Ballad of Narayama

Keisuke Kinoshita (木下 恵介, December 5, 1912–December 30, 1998) was a Japanese film director.Although lesser known internationally than his fellow filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa (黒澤明), Kenji Mizoguchi (溝口健二) and Yasujiro Ozu (小津安二郎), Keisuke Kinoshita was nonetheless a household figure at home beloved by audiences and critics alike, especially in the forties through the sixties. He was also prolific, turning out some 42 films in the first 23 years of his career. For this, Kinoshita explained, “can’t help it. Ideas for films have always just popped into my head like scraps of paper into a wastebasket.”

Born on 5 December 1912 in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, about halfway between Tokyo and Kyoto, to a family who owned a grocery store, Kinoshita was already a movie fan when he was eight. Vowing to become a filmmaker, he was, however, faced with opposition from his parents. When he was in high school, a film crew arrived in Hamamatsu for location shooting one day. He befriended actor Bando Junosuke when the latter came to his store for local products. Bando later helped him run away to Kyoto where most period films were made. But his grandfather came and took him back home the next day. His determination to become a filmmaker finally moved his parents into letting him pursue his own career and his mother even secured him an introduction to the Shochiku Kamata studios, where Ozu, Mikio Naruse and other famous directors worked. Without a university education, however, Kinoshita was not allowed to work as an assistant director and had to start as a photographer, for which he applied to the Oriental Photography School and graduated before he was finally admitted into Shochiku. There, he first worked in the film processing laboratory, then as a camera assistant, before he was advised by Kozaburo Yoshimura to switch to assistant director.

In 1940, Kinoshita was drafted into the war and went to China, but returned the following year out of sickness. He re-entered Shochiku and was promoted to director in 1943. Adapting a famous novel, Kinoshita made The Blossoming Port with a large cast and budget. The same year also 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.

Throughout his career, Kinoshita made many films which were both huge commercial success and critically successful, among which the best known were Morning for the Osone Family (Osone-ke no asa, 1946), Carmen Comes Home (Karumen kokyo ni kaeru, 1951) (which, made in Fujicolor, was the first color feature of Japan), Tragedy of Japan (Nihon no higeki, 1953), Twenty-Four Eyes (Nijushi no hitomi, 1954), You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Yagiku no gotoki kimi nariki, 1955), The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushi kō, 1958)), The River Fuefuki (Fuefukigawa, 1960), just to mention a few. He also refused to be bound by genre, technique or dogma. He excelled in almost every genre, comedy, tragedy, social dramas, period films, All location’s films and films shot completely in a one-house set. He pursued severe photographic realism with the long take, long-shot method, and he has gone equally far toward stylization with fast cutting, intricate wipes, tilted cameras and even medieval scroll-painting and Kabuki stage technique. —Wikipedia