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Film director
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A film director is a person who directs the making of a film. Generally, a film director controls a films artistic and dramatic aspects, the director has a key role in choosing the cast members, production design, and the creative aspects of filmmaking. Under European Union law, the director is viewed as the author of the film, the film director gives direction to the cast and crew and creates an overall vision through which a film eventually becomes realized, or noticed. Directors need to be able to mediate differences in creative visions, there are many pathways to becoming a film director. Some film directors started as screenwriters, cinematographers, film editors or actors, other film directors have attended a film school. Some outline a general plotline and let the actors dialogue, while others control every aspect. Some directors also write their own screenplays or collaborate on screenplays with long-standing writing partners, some directors edit or appear in their films, or compose the music score for their films. Film directors create a vision through which a film eventually becomes realized/noticed. Realizing this vision includes overseeing the artistic and technical elements of production, as well as directing the shooting timetable. This entails organizing the crew in such a way as to achieve their vision of the film. This requires skills of leadership, as well as the ability to maintain a singular focus even in the stressful. Moreover, it is necessary to have an eye to frame shots and to give precise feedback to cast and crew, thus. Thus the director ensures that all involved in the film production are working towards an identical vision for the completed film. The set of varying challenges he or she has to tackle has been described as a jigsaw puzzle with egos. It adds to the pressure that the success of a film can influence when, omnipresent are the boundaries of the films budget. Additionally, the director may also have to ensure an intended age rating, thus, the position of film director is widely considered to be a highly stressful and demanding one. It has been said that 20-hour days are not unusual, under European Union law, the film director is considered the author or one of the authors of a film, largely as a result of the influence of auteur theory. Auteur theory is a film criticism concept that holds that a directors film reflects the directors personal creative vision
2.
Japanese people
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Japanese people are an ethnic group native to Japan. Japanese people make up 98. 5% of the population of their country. Worldwide, approximately 129 million people are of Japanese descent, of these, people of Japanese ancestry who live in other countries are referred to as the Japanese diaspora. The term ethnic Japanese may also be used in some contexts to refer to ethnic groups, including the Yamato, Ainu. The Japanese language is a Japonic language that in the past was treated as a language isolate, the Japanese language has a tripartite writing system using Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Domestic Japanese people use primarily Japanese for daily interaction, the adult literacy rate in Japan exceeds 99%. Japanese religion has traditionally been syncretic in nature, combining elements of Buddhism, Shinto, a polytheistic religion with no book of religious canon, is Japans native religion. Mahayana Buddhism came to Japan in the century and evolved into many different sects. Today, the largest form of Buddhism among Japanese people is the Jōdo Shinshū sect founded by Shinran, most Japanese people profess to believe in both Shinto and Buddhism. Japanese peoples religion functions mostly as a foundation for mythology, traditions, Christianity in Japan is among the nations minority religions. Just under 2%, or about 2.5 million, of Japans population are Christians, many Japanese practice Christianity in the diaspora in Brazil, which is home to the largest Japanese population outside Japan. About 60% of Japanese Brazilians are Roman Catholics, while 90% of Japanese Mexicans are Roman Catholic, certain genres of writing originated in and are often associated with Japanese society. These include the haiku, tanka, and I Novel, although modern writers generally avoid these writing styles, historically, many works have sought to capture or codify traditional Japanese cultural values and aesthetics. Twentieth-century Japanese writers recorded changes in Japanese society through their works, some of the most notable authors included Natsume Sōseki, Junichirō Tanizaki, Osamu Dazai, Yasunari Kawabata, Fumiko Enchi, Yukio Mishima, and Ryōtarō Shiba. In contemporary Japan, popular authors such as Ryū Murakami, Haruki Murakami, decorative arts in Japan date back to prehistoric times. Jōmon pottery includes examples with elaborate ornamentation, in the Yayoi period, artisans produced mirrors, spears, and ceremonial bells known as dōtaku. Later burial mounds, or kofun, preserve characteristic clay haniwa, beginning in the Nara period, painting, calligraphy, and sculpture flourished under strong Confucian and Buddhist influences from China. Among the architectural achievements of this period are the Hōryū-ji and the Yakushi-ji, after the cessation of official relations with the Tang dynasty in the ninth century, Japanese art and architecture gradually became less influenced by China
3.
