A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. Alexander Jacoby

      A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors

      From the Silent Era to the Present Day

      Alexander Jacoby

      Foreword by Donald Richie

      Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California

      Published by

      Stone Bridge Press

      P.O. Box 8208

      Berkeley, CA 94707

      tel 510-524-8732 • [email protected] • www.stonebridge.com

      Text © 2008 Alexander Jacoby.

      Cover design by Linda Ronan.

      The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from

       the publisher.

      LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

      Jacoby, Alexander.

      A critical handbook of Japanese film directors : from the silent era to the present day / Alexander Jacoby ; foreword by Donald Richie.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-1-933330-53-2 (pbk.)

      1. Motion picture producers and directors—Japan—Biography—Dictionaries. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—Japan—Credits. 3. Motion pictures—Japan. I. Title.

      PN1998.2.J29 2008

      791.43023’3092252—dc22

      [B]

      2008007836

      Foreword

      This is a book for which there is a need. Not only does it list almost all important Japanese film directors and their works, it is also the first recent volume to give a description of the director’s work, to indicate the nature of his or her accomplishment.

      Back in the mid-1950s when Joseph Anderson and I were writing The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, the first book in English on Japanese cinema, we initially spent much of our time making lists and sketching profiles. These lists were all concerned with chronology, with genre, and with who did what. The most difficult yet most necessary of these listings were those given over to film directors and their work.

      The necessity was that each director’s work offered a dimension to the Japanese cinema as a whole and we could not describe this until we had examined everything he had done. The difficulty was that there were few sources.

      Naturally, we used Japanese-language resources in this research, but these besides being few were often incomplete, particularly for earlier directors. I remember our trying to find out about early works by such directors as Shōzō Makino, or attempting to identify all of the films by such a prolific director as Hiroshi Inagaki. Even a director as well-known as Kenji Mizoguchi did not then have a complete filmography that we could use.

      Fortunately we had the assistance of the late Tokutarō Osawa, then editor of the film magazine, Eiga Hyron, who remembered things everyone else had forgotten. And, just as providential for us, Jun’ichirō Tanaka was, as we wrote, publishing his monumental history of the Japanese film and we could check our lists against his.

      Such directories of directors are extremely helpful. They indicate the shape of the career, give examples of its contours. They help trace development, or lack of it and offer a full account of a life’s work. They record and they register.

      Nonetheless such a full accounting in English of the complete works of those who made the Japanese film has been long in coming. The first appeared as late as 1971 when Arne Svenson wrote his Screen Series Guide: Japan. Though useful (not only directors but also actors and technicians were listed), it did not pretend to be complete and was further limited by being a volume in a series which designated how long the manuscript. should be. For present purposes it is also restricted in that its cut-off date for inclusion was 1969.

      Then, in 1996, came The Japanese Filmography: 1900–1994 by Stuart Galbraith IV. It included more complete entries on directors, actors, and others contributing to the film. In addition it gave full cast and credits for 1,300 Japanese films, a feat yet to be equalled.

      In 1998 appeared (to subscribers) Stephen Cremin’s The Asian Film Library Reference to Japanese Film. This was a large loose-leaved, two-volume work: the first of which listed the films, with basic credits; the second listed directors, actors, photographers, producers, etc. Here was the most complete director-listings yet.

      Useful as these volumes were, however, they were never marketed in a manner which made them available to all. Also it appears that they have not been regularly updated which leaves a decade’s worth of film and film directors unaccounted for.

      There is thus a real need for Alexander Jacoby’s new comprehensive register of Japanese film directors and their works. He lists everything and gives succinct descriptions of each director included. The reader is thus provided not only with a record but also with an indication of the director’s accomplishments and the critical opinion which has followed these.

      There has never been in English a more comprehensive compilation than this, and even many Japanese sources are not this complete. This is the book which, had Joe and I had it back in the Fifties, would have been enormously useful to us. It would have helped us as it will now help all scholars, researchers, students, and fans of the Japanese film.

      Donald Richie

      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, Yasujirō 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