Japanese Cinema to 1960 by Gregg Rickman : Rashomon

Japan has long had one of the most beautiful cinemas in the world, with masterpieces extant from its prolonged silent era, from the militarist period of the late 1930s and early 1940s, through the postwar era of American occupation and economic resurgence. This primer covers films made through this postwar era, extending its commentary to the present day to demonstrate the continuing influence of Japan's film pioneers. Early Japanese cinema is hard to find, little of it surviving the firebombs of the Pacific War, and a small portion is presently available on DVD. This survey will comment not only on the few films now available for home viewing but other works as well, in hopes that as time passes more films will become available.

Introduction

Shiro Asano imported the first motion picture camera to Japan in 1897, two years after the first Lumière Brothers screenings in Paris. Unlike the west, where for most of its formative early years the medium was considered working class entertainment, fit only for fairgrounds and the nickelodeon - and thus was able to develop as a vigorous, story-telling medium - the Japanese upper class favored the new medium from the start. As a consequence, until 1920 most films were filmed stage plays, drawn from either the classic kabuki form or the newer, post-1890, shimpa ("new school") theater. This division is the basis of the still-existing divide of Japanese cinema into historical, period films (jidaigeki) and contemporary pictures (gendaigeki). Both forms were stylized, shot in a series of long takes from a fixed, stage-like position, and drew from theatrical tradition as well in its use of female impersonators for women's roles.

Western films, widely imported to Japan after 1917, were a great contrast and quite successful. The young Akira Kurosawa's father took him to many imported American and European films, which he felt were "educational," and the boy, writing years later in his Something Like an Autobiography, was particularly impressed by the "reliable manly spirit and the smell of male sweat" of William S. Hart's westerns (a forecast perhaps of his own taste for samurai films). Devices such as pans and close-ups began to influence Japanese cinema. The first "realist" (in the western sense) Japanese film is considered to be the still-extant Souls on the Road (Minoru Mirata, 1921), a loose adaptation of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths (which Kurosawa himself would film in 1957).

A Page of Madness

German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s would influence two films by Teinosuke Kinugasa (1896-1982), who had entered cinema as a female impersonator in 1917 and directed two highly regarded experimental narratives, A Page of Madness (1926) and Crossroads (1928). A Page of Madness echoes The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in its story of a man ridden with guilt by his wife's insanity; he takes a job in her asylum. Both films skip freely through time, as with many post-1960 experimental narratives from Resnais to Tarantino. Kinugasa had a long career - his colorful Gate of Hell (1952) was one of the first Japanese films to be seen worldwide.

Other foreign films and trends influenced Japanese silent cinema as well. The popularity of American slapstick, for example, gave rise to a nansensu("nonsense") genre. Yasujiro Ozu's early films are nansensu in nature; his earliest surviving film, Days of Youth (1929) featured a bespectacled protagonist (à la Harold Lloyd) who chases a lost ski with a mind of its own. (A clip from this film can be seen in the documentary, I Lived, But…, which is included in the bonus disc for the Criterion Collection edition of Tokyo Story.)

But full adaptation of western filmmaking modes was impeded by the ongoing popularity of a figure who had died out in the west after 1910, a lecturer who sat beside the screen and gave a running interpretive commentary on the action. These lecturers (benshi) were popular in their own right, and their popularity held back the development of movies as a story-telling medium whose images could stand on their own. Even the coming of sound was delayed. The enormous popularity of Josef von Sternberg's Morocco in 1930 set the stage for Japan's first all-talking film (Heinosuke Gosho's The Neighbor's Wife and Mine) in 1931, but lingering resistance from benshi and from audiences delayed sound's complete triumph for several years. A stubborn Ozu continued to make silent films up through An Inn in Tokyo (1935). A key turning point was a 1932 strike by benshiagainst 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.

