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Sadao Yamanaka
was a Japanese film director and screenwriter who directed 26 films between 1932 and 1938. He was a contemporary of Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi and one of the primary figures in the development of the ''jidaigeki'', or historical film. Yamanaka died of dysentery in Manchuria after being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. He is the uncle of the Japanese film director Tai Kato, who wrote a book about Yamanaka, ''Eiga kantoku Yamanaka Sadao''. Only three of his films survive in nearly complete form. While long considered a master filmmaker in his native Japan, interest in Yamanaka's work redeveloped after the restoration and Japanese DVD release of the three surviving films. His most internationally discussed film, ''Humanity and Paper Balloons'' (1937), was given its first non-Japanese DVD release in the UK as a Masters of Cinema release. Career Yamanaka began his career in the Japanese film industry at the age of 20 as a writer and assistant director for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kyoto City
Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the city had a population of 1.46 million. The city is the cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Kyoto, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 3.8 million people. Kyoto is one of the oldest municipalities in Japan, having been chosen in 794 as the new seat of Japan's imperial court by Emperor Kanmu. The original city, named Heian-kyō, was arranged in accordance with traditional Chinese feng shui following the model of the ancient Chinese capital of Chang'an/Luoyang. The emperors of Japan ruled from Kyoto in the following eleven centuries until 1869. It was the scene of several key events of the Muromachi period, Sengoku period, and the Boshin War, such as the Ōnin War, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and many List of islands of the United Kingdom, smaller islands within the British Isles. Northern Ireland shares Republic of Ireland–United Kingdom border, a land border with the Republic of Ireland; otherwise, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel, the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea. The total area of the United Kingdom is , with an estimated 2020 population of more than 67 million people. The United Kingdom has evolved from a series of annexations, unions and separations of constituent countries over several hundred years. The Treaty of Union between ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rouben Mamoulian
Rouben Zachary Mamoulian ( ; hy, Ռուբէն Մամուլեան; October 8, 1897 – December 4, 1987) was an American film and theatre director. Early life Mamoulian was born in Tiflis, Russian Empire, to a family of Armenian descent. His mother, Virginia (née Kalantarian), was a director of the Armenian theatre, and his father, Zachary Mamoulian, was a bank president.Luhrssen, David (2013)''Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen'' University Press of Kentucky. p. 8; Mamoulian moved to England and started directing plays in London in 1922. He was brought to the United States the next year by Vladimir Rosing to teach at the Eastman School of Music and was involved in directing opera and theatre. In 1925, Mamoulian was head of the School of Drama, where Martha Graham was working at the time. Among other performances, together they produced a short, two-color film titled ''The Flute of Krishna'', featuring Eastman students. Mamoulian left Eastman shortly after, and Graham ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seijun Suzuki
, born (24 May 1923 – 13 February 2017), was a Japanese filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter. His films are known for their jarring visual style, irreverent humour, nihilistic cool and entertainment-over-logic sensibility. He made 40 predominately B-movies for the Nikkatsu Company between 1956 and 1967, working most prolifically in the yakuza genre. His increasingly surreal style began to draw the ire of the studio in 1963 and culminated in his ultimate dismissal for what is now regarded as his magnum opus, '' Branded to Kill'' (1967), starring notable collaborator Joe Shishido. Suzuki successfully sued the studio for wrongful dismissal, but he was blacklisted for 10 years after that. As an independent filmmaker, he won critical acclaim and a Japanese Academy Award for his ''Taishō'' trilogy, ''Zigeunerweisen'' (1980), ''Kagero-za'' (1981) and '' Yumeji'' (1991). His films remained widely unknown outside Japan until a series of theatrical retrospectives beginning in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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. Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director during World War II with the popular action film '' Sanshiro Sugata''. After the war, the critically acclaimed '' Drunken Angel'' (1948), in which Kurosawa cast the then little-known actor Toshiro Mifune in a starring role, cemented the director's reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan. The two men would go on to collaborate on another fifteen films. ''Rashomon'' (1950), which premiered ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cinema Of Japan
The 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. '' Tokyo Story'' (1953) ranked number three in '' Sight & Sound'' critics' list of the 100 greatest films of all time. ''Tokyo Story'' also topped the 2012 ''Sight & Sound'' directors' poll of The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time, dethroning ''Citizen Kane'', while Akira Kurosawa's '' Seven Samurai'' (1954) was voted the greatest foreign-language film of all time in BBC's 2018 poll of 209 critics in 43 countries. Japan has won the Academy Award for the Best International Feature Film four times, more than any other Asian country. Japan's Big Four film studios are Toho, Toei, Shochiku and Kad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tadao Sato
