A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors is your detailed guide to the key figures in Japanese cinema history.
This valuable resource addresses the need for a thorough reference on prominent Japanese film directors. Jacoby offers thoughtful analysis without relying on academic jargon, exploring the works of more than 150 filmmakers to highlight what makes their films compelling.
The book features profiles of directors ranging from Yutaka Abe to Isao Yukisada, including icons such as Kinji Fukasaku, Juzo Itami, Akira Kurosawa, Takashi Miike, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Yoji Yamada. Each entry provides a critical overview and a complete filmography, making it an indispensable tool for film enthusiasts and scholars alike.
A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors: From the Silent Era to the Present Day by Alexander Jacoby, foreword by Donald Richie is available in both print and digital everywhere now.
Order your copy here.
Read a sample of A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors below.
Introduction
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Japanese cinema found itself with at least two separate audiences in the West. There was the audience that had made an overwhelming success of international touring retrospectives devoted to such classical directors as Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujirô Ozu, and Akira Kurosawa, whose work, some fifty years earlier, had first brought Japanese films to international attention. At the same time, another set of viewers was enjoying a different mode of Japanese filmmaking, typified by the eerie “J-horror” of Hideo Nakata or the gangster films of Takeshi Kitano. When this audience looked back into the history of Japanese film, it was to the gritty yakuza movies of Kinji Fukasaku or the flamboyant samurai films of Kenji Misumi. The two audiences rarely met, the former inhabiting art houses and cinémathèques, the latter exploring the expanding DVD market.
That the cinema of one nation can sustain two international audiences with such different interests, concerns, and priorities is a mark of its abiding richness and variety. The Japanese cinema cannot easily be defined, any more than can the country that produced it. The neon and concrete city is as “typically Japanese” as the forested mountain; the zen garden as the pachinko parlor; the Noh theater as the comic strip. It is unsurprising that this contradictory country has produced a cinema of great range and scope. Japanese films can be among the world’s most tender or the world’s most violent; they can be understated or melodramatic, leisurely or hectic; in subject matter they span more than a thousand years of history and every genre. There is certainly enough variety in the Japanese cinema to satisfy a good deal more than two audiences.
Inevitably, then, this book is intended for more than one group of readers; and its focus is the common factor which links the various international audiences for Japanese films. This is an awareness of the people who made the films. When the first English-language history of the Japanese cinema, Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie’s The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, was published in 1959, it was dedicated to “that little band of men who have tried to make the Japanese film industry what every film industry should be: a director’s cinema.” Viewers of both classical and modern Japanese films are likely to second that sentiment. Applied to the Japanese cinema, the auteur theory has never been controversial. In the days when the theory was in its infancy, and when the arbiters of critical opinion in the West still refused to endorse the attention being extended to Hitchcock and Hawks in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, no one doubted that Kurosawa and Mizoguchi were the authors of their own films. It would have come as a shock to many in the West to discover that Japan, as much as California, had a flourishing studio system, with its own codes, genres, and hierarchy of stars; it was easier to think of films such as Rashomon (Rashômon, 1950) and Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari, 1953) as the lofty products of individual genius. In fact, the genius of the system was to allow a significant measure of freedom to individual directors, while providing the backing of substantial capital and resources. Artists such as Mizoguchi, Ozu, Keisuke Kinoshita, Kôzaburô Yoshimura, and (in the earlier part of his career) Kurosawa flourished not despite but because of this system. Their films would mostly ºhave been inconceivable without the technical resources of the big studios, which enabled their imaginative visions to become concrete reality. Yet until the 1960s, studio bosses were wise enough to know that the creativity of individual artists was their greatest asset.
In due course, the studio system declined. The major production companies still made films; but their work became increasingly repetitive and derivative. As the products of the major studios grew more routine, a growing number of talented directors, including Nagisa Ôshima, Shôhei Imamura, Yoshishige Yoshida, and Masahiro Shinoda, found that it was more profitable, in creative if not in financial terms, to operate outside the system. This made funding very much harder to obtain. From the mid-sixties onwards, those filmmakers who wished to work creatively often found that they had no choice but to establish independent production companies. Today, many of these directors have become cult figures, admired for their determination as well as for their achievement.
The 1970s and 1980s are often considered a low point in the quality of the Japanese film. To a degree, this is true. The studios produced more pedestrian work and opportunities to make films outside the studio system diminished. However, the growing availability of 8mm film stock enabled a younger generation of directors to begin to make films for private exhibition. Others trained in television or in the straight-to-video market, and initiatives such as the PIA film festival gave support to promising younger talents. The result was a minor Renaissance in the nineties, when a number of new directors in generic and art house cinema began to stamp their material with personal concerns and individual styles.
The Japanese cinema, then, in phases both of industrial and independent production, has been a director’s cinema—which is to say that it is a cinema in which individual artists have been able to sustain their creativity and to explore personal concerns. And this creativity has been remarkably robust. Outstanding filmmakers have been at work in Japan from the twenties to the present day; there are periods of more and less consistent achievement, but Japanese directors have succeeded in producing distinguished films in every decade, despite social changes and varying political and economic pressures. Since the majority of this book will consist of profiles of these directors and accounts of their work, it is worth examining the context here. No one imagines that even the greatest artists conjure their work out of thin air; film production can be successfully undertaken only under favorable circumstances. In order to discuss the circumstances that have allowed Japanese filmmakers to produce work of so consistently high a standard, I want to provide a brief history of the development of the Japanese film.
A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors: From the Silent Era to the Present Day by Alexander Jacoby, foreword by Donald Richie is available in both print and digital everywhere now.
Order your copy here.