Kon Ichikawa is noted for a wry humor that often resembles black comedy, for his grim psychological studies?often of misfits and outsiders?and for the visual beauty of his films. He is noted as one of Japan's foremost cinematic stylists, and has commented, "I began as a painter and I think like one."
Unquestionably Japan's best-known film director, Akira Kurosawa introduced his country's cinema to the world with his 1951 Venice Festival Grand Prize winner, Rashomon. His international reputation has broadened over the years with numerous citations, and when 20th Century-Fox distributed his 1980 Cannes Grand Prize winner, Kagemusha, it was the first time a Japanese film achieved worldwide circulation through a major Hollywood studio.
By any standard Kenji Mizoguchi must be considered among the world's greatest directors. Known in the West for the final half-dozen films which crowned his career, Mizoguchi considered himself a popular as well as a serious artist. He made eighty-five films during his career, evidence of that popularity. Like John Ford, Mizoguchi is one of the few directorial geniuses to play a key role in a major film industry. In fact, Mizoguchi once headed the vast union governing all production personnel in Japan, and was awarded more than once the industry's most coveted citations.
Mikio Naruse belongs in the second echelon of Japanese directors of his generation, along with Gosho, Ozu, and Kinoshita. This group ranks behind Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Ichikawa, and Kobayashi, who broke out beyond the bounds of the conventions of the Japanese cinema, whereas Naruse and the others were mostly content to work within it. This is not to say that all of them did not tackle contemporary as well as historical subjects.
Throughout his career, Yasujiro Ozu worked in the mainstream film industry. Obedient to his role, loyal to his studio (the mighty Shochiku), he often compared himself to the tofu salesman, offering nourishing but supremely ordinary wares. For some critics, his greatness stems from his resulting closeness to the everyday realities of Japanese life. Yet since his death another critical perspective has emerged.
Scholars have only barely begun to investigate Yoko Ono?s filmmaking. She is of course best known as John Lennon?s widow. Before the ex-Beatle was assassinated, she was cast as the ?dragon lady? who broke up the band. Though mean-spirited biographers such as Albert Goldman continue to give a sleazy edge to her self-confidence and wide-ranging appetites for both art and life, Ono has candidly expressed her most intimate feelings?as visual artist, composer, lyricist, and performer as well as director?throughout her life, before and after her time with her third husband.
For a woman to become accepted as a film director has rarely been easy, but in the Japan of the 1950s, a notoriously conventional society with rigidly traditional attitudes to the roles of the sexes, it was all but impossible. Only one woman achieved it, and then chiefly thanks to her status as Japan?s most famous and respected cinema actress.
Kinuyo Tanaka?s screen career began in the silent era, in 1924; still playing major roles, she made her last film in 1976, the year before she died. She starred in Japan?s first talkie and first color film. Altogether she appeared in something m
