KENJI'S JAPANESE CANON

By: Kenji

Maborosi (1995)

A big welcome to the land of cinematic wonders!

I’ve aimed for a rounded overview to include not only personal favourites but popular hits and international award winners, animé landmarks, avant-garde films, the New Wave, erotic “pink films” and the great classics that are still the glory of world cinema.

Much of silent cinema before the 1930s has been lost, its Benshi narrators displaced but good finally to have the landmark film Souls on the Road on Mubi. In the 20s directors were able to learn their trade through prolific practice, aware of and encorporating developments in both the Soviet Union and the West… and then, what a wealth of wonders! Older masters: the unequalled aesthetic refinement of Mizoguchi, the charm of Shimizu, the quiet observational wisdom of Ozu, the tragically curtailed promise of Yamanaka, the balanced restraint of Naruse, the muscular humanism of Kurosawa… Then, a new generation from the late 50s, in full swing in the sexually freer 60s: the idealism of Kobayashi, the political bite of Oshima, the earthy subversion of Imamura, the cool of Suzuki and Masumura. the avant-garde Terayama.. So many to explore: Yoshida, Ichikawa Kon, Teshigahara, Shinoda, Wakamatsu, Kumai, the documentaries of Ogawa and Hara, the stop motion master Kawamoto, the blood soaked Fukasaku.. the rise of animé, with the international success of Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki’s beautiful flights of fancy, the spiky Tsukamoto, the popular appeal of Kitano, the prolific shocker Miike.. up to the present with Koreeda, Naomi Kawase, Sono, Kurosawa Kiyoshi… oh and i almost went without mentioning Samurai and Godzilla.

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DIRECTORS

The much admired 1930s leftist director Yamanaka Sadao who died in Manchuria after being drafted into the army.

(just click on the blue for links/articles: magic!)
ICHIKAWA
IMAMURA
KITANO
KUROSAWA
MIYAZAKI
MIZOGUCHI
NARUSE
OSHII
OSHIMA
OZU
SUZUKI
TESHIGAHARA
UCHIDA
YAMANAKA
YOSHIDA (+interview)

Ai No Corrida (1976), Oshima’s controversial depiction of power reversal and a very sexual relationship

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I may reinstate the extensive list of films that was in this section if there’s enough demand, but it was all becoming too long..

My favourite films:

Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi)
Maborosi (Kore-eda)
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)
Late Spring (Ozu)
Tales of the Taira Clan (Mizoguchi)
The Life of Oharu (Mizoguchi)
Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi)
Floating Clouds (Naruse)
Tokyo Story (Ozu)
Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Mizoguchi)
Ornamental Hairpin (Shimizu)
My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki)
After the Rain (Koizumi)
The Human Condition (Kobayashi)
Sound of the Mountain (Naruse)
Crazed Fruit (Nakahira)
Eureka (Aoyama)
The End of Summer (Ozu)
The Woman of Rumour (Mizoguchi)
Our Neighbour Miss Yae (Shimazu)
Tokyo Twilight (Ozu)
The Pornographers (Imamura)
Kwaidan (Kobayashi)
With Beauty and Sorrow (Shinoda)
Harakiri (Kobayashi)
Humanity and Paper Balloons (Yamanaka)
Ai no Corrida (Oshima)
Woman of the Dunes (Teshigahara)
Flame and Women (Yoshida)
High and Low (Kurosawa)
Repast (Naruse)
Howl’s Moving Castle (Miyazaki)
Early Summer (Ozu)
Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa)
Onibaba (Shindo)
Bitter End of a Sweet Night (Yoshida)
Straits of Love and Hate (Mizoguchi)
The Only Son (Ozu)
Pigs and Battleships (Imamura)
Branded to Kill (Suzuki)
Red Angel (Masumura)
Japanese Girls at the Harbour (Shimizu)

My Neighbour Totoro (1987), Miyazaki’s delightful and imaginative hit animation.

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LISTS ON MUBI

Japan has been extremely well served by many superb lists on mubi. So i’ve done a separate list of them HERE

ARTICLES:

Wikipedia: CINEMA OF JAPAN

sub categories

READING

Donald Richie: A Hundred Years of Japanese Film
Donald Richie: Ozu
Sato Tadao: Currents in Japanese Cinema
Sato Tadao: Mizoguchi Kenji and the Art of Japanese Cinema
Audie Bock: Japanese Film directors (for 12 greats up to mid 80s)
Jasper Sharp, Tom Mes: The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film
Catherine Russell: The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity
David Desser: Eros Plus Massacre: Japanese New Wave Cinema
Keiko McDonald: Reading a Japanese Film: Cinema in Context
David Bordwell: Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema
David Bordwell: Figures Traced in Light (for the lengthy chapter on Mizoguchi)
Darrell Davis: Picturing Japaneseness
Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro: Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema
Alexander Jacoby: A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors
Alexander Jacoby: Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s
Noel Burch: To the Distant Observer
Mark le Fanu: Mizoguchi and Japan
Jay McRoy (ed): Japanese Horror Cinema
Chris D: Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film
Jasper Sharp: Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema
Stuart Galbraith: The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune
Arthur Nolletti Jr., David Desser (eds): Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History
Oshima Nagisa (et al): Cinema, Censorship and the State: the Writings of Oshima Nagisa
Joan Mellen: Voices from the Japanese Cinema
Joan Mellen: The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan Through its Cinema.
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto Matsuhiro: Logic of Sentiment: The postwar Japanese cinema and questions of modernity
Abe Mark Nornes: Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and the Postwar Japanese Documentary
Abé Mark Nornes: Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima
Maureen Turim: The Films Of Nagisa Oshima: Images Of A Japanese Iconoclast