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. They also had greater career stability - Yasujiro Ozu spent most of his career at one studio, Shochiku, while Akira Kurosawa made most of his films from 1943-65 at Toho. Much responsibility was assigned to a director's assistant directors, many of whom in turn became directors themselves. Ozu's assistants included Keisuke Kinoshita and Shohei Imamura, both of whom have had substantial careers; Kurosawa was trained in the prewar era by Kajiro Yamamoto, and one of his assistant directors, Ishiro Honda, went on to make Godzilla and many of its sequels.

Ozu

To many, the greatest Japanese filmmaker and one of cinema's greatest overall, is Yasujiro Ozu (1903-62). Different commentators emphasize different things: Paul Schrader claimed for him (and two European filmmakers with intensely spiritual concerns, Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson) a "transcendental style," while Japanese film scholar Donald Richie is interested in his expression of Buddhist mono non aware ("sympathetic sadness, serene acceptance"). They emphasize the profound sympathy the director engenders for his neglected parents (Tokyo Story, 1953) or widowed fathers marrying off their daughters (as in Late Spring, 1949, or Early Summer, 1951). Other commentators, like Noel Burch or David Bordwell, are more excited by the way he continually broke with standard (western) filmmaking technique, tending to shoot every scene from a low angle, bridging scenes with narratively irrelevant shots of tea kettles, laundry, banners and other mundane images ("curtain shots"), and continually breaking the rules of eyeline matches, screen direction and position. Famously, Ozu's editor in the late 1930s talked him into shooting a scene in the "correct" and in his regular fashion; Ozu purportedly said, "There is no difference." The incredible formal beauty (and sense of filmic play) his works offer show that there is.

Tokyo Story

Ozu has had an intense following outside of Japan at least since the 1970s, when his films began to be distributed abroad: the German filmmakerWim Wenders directed a documentary about him (Tokyo-Ga, 1985), and Jim Jarmusch, whose long-take, deadpan style owes something to the director, namechecked him in Stranger Than Paradise (1983) by having names of horses on a racing form be drawn from characters in Ozu films. Filmmakers as disparate as Jarmusch, Wayne Wang (notably in his Dim-Sum, 1985) and Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-Hsien have demonstrated his influence on their work.

At home, Ozu, while deeply respected by many - the old formula was supposedly that Kurosawa was the most western of Japanese filmmakers and Ozu the most "Japanese" - was criticized by some in the New Wave generation of the 1960s, notably his ex-assistant director Shohei Imamura, for what they considered the conservatism of his family dramas. Nagisa Oshima's The Ceremony (1972) is a sort of anti-Ozu family drama. Yet Ozu's influence continues to resonate to this day: Hirokazu Kore-eda's Mabarosi (1995) clearly shows Ozu's influence, as does some of the imaginative framing of shots employed by the comedian/gangster filmmaker Hideko Takeshi (Kitano), notably in Hana-bi (Fireworks, 1997).

Criterion has produced all of the Ozu films currently (as of 2005) available on DVD: both versions of Ozu's warmly humorous story of a traveling theatrical troupe, A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) backed with the 1959 remake Floating Weeds, as well as the beloved family dramas Early Summerand Tokyo Story, and the comedy Ohayo (Good Morning, 1959), a remake of the unfortunately unavailable I Was Born, But… (1932). Both versions, full of aggressive children and bemused parents, satirize the lives of salary men (one of Ozu's favorite themes), with the earlier version much more biting.

Other Directors and Stars of the Prewar Era

After Ozu, the most highly regarded Japanese filmmaker of the era is Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956). To date, the only Mizoguchi film available on DVD is 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. It employs a long-take, highly mobile camera technique that makes the director's films dazzling visual pleasures, notably in his postwar classics Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff(1954). Many of Mizoguchi's films are jidaigeki, period films (unlike all of Ozu's, save his very first), 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. A favorite theme of his, either in period or contemporary films, is the imprisonment of women within a harsh society: thus the modern-day working women of Sisters of the Gion and Osaka Elegy (both 1936), the period Life of Oharu(1952) or the post-war prostitutes of Street of Shame (his last film, in 1956).

