Background
Kinoshita, Keisuke was born on 5 December 1912 in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan.
Kinoshita, Keisuke was born on 5 December 1912 in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan.
He ran away from home as a teenager when his family resisted his desire to enter the movie industry. That led to formal training at the Oriental School of Photography and a first job at the Shoehiku laboratories.
By 1935, he was working as a camera assistant and he soon began to work for director Yasujiro Shimazu, for whom he wrote Gonin no Kyodai (39). For most of his career, Kinoshita has been his own screenwriter.
He worked in many different moods—the romantic, the satirically comic, and the sentimental—and, time and again, he made valiant, good- humored women his central characters. But A Japanese Tragedy uses the travails of a war widow to reflect upon modern Japanese history and rises to a level of unquestioned tragedy.
Elsewhere, Kinoshita won outstanding performances from Kinuyo Tanaka as the old woman in The Ballad of Narayama and the mother in Army. But probably his most original use of an actress— and Japan’s first film in color—was Carmen Comes Home, which found an unexpected comic presence in Hideko Takamines stripper. The same actress was as impressive, though far more conventional, as the teacher in Twenty-four Eyes.
Three of Kinoshitas films—Morning for the Osone Family; Twenty-four Eyes; and The Ballad of Narayama—won the critics’ best picture award, but much of his work, however beautifully created, seems to Western eyes somewhat sentimental and politically naive.
Twenty-four Eyes
Kono Ko Wo Nokoshite
1984Shin Yorokobimo
1986Kinoshita has never had a film open commercially in America or Britain. Thus, the opportunities to see his work are confined to festivals, museum screenings, and the invaluable presentations of the Japan Societv. Whereas many people will “know” Kurosawa, and will likely have seen some of this films, Kinoshita will be a stranger. Yet again, we have been misled. Despite the flourish and fame of Kurosawa, the core of Japanese film is to be found in family stories, wistful romances, and in attention paid to women as much as to men. The great tradition in Japan is Ozu, Mizoguehi, Naruse (almost certainly), and Kinoshita.