei Tokugawa was a Japanese benshi, actor, raconteur, essayist, and radio and television personality. Musei first came to prominence as a benshi, a narrator of films during the silent era in Japan. He was celebrated for his restrained but erudite narration that was popular among intellectual film fans. He concentrated on foreign films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari at high-class theaters like the Aoikan and the Musashinokan, but also performed Japanese works such as Teinosuke Kinugasa's experimental masterpiece A Page of Madness (1926). As the silent era ended, Musei switched to storytelling on stage and on radio, and also began acting and doing narrations in films. He was also famous for his essays, humorous novels, and autobiographical writings, publishing nearly fifty books in his life. With the advent of television in Japan, Musei also became a prominent presence in that medium.
Tennenshoku Katsudō Shashin (天然色活動写真) was a Japanese film studio active in the 1910s. The name translates as the "Natural Color Moving Picture Company," but it was known as Tenkatsu for short. The company was formed in 1914 by remnants of the Fukuhōdō studio that did not take part in the merger that formed Nikkatsu, particularly the entrepreneur Kisaburō Kobayashi, and was first aimed at exploiting the Kinemacolor color motion picture system in Japan. That system became too expensive, so the company soon settled on making regular films, becoming Nikkatsu's main rival in the 1910s. Although it was a decentralized company, one that was run by various bosses and allowed benshi to order the production of films,
Shinpa (新派) is a form of theater in Japan, usually featuring melodramatic stories, contrasted with the more traditional kabuki style. It later spread to cinema.
Taishō Katsuei (大正活映) was a Japanese film studio active in the early 1920s. Founded in April 1920 by Ryōzō Asano, the son of Asano zaibatsu head Sōichirō Asano, it was mostly known as Taikatsu for short. Its origins can be traced back to Tōyō Film, a venture started in 1918 by Benjamin Brodsky and Thomas Kurihara, that Asano ended up supporting. With Kurihara as the main director and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki as the literary consultant, Taikatsu was one of two studios founded in 1920 that publicly announced their intention to make "pure films" in line with the Pure Film Movement. It established an actors school and began production with Amateur Club, a film directed by Kurihara and scripted by Tanizaki that was strongly influenced by American cinema. Other important works include A Serpent's Lust, another Kurihara-Tanizaki collaboration based on the same story as Ugetsu by Kenji Mizoguchi. The Taikatsu studio was located in Yokohama, below the Bluff and the Foreigner's Cemetery. Taikatsu did not last long, since it did not have enough theaters to recoup the costs of production and of importing American films. Its production division was taken over by Shōchiku in 1922, even though the company lasted a few more years as an exhibition business. A number of important film figures emerged from Taikatsu, including the directors Tomu Uchida and Buntarō Futagawa and the actors Tokihiko Okada, Ureo Egawa and Atsushi Watanabe. Otohiko Matsukata, who served as a director, later became the president of Nikkatsu.
The Shinjuku Musashinokan (新宿武蔵野館) is a long-standing movie theater located on the east side of Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, Japan. Originally started as the Musashinokan in May 1920, it quickly became Tokyo's premiere independent high-class theater showing foreign films. The theater program featured top-level film criticism and a committee of the managers and of film critics such as Akira Iwasaki helped program the films shown there. It was also famous in the silent era for the erudite benshi narration of Musei Tokugawa. On occasion, it also showed Japanese films such as Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness.
Minoru Murata was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and actor who was one of the major directors of the silent era in Japan.
Kinema Record was a Japanese film magazine published during the 1910s that played an important role in the Pure Film Movement. In 1914, with no serious film magazines being published in Japan at the time, Norimasa Kaeriyama, Yoshiyuki Shigeno and other students interested in movies formed the Japan Cinematographist Association and began to publish the coterie magazine Film Record in October. They changed its name to Kinema Record in December. The monthly magazine contained a range of articles, from film reviews to how-to advice on making and selling movies, but it primarily came to represent calls for reforming a Japanese cinema that was considered too theatrical and uncinematic. A full reprint of the available issues was published in 1999 by Kokusho Kankōkai.
Non-narrative film is an aesthetic of cinematic film that does not narrate, or relate "an event, whether real or imaginary". It is usually a form of art film or experimental film, not made for mass entertainment.
Aaron Gerow is an American historian of Japanese cinema, and a member of the faculty of Yale University where he holds a joint position between the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Film Studies Programs.
The Glow of Life is a Japanese film directed by Norimasa Kaeriyama made in 1918 and released in 1919 by Tenkatsu. It is considered the first in a series of films aimed at reforming and modernizing Japanese cinema.