Ugetsu Monogatari

Mizoguchi, influenced in the 1920s by western art and literature, made an early impression with films such as the now-lost Metropolitan Symphony(1929) and 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. (Mizoguchi's The 47 Ronin would qualify as a "national policy" work, for despite its complete lack of blood lust it emphasizes honor, loyalty and self-sacrifice.) Some filmmakers employed passive resistance as means of resisting military demands. Ozu made only two films after 1936 and before the end of the war, both of which - Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941) and There Was a Father (1942) - were arguably pro-family in their approach but not more so than his other films. He resisted every effort to engage in positive propaganda for the war and spent most of it in Burma watching and enjoying captured American films. (He did intervene decisively to allow the release of Akira Kurosawa's first film, Sanshiro Sugata, in 1943, which had been taxed by military censors as too western in its style.)

Other filmmakers were less lucky. One of the most talented directors to emerge in 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). Evidently a dissident, he was drafted and sent to the Chinese front, where he died.

A number of Japan's best directors launched successful, long-lasting careers in this prewar era, which, despite its problems, was a very rich one for Japanese cinema. Like Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Teinosuke Kinugasa, Heinosuke Gosho (1902-81) and Mikio Naruse (1905-69) had substantial careers both before and after the war. Gosho's A Tricky Girl (1928) was seen by Sergei Eisenstein, who is said to have complained that it opened like a Hollywood slapstick film and ended in despair. These mixed tones are characteristic of Gosho and some of the other greatest Japanese filmmakers. Gosho's subsequent films of note include The Neighbor's Wife and Mine (1931), the first all-sound Japanese film, and the excellent postwar dramaWhere Chimneys Are Seen (1954). His No Return (1926) has just been issued on DVD under the title "One-Way System."

Horoki

Mikio Naruse directed the first Japanese film distributed in the West (the sweet Wife! Be Like a Rose!, 1935). Unfortunately, neither that film or any of his outstanding series of thoughtful postwar melodramas (among them, Mother, 1952; Lightning, 1952; Floating Clouds, 1955, Flowing, 1956,When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, 1960) are currently available on DVD. Many of these are based on the fiction of the female author Fumiko Hayashi. Hideko Takemine (born 1924), whose film career dates to 1929, and who scored a great early success in Naruse's Hideko the Bus Conductress (1941), starred in all of these but Mother, and is astoundingly good as the bar hostess in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. She plays Hayashi in Naruse's film about the author's life, Horoki (A Wanderer's Notebook, 1962). Unfortunately, only Takemine's small but crucial role in The Human Condition Part III: A Soldier's Prayer (1961), the last leg of Masaki Kobayashi's trilogy set in war-torn Manchuria, is available on DVD at this time. It's been suggested however that Takemine inspired Satoshi Kon's anime Millennium Actress (2001), which follows the life of a teenage star of the 1930s whose career continues through the postwar era.

Another great actress with a long career, Kinuyo Tanaka (1910-77), can be seen on DVD in Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard (1965). Highlights of her career include five early films by Ozu, including the outstanding Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth (1935), as well as postwar films of his likeEquinox Flower (1958). Others of her films include Gosho's The Neighbor's Wife and Mine and Where Chimneys Are Seen, Naruse's Mother andFlowing, and Mizoguchi's masterpieces Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), My Love Has Been Burning (1949), Miss Oyu (1951), The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu Monogatari and Sansho the Bailiff. She also appeared in Keinosuke Kinoshita's Ballad of Narayama (1958), Kon Ichikawa'sAlone on the Pacific (1963) and the very popular Sandakan 8 (Kei Kumai, 1974). In Horoki, she plays Hideko Takamine's mother. She also directed six movies herself.

Continue to Part 2...

Japanese Cinema to 1960

by Gregg Rickman

Continued from Part 1.