was a Japanese film critic, theorist and historian. His real name was . Overviews Born in Niigata, Niigata Prefecture, Japan, He published more than a hundred books on film, and was one of Japan's foremost scholars and historians addressing film. He was recognized as one of the world's foremost authorities on Japanese cinema specifically, although little of his work had been translated for publication abroad. He also wrote books on Chinese, Korean, American and European films. The international awareness of Sato's scholarship can be attributed to a collection of selected essays, ''Currents In Japanese Cinema'', published internationally in English translation in 1982. His ''Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema'' was published in Japanese in 1982 and translated in 2008.Sato, Tadao, (trans. Brij Tankha) ''Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese cinema'', Oxford ; New York, NY : Berg, 2008. . Sato has also frequently appeared as a primary source in the writing of oth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donald Richie
Donald Richie (17 April 1924 – 19 February 2013) 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. Biography Richie was born in Lima, Ohio. During World War II, he joined the United States Merchant Marine and served aboard Liberty ships as a purser and medical officer. By then he had already published his first work, "Tumblebugs" (1942), a short story.''Introduction'' by Leza Lowitz, in ''Botandoro'' by Donald Richie In 1947, Richie first visited Japan with the American occupation force, a job he saw as an opportunity to escape from Lima, Ohio. He first worked as a typist, and then as a civilian staff writer for the ''Pacific Stars and Stripes''. While in Tokyo, he became fascinated with Japanese culture, particularly Japanese cinema. He was soon writing movie re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manchukuo
Manchukuo, officially the State of Manchuria prior to 1934 and the Empire of (Great) Manchuria after 1934, was a puppet state of the Empire of Japan in Manchuria from 1932 until 1945. It was founded as a republic in 1932 after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and in 1934 it became a constitutional monarchy under the ''de facto'' control of Japan. It had limited international recognition. The area was the homeland of the Manchu people, Manchus, including the emperors of the Qing dynasty. In 1931, Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Japan seized the region following the Mukden Incident. A pro-Japanese government was installed one year later with Puyi, the List of emperors of the Qing dynasty, last Qing emperor, as the nominal regent and later emperor. Manchukuo's government was dissolved in 1945 after the Surrender of Japan, surrender of Imperial Japan at the End of World War II in Asia, end of World War II. The territories claimed by Manchukuo were first seized in the Soviet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Silent Film
A silent film is a film with no synchronized Sound recording and reproduction, recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, when necessary, be conveyed by the use of intertitle, title cards. The term "silent film" is something of a misnomer, as these films were almost always accompanied by live sounds. During the silent era that existed from the mid-1890s to the late 1920s, a piano, pianist, theatre organ, theater organist—or even, in large cities, a small orchestra—would often play music to accompany the films. Pianists and organists would play either from sheet music, or musical improvisation, improvisation. Sometimes a person would even narrate the inter-title cards for the audience. Though at the time the technology to synchronize sound with the film did not exist, music was seen as an essential part of the viewing experie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nikkatsu
is a Japanese entertainment company known for its film and television productions. It is Japan's oldest major movie studio, founded in 1912 during the silent film era. The name ''Nikkatsu'' amalgamates the words Nippon Katsudō Shashin, literally "Japan Motion Pictures". Shareholders are Nippon Television Holdings (35%) and SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation (28.4%). History Founding in 1912 Nikkatsu was founded on September 10, 1912, when several production companies and theater chains, Yoshizawa Shōten, Yokota Shōkai, Fukuhōdō and M. Pathe, consolidated under the name Nippon Katsudō Shashin. The company enjoyed its share of success. It employed such notable film directors as Shozo Makino and his son Masahiro Makino. During World War II, the government ordered the ten film companies that had formed by 1941 to consolidate into two. Masaichi Nagata, founder of Daiei Film and a former Nikkatsu employee, counter-proposed that three companies be formed and the suggestion was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matsuo Kishi
(18 September 1906 – 17 August 1985) was a Japanese film critic, director, screenwriter, producer, and biographer. His real name was Aji Shūichirō. Born in Tokyo, he became interested in film from his days in high school and, continuing on to Keio University, began submitting reviews to magazines such as ''Kinema Junpo'' and editing theater programs. Starting a dōjinshi ''Eiga kaihō'' with Tsuneo Hazumi, Kishi became involved in the left-wing film movement of the late 1920s, eventually becoming a member of the Proletarian Film League of Japan (Prokino). He soon left out of dissatisfaction with such a political approach to film. In 1932, he became the first critic to champion the work of Sadao Yamanaka, and later was a strong supporter of the films of Hiroshi Shimizu. In 1937, he gave up being a film critic and became an assistant director at Toho, where he directed one film— ''Kazaguruma'', in 1938— before concentrating on screenwriting. After the war, he mainly worked ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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