Cinema, Contemporary — Japan
Japanese cinema began in 1897 with the importation of motion picture cameras from France. By 1900 the Japanese were manufacturing their own equipment. The earliest Japanese films were actualities along the lines of the Lumiere Brothers in France, brief vignettes of street life or glimpses of landscapes. The Russo-Japanese War, beginning in 1904, was actually a boon to Japanese filmmaking, which catered to a seemingly inexhaustible demand for newsreel footage of the fighting—real or staged. The fiction film came into its own when it was integrated into stage plays to form a unique dramatic presentation known as rensa-geki (chain drama). Film sequences shot on location or scenes of dramatic chases became part of live theatrical performances. As the fiction film developed and increased in popularity over the documentary mode, theater, especially kabuki and shimpa, became the dominant model for Japanese cinema. Directors like Itami Mansaku (1900–1946), the father of Itami Juzo, and Makino Shozo (1878–1929) pioneered modern cinematic storytelling techniques, often in the jidai-geki (period film) mode, paving the way for masters like Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956), Yamanaka Sadao (1909–1938), and Ozu Yasujiro (1902–1963) to create a golden age of film in the 1930s. Wartime censorship and the exigencies of war soon put an end to this remarkable period of creativity and commercial success, which would be equaled and perhaps surpassed in the 1950s.
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