Akira Kurosawa

To many, the quintessential Japanese filmmaker, Kurosawa's works are widely available on DVD. Criterion alone has made available the cream of the first half (1943-65) of his long career: Stray Dog (1949), Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961), Sanjuro (1962), High and Low (1963) and Red Beard (1965), all backed with excellent extras including documentary footage of Kurosawa at his peak. Documentaries on the director include Chris Marker's AK, filmed while Kurosawa was shooting his late masterpiece Ran (1985).

Drunken Angel

Entering cinema as an assistant director, Kurosawa rapidly made his mark with his debut Sanshiro Sugata (Judo Saga, 1943), an early display of his command of screen action. Both his wartime propaganda feature The Most Beautiful (1944) and his postwar film, No Regrets for Our Youth(1946), about a family who suffers due to the father's dissent from the militarist regime of the 1930s, have similar themes of self-sacrifice.

More recent gangster dramas such as Battles Without Honor and Humanity (Kinji Fukasaku, 1973) paint a bleak portrait of postwar Japan. Kurosawa, meanwhile, was determined to try and show his fellow Japanese a way out of despair, dramatizing this resolution in his crime dramasDrunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog and the compelling testament of a nonentity who achieves heroism, Ikiru. In the book Japanese Film Directors, Audie Bock (translator of Kurosawa's memoirs) groups Kurosawa with a number of other directors who began their careers after World War II that she dubs "the Postwar Humanists" (Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi, Keisuke Kinoshita). Their films express the new ideals of democratization and humanitarianism. While Rashomon became world famous for its plot that questions the nature of truth, one is meant to come away from the film not with existential despair but with the positive moral of the poor man who takes in the abandoned child. The brilliantly conceived and choreographedSeven Samurai is another vehicle for this overt morality.

As the 1950s progressed, and an economically revived Japan fell further and further away from the ideals of sincere postwar resolutions, Kurosawa's films turned darker. Kurosawa's samurai films from this later era are essays in mock-heroism: The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. His parallel films set in contemporary Japan - I Live in Fear (1955), The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and High and Low - are scathing satires of a modern Japan that live less and less up to the ideals expressed in Stray Dog, Ikuru and the codas to Rashomon and Seven Samurai. This period - perhaps Kurosawa's most interesting, as he engages with an increasingly corrupt Japan with fewer and fewer illusions - is book-ended by two other period, but non-samurai, films: The Lower Depths (1957), cleverly paired in the Criterion Collection edition with Jean Renoir's 1936 version of the same Maxim Gorky play, and Red Beard (1965). Red Beard is a rare example of a successful film about a genuinely good man, the gruff doctor (Toshiro Mifune) of the title.

Throne of Blood

Kurosawa was long the west's favorite Japanese director. He returned the favor; throughout his career Kurosawa evinced a great admiration for foreign literature, specifically Shakespeare's plays and Russian literature - The Lower Depths, and his adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot(1951), which is (unjustly) widely disliked. But Kurosawa's Shakespearean adaptations are generally admired. Throne of Blood (1957) may well be the best filmic adaptation of any Shakespeare play, dispensing as it does with the playwright's words but finding images worthy of the Bard's poetry. His industrial drama The Bad Sleep Well borrows from Hamlet while Ran successfully transposes King Lear to medieval Japan. The dynamic High and Low, meanwhile, is a successful transferal of one of Ed McBain's American police dramas to Japan.

Many of Kurosawa's films were remade abroad: Rashomon as The Outrage (1964), Seven Samurai as John Sturges's expansive western The Magnificent Seven (1960), and, infamously, Yojimbo as the first of Sergio Leone's "Man with No Name" spaghetti westerns, A Fistful of Dollars(1964), which made Clint Eastwood an international star. Leone's producers never bothered to pay Kurosawa's production company for the rights to his film, which held up distribution of Dollars in the US until 1967 and, truth be told, Leone's amorally cynical take on Kurosawa's morally cynical samurai film does betray the spirit of the original. Given that Kurosawa was influenced by American western filmmakers, notably John Ford, it is appropriate, however, that The Outrage, The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars are all Westerns.

