Keisuke Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita (木下 惠介, Kinoshita Keisuke; December 5, 1912 – December 30, 1998) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter.^[2] While lesser-known internationally than contemporaries such as Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu, he was a household figure in his home country, beloved by both critics and audiences from the 1940s to the 1960s. Kinoshita's films were marked by a sense of sentimentality, purity, and beauty, and often featured experimentation in both technique and subject matter.

Kinoshita entered the film industry in 1933 as a film processor. He moved on to the position of camera assistant, then assistant director. In 1943, Kinoshita was promoted to director and released his first film, Port of Flowers. A prolific filmmaker, Kinoshita directed 43 films in the first 23 years of his career, and then five more after a stint in television production. Among his best known films are Carmen Comes Home (1951), A Japanese Tragedy (1953), Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (1955) and The Ballad of Narayama (1958).

Keisuke Kinoshita was born Masakichi Kinoshita on December 5, 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.^[3] So he attended high school and began studying for college.^[3]

One day, when Kinoshita was in high school, a film crew arrived in Hamamatsu for location shooting.^[3] Amongst the crew was the actor Junosuke Bando, who Kinoshita would befriend when Bando came to the Kinoshita family's grocery store.^[3] Bando helped Kinoshita run away to Kyoto, where most period films were made, but Kinoshita's grandfather came and took Kinoshita back home the next day.^[3] Kinoshita's determination to become a filmmaker convinced his parents into letting him pursue a career in film.^[3]

Kinoshita's mother secured him an introduction to the Shochiku Kamata Studio, where Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse worked.^[3][4] But Kinoshita was told that he could not become an assistant director without a university education, but that he may be able to become a photographer.^[3] He applied to the Oriental Photography School, but was told that he needed at least half a year of practical experience in order to be admitted.^[3] He then worked in photography shops in Tokyo until he had enough experience to apply to the Oriental Photography School.^[3] He graduated, then was successfully admitted into Shochiku in 1933, but was told that they no longer needed camera assistants, and that he would have to work in the film processing laborator.^[3] Kinoshita was then moved to work as a camera assistant under Yasujirō Shimazu.^[3] After two years, Shimazu asked Kinoshita's superior for Kinoshita to be moved to the position of assistant director, but the request was denied.^[3] After one more year, Shimazu himself made Kinoshita his assistant director.^[3] Kinoshita credits Shimazu as his most important mentor.^[3] Kinoshita continued to work as Shimazu's assistant for six years, until Kinoshita became Kōzaburō Yoshimura's assistant.^[3][5] Around the time, Kinoshita began scriptwriting.^[3] In 1940, Kinoshita was drafted into the Sino-Japanese War and went to China, but returned the following year due to an injury.^[1]

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.^[6] Adapting a popular play by Kazuo Kikuta,^[7] he made the comedy Port of Flowers with a large cast and budget.^[6] 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.

In 1944, Kinoshita released his fourth film, Army.^[6] Like his previous films, Army was propaganda.^[6] Yet, the famous final scene showed a mother grieving her son's departure for the front instead of cheering him.^[8][9] 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.'"^[10][11][12] He returned to his hometown Hamamatsu, where he waited for the war to end.^[1]

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.^[13] In the following years, he worked in a variety of genres, including comedy, period and contemporary drama, ghost story, and thriller.^[10] Starting with Phoenix in 1947, Kinoshita took on Masaki Kobayashi as an apprentice, who would continue to assist Kinoshita until 1953.^[6] In 1949, the highly successful romantic comedy Here's to the Young Lady was released, starring Setsuko Hara.^[13]

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.^[14] The same year saw the release of the musical comedy Carmen Comes Home, Japan's first colour feature.^[8] Due to technical and financial reasons, a black-and-white version was also filmed and released.^[15][16] 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.^[6] Kinoshita's sister and wife of Hiroshi Kusada, Yoshiko Kusuda, wrote the screenplay for Farewell to Dream (1956).^[17]

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.^[8][18] Also highly popular was the lighthouse keeper drama Times of Joy and Sorrow (1957),^[19] which was repeatedly remade in later years, including one version by Kinoshita himself.^[20] 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.^[21]

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.^[22][23] Alexander Jacoby also found the 1960 satire Spring Dreams noteworthy, which he called "quirkily enjoyable".^[8] In 1969, he along with Akira Kurosawa , Masaki Kobayashi, and Kon Ichikawa formed the Yonki-no-kai Productions company.

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,^[24] 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.^[13][25]

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.^[26] His 1959 film Farewell to Spring has been called "Japan's first gay film" for the emotional intensity depicted between its male characters.^[27]

Kinoshita died on December 30, 1998, of a stroke.^[28] His grave is in Engaku-ji in Kamakura, very near to that of his fellow Shochiku director, Yasujirō Ozu.

Kinoshita's films varied greatly in genre, but the two main veins of Kinoshita's work were comedy and melodrama, and all were marked with sentimentality and a deep sense of purity and beauty.^[3] 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.^[8] 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.^[14] 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.^[29]

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."^[30] 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,^[8] daguerreotype-like framing of images in She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum,^[31] or partial tinting to evoke the impression of Japanese woodblock prints in The River Fuefuki.^[22] In A Japanese Tragedy, he interspersed newsreel footage, and drew upon kabuki stage effects in The Ballad of Narayama.^[32] The Snow Flurry told its story in a fragmented, nonlinear manner, preceding the New Wave.^[33]

Kinoshita's birth town Hamamatsu established the "Keisuke Kinoshita Memorial Museum" to commemorate him.^[34]

A retrospective on Kinoshita with 15 of his films was held at the Lincoln Center, New York, in 2012.^[35] 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.^[36]

In 1946 Masaki Kobayashi became Kinoshita's assistant^[37] 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).^[38]

Director Tadashi Imai was an outspoken admirer of Kinoshita's work,^[39] 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.^[40]

In 2000, Kinoshita was voted as the third favorite Japanese director of Kinema Junpo readers.^[41] Twenty-Four Eyes was voted at position #6 on the 2009 All Time Best Japanese Movies list by readers of Kinema Junpo.^[42]

• Bock, Audie (1978). Japanese Film Directors. Kodansha. pp. 189–217. ISBN 0-87011-304-6.

• Keisuke Kinoshita at IMDb
• Keisuke Kinoshita at the Japanese Movie Database (in Japanese)