Akira Kurosawa
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Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese filmmaker. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. After years of working on films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director in 1943, during World War II. The two men would go on to collaborate on another 15 films, Kurosawas wife, Yōko Yaguchi, was also an actress in one of his films. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Kurosawa directed approximately a film a year, including a number of highly regarded films such as Ikiru, Seven Samurai, in 1990, he accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Kurosawa was born on March 23,1910 in Ōimachi in the district of Tokyo. In addition to promoting physical exercise, Isamu Kurosawa was open to western traditions and considered theater and he encouraged his children to watch films, young Akira viewed his first movies at the age of six. During this time, the boy also studied calligraphy and Kendo swordsmanship, another major childhood influence was Heigo Kurosawa, Akiras older brother by four years. In the aftermath of the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, which devastated Tokyo, some commentators have suggested that this incident would influence Kurosawas later artistic career, as the director was seldom hesitant to confront unpleasant truths in his work. In the late 1920s, Heigo became a benshi for Tokyo theaters showing foreign films, Akira, who at this point planned to become a painter, moved in with him, and the two brothers became inseparable. Through Heigo, Akira devoured not only films but also theater and circus performances, while exhibiting his paintings, with the increasing production of talking pictures in the early 1930s, film narrators like Heigo began to lose work, and Akira moved back in with his parents. In July 1933, Heigo committed suicide, only four months later, Kurosawas eldest brother also died, leaving Akira, at age 23, the only one of the Kurosawa brothers still living, together with his three surviving sisters. In 1935, the new film studio Photo Chemical Laboratories, known as P. C. L and his half-mocking view was that if the deficiencies were fundamental, there was no way to correct them. Kurosawas essay earned him a call to take the exams, and director Kajirō Yamamoto. The 25-year-old Kurosawa joined P. C. L. in February 1936, during his five years as an assistant director, Kurosawa worked under numerous directors, but by far the most important figure in his development was Kajiro Yamamoto. Of his 24 films as A. D. he worked on 17 under Yamamoto, many of them featuring the popular actor Kenichi Enomoto. Yamamoto nurtured Kurosawas talent, promoting him directly from third assistant director to assistant director after a year. In the last of Kurosawas films as an assistant director, Horse, Kurosawa took over most of the production, One important piece of advice Yamamoto gave Kurosawa was that a good director needed to master screenwriting
4.
Kenji Mizoguchi
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Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. Mizoguchis work is renowned for its long takes and mise-en-scène, according to writer Mark Le Fanu, His films have an extraordinary force and purity. They shake and move the viewer by the power, refinement and his film Ugetsu won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and appeared in the Sight & Sound Critics Top Ten Poll in 1962 and 1972. Other acclaimed films of his include The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, The Life of Oharu, Mizoguchi was born in Hongo, Tokyo, one of three children. His father was a roofing carpenter, the family was modestly middle-class until his father tried to make a living selling raincoats to soldiers during the Russo-Japanese war. In effect his sister Suzuko, or Suzu, was sold into geishadom - an event which profoundly affected Mizoguchis outlook on life, between this and his fathers brutal treatment of his mother and sister, he maintained a fierce resistance against his father throughout his life. The year 1912, back with his parents, was spent almost entirely in bed, in 1913 Mizoguchis sister Suzu secured him work as an apprentice, designing patterns for kimonos and yukatas. In 1915 his mother died, and Suzu brought her brothers into her own house. In 1916 he enrolled for a course at the Aoibashi Yoga Kenkyuko art school in Tokyo, at this time too he pursued a new interest in opera, particularly at the Royal Theatre at Akasaka where he began, in due course, to help the set decorators. In 1917 his sister helped him to find work, this time a post with the Yuishin Nippon newspaper in Kobe. The writer Tadao Sato has pointed out a coincidence between Mizoguchis life in his years and the plots of shimpa dramas. Such works characteristically documented the sacrifices made by geishas on behalf of the men they were involved with. After less than a year in Kobe however he returned, to the delights of Tokyo. Mizoguchis early works had been exploratory, mainly genre works, remakes of German Expressionism and adaptions of Eugene ONeill, in these early years Mizoguchi worked quickly, sometimes churning out a film in weeks. These would account for over fifty films from the 1920s and 1930s, working in Kyoto - the home of the traditional arts - had a decisive influence. Mizoguchi studied kabuki, noh, and traditional Japanese dance and music, several of Mizoguchis later films were keikō-eiga or tendency films, in which Mizoguchi first explored his socialist tendencies and moulded his famous signature preoccupations. Later in his life, Mizoguchi maintained that his career as a serious director did not begin until 1936, in his middle films, Mizoguchi began to be hailed as a director of new realism, social documents of a Japan that was making its transition from feudalism into modernity. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums won a prize with the Education Department, during this time, Mizoguchi also developed his signature one-scene-one-shot approach to cinema
5.
Shizuoka Prefecture
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Shizuoka Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Chūbu region of Honshu. The capital is the city of Shizuoka, while Hamamatsu is the largest city by population, Shizuoka Prefecture was formed from the former Tōtōmi, Suruga and Izu provinces. The area was the home of the first Tokugawa Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu held the region until he conquered the lands of the Hōjō clan in the Kantō region and placed land under the stewardship of Oda Nobunaga. After becoming shogun, Tokugawa took the back for his family. With the creation of Shizuoka han in 1868, it again became the residence of the Tokugawa family. Shizuoka Prefecture is an elongated region following the coast of the Pacific Ocean at the Suruga Bay, in the west, the prefecture extends deep into the Japan Alps. In the east, it becomes a narrower coast bounded in the north by Mount Fuji, until it comes to the Izu Peninsula, throughout history, a disastrous earthquake called the Tokai earthquake has hit Shizuoka every 100 to 150 years. On Tuesday, March 15,2011, Shizuoka Prefecture was hit with a magnitude 6.2 earthquake approximately 42 km NNE of Shizuoka City, ISBN 978-0-674-01753-5, OCLC58053128 Official Shizuoka Prefecture website Official Shizuoka Guide
6.