But if you want to see how East and West diverge, compare Kurosawa's sequel to Yojimbo, the class-basedSanjuro, to Leone's follow-up, For a Few Dollars More (1965) - they're wholly different. It's worth mentioning as well that Yojimbo owes more than a little to the one Dashiell Hammett detective novel which has never been filmed, Red Harvest (1927), which involves a good bad man selling his services to both sides of a battle between two equally corrupt gangs. Red Harvest (an American crime novel) is the source material, then, for not only Yojimbo (Japanese samurai) and A Fistful of Dollars (Italian western) but the Coen Brothers' Millers Crossing (1990) and an acknowledged remake of Yojimbo, Last Man Standing (Walter Hill, 1996), with Bruce Willis, both crime dramas set at the time of Hammett's original. (Only Last Man Standing acknowledges the debt to Kurosawa.)

Other Kurosawa remakes arguably include George Lucas's original Star Wars (1977), which draws heavily upon The Hidden Fortress for inspiration, including the device of telling much of an epic story of a princess's escape across hostile territory from the perspective of two outsiders (cowardly peasants in the Kurosawa version, robots in Lucas's). A screenplay Kurosawa developed in the late 1960s was eventually filmed by a Soviet filmmaker in the US as Runaway Train (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1985). The great catastrophe of Kurosawa's career was his failed involvement in a Japanese-American co-production about Pearl Harbor, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1968), from which Kurosawa was dismissed as co-director in pre-production (he retains a screenwriting credit). The American studio and jealous enemies of Kurosawa in Japan spread rumors about Kurosawa's competence, a contributing factor to a 1971 suicide attempt.

Before this, in 1970, Kurosawa had filmed an expressionist color film, Dodes'ka-Den, returning to the subject of the lives of society's rejects which he'd already addressed in The Lower Depths. A consortium of Kurosawa and three other directors - fellow postwar humanists Ichikawa, Kinoshita and Kobayashi - financed the film as, by 1970, Kurosawa was no longer thought bankable by the Japanese film industry. His films cost too much to make in this period of severe industry retrenchment, a period that ended many other careers besides Kurosawa's. Indeed, while Kurosawa had produced roughly one film a year from 1943-1965, the next several of his films came at precise five year intervals, mostly financed by foreign backers. Thus:Dodes'ka-Den in 1970, Dersu Uzala (1975), financed by the Soviet Union, and filmed in Siberia, and the samurai epics Kagemusha (1980) and Ran(1985), financed in part by successful American filmmakers who admired Kurosawa's achievement, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.Kagemusha and, in particular, Ran were longtime dream projects of the director, who had, frustrated in his attempts to find money to produce them, painted scenes from them. A resigned bitterness underlays both.

Ran completed, Kurosawa experienced a late-career blossoming that allowed him to complete three more films in the last years of his life: Yume(released here as Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, 1990), Rhapsody in August (1991) and Madadayo (Not Yet, 1993). Dreams recalls the color expressionist of Dodes'ka-Den, notably in the scene in which Martin Scorsese, playing Vincent Van Gogh, runs through a field of paint. Rhapsody in August echoes the anti-nuclear war parable of Record of a Living Being, while Madadayo, the story a beloved teacher who loses his home in a wartime bombing, but whose students continue to seek his support, brings Kurosawa's career in a full circle back to No Regrets for Our Youth (1947). After Kurosawa's death in 1998, a number of his unproduced scripts were filmed, among them Alley Cat (Ichikawa, 2000) and The Sea is Watching(Kei Kumai, 2002).

