Kaneto Shindo was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, film producer, and author. He directed 48 films and wrote scripts for 238. His best known films as a director include Children of Hiroshima, The Naked Island, Onibaba, Kuroneko and A Last Note.
Background
Shindo was born on April 22, 1912 in the Saeki District of Hiroshima Prefecture. He was the youngest of four children. His family were wealthy landowners, but his father went bankrupt and lost all his land after acting as a loan guarantor. His older brother and two sisters went to find work, and he and his mother and father lived in a storehouse. His mother became an agricultural labourer and then died during his early childhood.
Education
In 1933, Shindo, then living with his brother in Onomichi, was inspired by a film called Bangaku No Isshō to want to start a career in films. He saved money by working in a bicycle shop and in 1934, with a letter of introduction from his brother to a policeman in Kyoto, he set off for Kyoto. After a long wait he was able to get a job in the film developing department of Shinkō Kinema, which he joined because he was too short to join the lighting department. He was one of eleven workers in the developing department, but only three of them actually worked, the others being members of the company baseball team. At this time he learned that films were based on scripts because old scripts were used as toilet paper. He would take the scripts home to study them. His job involved drying 200-foot lengths of film on a roller three metres long and two metres high, and he learned the relationship between the pieces of film he was drying and the scripts he read.
Career
By the late 1930s he was working as an assistant to Kenji Mizoguchi on several films, most notably being in charge of the sets for The 47 Ronin. He submitted scripts to Mizoguchi, only for Mizoguchi to tell him that he "had no talent" for screenwriting, events dramatized in Shindo's film "The Story of a Beloved Wife". His first film as a screenwriter was the film Nanshin josei 1940.
In 1942, he joined a Shochiku subsidiary, the Koa Film company under the tutelage of Kenji Mizoguchi. In 1943 he transferred to the Shochiku studio.
In 1951, Shindo made his debut as a director with the autobiographical Story of a Beloved Wife starring Nobuko Otowa in the role of his deceased common-law wife Takako Kuji.
Wrote the scenarios for Anjoke-no Butokai (The Anj o Family's Dance Party) and Senka-no-Hate (Where War Ends), two popular postwar films. With Kimisaburo Yoshimura and Hisao Itoya, organized the Modern Cinema Association (1950), which was later disbanded. Has also directed several pictures.
From 1972 to 1981, Shindo served as chair of the Japan Writers Guild.
In 1977 he also travelled to America to film a television documentary, "Document 8.6", about the Hiroshima atomic bomb. He met Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane which dropped the bomb, but was not able to interview him on film. The documentary was broadcast in 1978.
In 1978, after the death of his ex-wife, he married Nobuko Otowa.
The Strangling was in competition at the 1979 Venice Film Festival, where Nobuko Otowa won the award for Best Actress.
In 1984 Shindo made The Horizon based on the life of his sister. The film chronicles her experiences as a poor farm girl who is sold as a mail-order bride to a Japanese American and never sees her family again. She spends time in a Japanese internment camp during World War II and lives a life of difficulty and disappointment.
In 2003, when Shindo was 91, he directed Owl (Fukurō) based on a true story of farmers sent back from Japanese colonies in Manchuria to unworkable farmland at the end of the Second World War. The entire film was shot on a single set, partly because of Shindo's mobility problems. The film was entered into the 25th Moscow International Film Festival where Shindo won a special award for his contribution to world cinema.
For the last forty years of his life, Shindo lived in a small apartment in Akasaka. After the death of Nobuko Otowa, he lived alone. Although he had been able to walk all over Tokyo in his eighties, he lost mobility in his legs in his nineties. Because of his need for care, Kaze Shindo moved into his apartment and lived with him for the last six years of his life, acting as his caregiver.
From April to May 2012 a committee in the city of Hiroshima presented a tribute to Shindo to commemorate his 100th birthday. This event included screenings of most of his films and special guests such as Shindo himself and longtime admirer Benicio del Toro.
Shindo died of natural causes on May 29, 2012.
Views
Shindo said that he saw film "as an art of 'montage' which consists of a dialectic or interaction between the movement and the nonmovement of the image."
The strongest and most apparent themes in Shindo's work involve social criticism of poverty, women and sexuality. Women and human sexuality also play a major role in Shindo's films.