Shochiku
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Shochiku Company Limited is a Japanese movie studio and production company for kabuki. It also produces and distributes anime films and its best remembered directors include Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Keisuke Kinoshita and Yōji Yamada. Shochiku has also produced films by highly regarded independent and loner directors such as Takashi Miike, Takeshi Kitano, Akira Kurosawa, the company was founded in 1895, which makes it the oldest company in Japan involved in film production. The name was changed in 1937 to the reading of Shōchiku. The company began making films in 1920, about a decade after its main rival Nikkatsu, renaming itself “Shochiku Kinema”, the company sought to break away from the prevailing pattern of jidai-geki and to emulate Hollywood standards. It was the first film studio to abandon the use of female impersonators and brought new ideas, including the star system and the sound stage to Japan. It built its main studio at Kamata, between Tokyo and Yokohama, and hired Henry Kotani, an American-born Japanese who had worked in Hollywood as an actor to direct its first film, “Island Woman”. With the reopening of its Kamata studios, Shochiku also introduced the shomin-geki genre and these dramas proved immensely popular, and marked the start of the careers of many prominent directors and actors. In 1931, Shochiku released the first “talkie” made in Japan, The Neighbors Wife, the following year, Shochiku Kinema was merged with its parent company, Shochiku Entertainment, and adopted the new name of Shochiku Corporation. During the war years, Shochikus President, Shiro Kido, helped establish the Dai Nippon Eiga Kyokai, from the mid-1930s until 1945, the films produced by Shochiku and other Japanese movie companies were propagandistic. After the Surrender of Japan, Kido and Shochikus co-founder Otani were arrested and charged with Class-A war crimes by the Allied occupation authorities. In 1953, after the end of the Occupation, Kido returned to Shochiku, directors associated with Shochiku in this era included Ozu, Keisuke Kinoshita, Noboru Nakamura and Hideo Oba. Many of the films during the 1950s were aimed primarily at female audiences, in particular, Hideo Oba’s “What is Your Name. ” was the most commercially successful film of the period. By the start of the 1960s, Shochiku’s films were criticized as “old-fashioned” with the popularity of rival Nikkatsu’s Taiyo-zoku youth-orientated movies, Shochiku continued to maintain its family-orientated audience largely due to the phenomenal success of the Otoko wa Tsurai yo series directed by Yoji Yamada from 1969 through 1997. However, with the death of its star Kiyoshi Atsumi, the series came to an end, and the company faced increasing financial difficulties. The Ofuna studio was transformed into a theme park, Kamakura Cinema World, but this was closed in 1998. Since that time, Shochiku has relied on its film studio, yoji’s “The Twilight Samurai” was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Picture. Shochiku has also served as a distributor of theatrical anime. as of October 2015 Kabuki-za Theatrical Corp.3. 44% Mizuho Corporate Bank,3. 22% Asakusa International Theater, media related to Shochiku at Wikimedia Commons Shochiku Co. Ltd
7.
Mikio Naruse
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Mikio Naruse was a Japanese filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who directed some 89 films spanning the period 1930 to 1967. Naruse is known for imbuing his films with a bleak and pessimistic outlook and he made primarily shomin-geki films with female protagonists, portrayed by actresses such as Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Setsuko Hara. Because of his focus on drama and the intersection of traditional and modern Japanese culture. His reputation is just behind Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Ozu in Japan and internationally, among Naruses most revered films are Late Chrysanthemums, Floating Clouds, and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Akira Kurosawa called Naruses style of melodrama, like a river with a calm surface. Mikio Naruse was born in Tokyo in 1905, for a number of years he worked at the Shochiku film company under Shiro Kido as a property manager and later as an assistant director. He was not permitted to direct a film at Shochiku until 1930, in 1933, he quit Shochiku, and began working for Photo-Chemical Laboratories. His first major film was Wife and it won the Kinema Junpo, and was the first Japanese film to receive theatrical release in the United States. The film concerns a woman whose father deserted his family many years before for a geisha. In the war years, Naruse went through a breakup with his wife Sachiko Chiba. Naruse himself claimed to have entered a period of depression as a result of this. In the postwar period he collaborated with others more often, less frequently writing his own scripts, when a Woman Ascends the Stairs tells the story of an aging bar hostess trying to adapt to modern times. Scattered Clouds was his last film, and is regarded as one of his greatest works, a tale of impossible love between a widow and the driver who accidentally killed her husband, it was made two years before his death. Naruse is known as particularly exemplifying the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the awareness of the transience of things, Naruse was shy and few of his closest collaborators knew him well. Hideko Takamine, who starred in a dozen of his films remembered ven during the shooting of a picture, he would never say if anything was good, or bad and he was a completely unresponsive director. I appeared in about 20 of his films, and yet there was never an instance in which he gave me any acting instructions, Naruses films contain simple screenplays, with minimal dialogue, unobtrusive camera work, and low-key production design. His protagonists were usually women and his studies of female experience spanned a range of social milieux. A number of films were adaptations of a single novelist, Fumiko Hayashi