Stars and Trends of the Postwar Era

One of postwar Japan's biggest stars, Toshiro Mifune (1920-97), was closely associated with Kurosawa for the first and best half of his career: from his surprise casting, a relative unknown, as a self-destructive gangster in Drunken Angel (1947) to the title role in Red Beard, Mifune was in 16 of 17 of Kurosawa's films (all but Ikiru) from that period. He essayed such disparate roles as the determined young detective of Stray Dog, the clownish rapist of Rashomon, the would-be samurai of Seven Samurai, the elderly man afraid of atomic war in Record of a Living Being and the business tycoon of High and Low. Along the way he also acted for Kenji Mizoguchi (beheaded for love in the opening sequences of The Life of Oharu) and Masaki Kobayashi (Samurai Rebellion, 1967).

Several of Mifune's most popular films were directed by genre specialist Hiroshi Inagaki (1905-80), a child actor who began directing at age 22 and who, among other achievements, collaborated on screenplays with Sadao Yamanaka in the 1930s under the pseudonym "Kinpachi Kajiwara." He helped define the period-film genre, particularly in his hugely popular Samurai trilogy (1954-56), The Life of Matsu the Untamed (shown abroad as The Rickshaw Man, 1958), the 1962 version of Chushingura, Samurai Banners (1969) and Incident at Blood Pass (1970). Mifune starred in all of these, winning a Best Actor award for The Rickshaw Man at the Venice Film Festival.

Yojimbo

Mifune's apotheosis was as the cynical ronin in Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Sanjuro, a role he reprised either openly (as in a late entry in the popular "blind swordsman" series Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (Kihachi Okamoto, 1970) or borrowing from it for films such as the spaghetti western Red Sun(Terence Young, 1971). At home, in movies or in many TV mini-series, Mifune found himself playing variants of his Yojimbo character for the remainder of his career, although some of his later films are well-regarded (as with his work in genre specialist Okamoto's Samurai Assassin, 1965,Sword of Doom, 1966, and Red Hair, 1969). A symbol of his country to the rest of the world, Mifune retained great international popularity, acting in the Hollywood productions Grand Prix (John Frankenheimer, 1966), Midway (Jack Smight, 1976), Winter Kills (William Richert, 1979),1941 (Steven Spielberg, 1979) and the 1980 TV miniseries Shogun. Mifune's gruff warrior is still the basis for our popular image of samurai - as per John Belushi's slovenly samurai character on Saturday Night Live.

While making Red Beard, Mifune and Kurosawa had a falling out that led to the end of their working relationship. His failure to reach a rapprochement with the ailing Kurosawa pained his last years; he would have loved to have played in either Kagemusha or Ran, and would have been excellent in either.

A number of Japanese female stars have also played in Hollywood productions, as with Machiko Kyo (Rashomon, Ugetsu Monogatari, Gate of Hell) cast with Marlon Brando in Teahouse of the August Moon (Daniel Mann, 1956).

After the Postwar Was Over

As noted, other postwar filmmakers besides Akira Kurosawa expressed a resolute idealism in their work. The films of Keisuke Kinoshita (1912-98), include, in addition to the colorful comedy Carmen Comes Home (1951) and the honestly sentimental Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), about the romance of a stripper and the struggles of a rural schoolteacher, respectively (both played by Hideko Takamine), the excellent dramas A Japanese Tragedy (1952) and The Ballad of Narayama (1958), the latter remade by Shohei Imamura in 1983.

Of the postwar humanists, second only to Kurosawa in ambition and talent would be Masaki Kobayashi (1916-96), who challenged Japanese behavior in the war in the ambitious, nine-hour epic The Human Condition, released in three parts (1959-61). Tatsuya Nakadai played an idealistic soldier who tries to improve the lot of everyone whose path he crosses in Japanese occupied Manchuria, be they exploited Chinese miners or Japanese soldiers, only to meet resistance at every turn. Kobayashi's subsequent films include two superb anti-heroic samurai films, Harakiri (1962) andSamurai Rebellion (1967) - both starring Nakadai - as well as the four-part ghost story Kwaidan (1964), a brilliant exercise in style.

