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Japanese Girls at the Harbor.In 1924, Hiroshi Shimizu, the 21-year-old son of a wealthy businessman, dropped his studies at an agricultural school in Hokkaido and moved to Tokyo to pursue his interest in filmmaking. The Japanese industry was in a state of flux, moving away from the jidaigeki, or period dramas, and towards gendaigeki, films about contemporary life: slapstick, romantic, and sport-themed comedies; crime films; and its trademark, shōshimin-eiga, social dramas concerned with working and middle class life.One of the major forces of this change was Shochiku, the studio where Shimizu landed a job, first as an assistant director, and then in 1925 as a full-fledged director. Under the leadership of Shiro Kido, an ambitious young executive, Shochiku was establishing itself as a distinctly modern film studio within a major metropolis. Tokyo was in the midst of a growth spurt, with urban sprawl accelerating and multitudes of people migrating from the countryside.

Pioneering filmmaker and actress was second woman to direct a feature in history of Japanese cinema.

The Locarno Film Festival will celebrate the work of Japanese director and actress Kinuyo Tanaka at its upcoming 73rd edition (August 5-15), in its first ever retrospective dedicated to a female artist.

Tanaka (1909 –1977) was a pioneering figure in Japanese cinema throughout her 50-year career, appearing in the films of legendary directors Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi before striking off to direct her own films.

“This is the first time that the festival will be dedicating its retrospective to a female director, after 73 years,” said...

Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This August will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

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Tuesday, August 1

Tuesday’s Short + Feature: These Boots and Mystery Train

Music is at the heart of this program, which pairs a zany music video by Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki with a tune-filled career highlight from American independent-film pioneer Jim Jarmusch. In the 1993 These Boots, Kaurismäki’s band of pompadoured “Finnish Elvis” rockers, the Leningrad Cowboys, cover a Nancy Sinatra classic in their signature deadpan style. It’s the perfect prelude to Jarmusch’s 1989 Mystery Train, a homage to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and the musical legacy of Memphis, featuring appearances by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Joe Strummer.

Has another photo existed with so many great filmmakers in one shot? This was taken in 1936 on the occation of the creation of the Japan Film Directors Society.

Front row, from left:

Teinosuke Kinugasa (1896-1982)

Yoshinobu Ikeda (1892-1973)

Sadao Yamanaka (1909-1938)

Mansaku Itami (1900-1946)

Heinosuke Gosho (1902-1981)

Minoru Murata (1894-1937)

Shigeyoshi Suzuki (1900-1976)

Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956)

Second row, from left:

Tomotaka Tasaka (1902-1974)

Yasujiro Shimazu (1897-1945)

Hiroshi Shimizu (1903-1966)

Yutaka Abe (1895-1977)

Kiyohiko Ushihara (1897-1985)

Kajiro Yamamoto (1902-1974)

Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963)

Tomu Uchida (1898-1970)

Third row, from left:

Mikio Naruse (1905-1969)

Kintaro Inoue (1901-1954)

(Via Vermillion and One Nights.)...

Japanese actor whose forte was courageous, independent, strong-willed heroines

Although Japan had been making films since the beginnings of cinema, Japanese films remained virtually unknown in the west for more than half a century. Shamefully, it has taken almost as long again to recognise the greatness of the director Mikio Naruse, and consequently the remarkable talents of Hideko Takemine, his leading lady in more than a dozen films, who has died of lung cancer aged 86.

In the same way as Kinuyo Tanaka became associated with the films of Kenji Mizoguchi, and Setsuko Hara with those of Yasujiro Ozu, Takemine embodied Naruse's heroines – courageous, independent, strong-willed, conscientious women, faced with misfortune. Naruse once remarked about his female characters: "If they try to move forward even a little, they quickly hit a wall." The director Akira Kurosawa's description of Naruse's films as "looking calm and ordinary at first glance but which...