Early Career As A Film Director
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. Otowa threw away a career as a studio star to appear in Shindo's film. She became Shindo's lover, and would go on to play leading roles in almost all of the films Shindo directed during her life. After directing Avalanche in 1952, Shindo was invited by the Japan Teachers Union to make a film about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Children of Hiroshima stars Nobuko Otowa as a young teacher who returns to Hiroshima for the first time since the bomb was dropped to find surviving former students. Both controversial and critically acclaimed on its release, it premiered at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival. It was the first Japanese film to deal with the subject of the atomic bomb, which had been forbidden under postwar American censorship.
After this international success, Shindo made Shukuzu in 1953. Nobuko Otowa is Ginko, a poor girl who must become a geisha in order to support her family, and cannot marry the rich client whom she falls in love with because of his family honor. Film critic Tadao Sato said Shindo had "inherited from his mentor Mizoguchi his central theme of worship of womanhood...Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Shindo's view of women blossomed under his master's encouragement, but once in bloom revealed itself to be of a different hue...Shindo differs from Mizoguchi by idealizing the intimidating capacity of Japanese women for sustained work, and contrasting them with shamefully lazy men."
Between 1953 and 1959 Shindo continued to make political films that were social critiques of poverty and women's suffering in present day Japan. These included Onna no issho, an adaptation of Maupassant's Une Vie in 1953, and Dobu, a 1954 film about the struggles of unskilled workers and petty thieves that starred Otowa as a tragic prostitute. In 1959 he made Lucky Dragon Number 5, the true story of a fishing crew irradiated by an atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. The film received the Peace Prize at a Czech film festival, but was not a success with either critics or audiences.
By this time Shindo had formed an established "stock company" of actors and crew that he would work with for the majority of his career. This included actors Nobuko Otowa, Taiji Tonoyama and Kei Sato, composer Hikaru Hayashi and cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda, who had been fired from the Toei studio for his political beliefs in the "red purge" of the early 1950s, and lost a legal battle for reinstatement.
Read more about this topic: Kaneto Shindo
Famous quotes containing the words film director, early, career, film and/or director:
“All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They’re obliged to overstate their own importance.”
—François Truffaut (1932–1984)
“Foolish prater, What dost thou
So early at my window do?
Cruel bird, thou’st ta’en away
A dream out of my arms to-day;
A dream that ne’er must equall’d be
By all that waking eyes may see.
Thou this damage to repair
Nothing half so sweet and fair,
Nothing half so good, canst bring,
Tho’ men say thou bring’st the Spring.”
—Abraham Cowley (1618–1667)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1948)
“He wrote me sad Mother’s Day stories. He’d always kill me in the stories and tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother’s eye.”
—Connie Zastoupil, U.S. mother of Quentin Tarantino, director of film Pulp Fiction. Rolling Stone, p. 76 (December 29, 1994)