Harp of Burma

The career of the versatile Kon Ichikawa (born 1915, and still active as of 2002) reminds one of an American filmmaker like John Huston in its longevity and wide shifts in tone and style. Harp of Burma (1956) - which the filmmaker remade in 1985 - is the quintessential postwar humanist work in its story of a Japanese soldier in occupied Burma, who takes on monk's robes and devotes himself to burying his dead comrades after war's end. The tragic absurdism of Fires on the Plain (1959) seems to come from some other director in this savage film about defeated Japanese soldiers in the Philippines struggling to survive, and in some cases resorting to cannibalism. Conflagration (1958), after a novel by Yukio Mishima, is a brilliant psychological study about a misfit's destruction of a temple he loved (Paul Schrader used this same story as an episode in his filmMishima). His other films include the grotesque sex drama The Key (1959), about an aging man's obsession with virility; the child's point-of-view, puppet mouse-starring Topo Gigio and the Missle War (1967). His best known film in the US is probably the documentary record Tokyo Olympiad(1965).

Also expressing idealism in films seen by millions is the work of Akira Kurosawa's former assistant director and good friend, Ishiro Honda (1911-93). Honda shot the very lengthy montage of detective Toshiro Mifune's tour of the Japanese underworld in Stray Dog and returned to Kurosawa as an assistant director for Kagemusha and Ran. What he's best known for, however, is his work directing Godzilla (1954) and its many sequels and variants - Rodan (1956), The Mysterians (1957) and many more. His honest, non-condescending handling of genre material marks him as a master of his craft. He ended his career as the uncredited director of some of the episodes of Dreams as well as Madadayo.

Japanese films of the later 1950s anticipate the disillusionment that will mark later Kurosawa films and the Japanese New Wave alike. A good example of this is Giants and Toys (Yasuzo Masumura, 1958), a satire of consumerism that parallels American films like Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?and The Apartment in its dyspeptic cynicism. Japanese cinema underwent a radical shift after 1960, a New Wave emerging of directors like Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura breaking stylistically and politically with their predecessors. Within a few years the long-established studio system would collapse and an industry-wide slump rendered filmmaking very difficult in the 1970s and 1980s. New genres rose and fell. In the 1990s, new filmmakers emerged and currently, in the new century, Japanese cinema is enjoying something of a renaissance.

Understanding and appreciating the work of great filmmakers like Takashi Kitano and Hideko Kore-eda is made easier with the recovery and circulation of Japan's silent, wartime, and postwar film heritage.

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Top Ten Pre-1960 Japanese Films on DVD

•             A Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu, 1934). A traveling theatrical troupe is stranded in the same small town where its leader fathered a son many years ago. Ozu's poignant and humorous handling marks this outstanding movie.

•             Samurai trilogy (1955-56): Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto; Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple;Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island. Hiroshi Inagaki's rousing, old fashioned samurai epic.

Stray Dog

•             Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1949). A detective loses his gun and must find it somewhere in Japan's underworld. A boilingly hot and sunny film noir.

•             Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1951). What is truth?

•             Early Summer (Ozu, 1951). Lovely family drama from the genre's master.

•             Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952). A dying man who's done nothing with his life decides to challenge local gangsters and a choking bureaucracy to leave a park behind him when he goes. Poignant and honorable.

•             Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953). Two parents are rejected by their children in this loose remake of the equally poignant Hollywood film Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937).

•             Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954). Perhaps the best action film ever made. Ever.

•             Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954). Perhaps the best giant monster film ever made. Ever.

•             The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-61). Three part, nine hour saga of a decent man trying to survive the hell of war. Deserves to be better known than it is.

Gregg Rickman is the editor of The Film Comedy Reader (2001) and The Science Fiction Film Reader (2004) as well as the co-editor of The Western Reader (1999). In the 1980s he published two books of interviews and a biography of the late Philip K. Dick. He's also the author of our Silent Film Comedy, Screwball Comedy andBritish Comedy primers. Rickman teaches film at San Francisco and Sonoma State Universities and lives with his wife, dog and cat in Berkeley, California.