The golden age of Japanese cinema

In the fifties the Japanese industry produced more than five hundred films a year and gave a few directors a rare freedom. Ozu placed his camera at the height of a man seated on a tatami and filmed parents visiting children who are too busy. Kurosawa had seven samurai hired by a village of peasants and invented a grammar of action taken up everywhere. Mizoguchi filmed the condition of women in long continuous takes, Naruse the precariousness of bar hostesses, Kobayashi the cruelty of the warrior code.

works 7

• TaleTales of Moonlight and Rain雨月物語Ueda Akinari · 1776Nine fantastic tales of 1776, drawn in part from Chinese collections and transposed to Japan.Literature
• NovelJapan's First Modern Novel: Ukigumo浮雲Futabatei Shimei · 1887A novel published in three parts, about a young civil servant who loses his post and sees an ambitious colleague supplant him.Literature
• CinemaTokyo Story東京物語Yasujiro Ozu · 1953A 1953 film about parents who travel from the provinces to see, in Tokyo, children who have no time to receive them.Cinema
• CinemaUgetsu雨月物語Kenji Mizoguchi · 1953Film of 1953 in which two men leave their village in wartime, one to sell, the other to bear arms.Cinema
• CinemaSeven Samurai七人の侍Akira Kurosawa · 1954A film of 1954 in which unarmed farmers hire seven idle warriors to stand up to bandits, and pay them in rice.Cinema
• CinemaFloating Clouds浮雲Mikio Naruse · 19551955 film based on a book, about a woman who cannot bring herself to leave the man she loved during the war.Cinema
• CinemaHarakiri切腹Masaki Kobayashi · 1962A 1962 sword film in which a man asks to take his own life in the courtyard of a clan, and in which we discover what the honour set against him rests on.Cinema