Cinema—Japan
Developing an art form that had originated in the West, Japanese cinema emerged after Japan's victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. As with the later golden age of Japanese film, film art came into its own in the wake of upheaval. The predominance of ideas, of speculation and introspection, so common in Japanese cinema, began with the banshi, the narrator of Japanese silent films. The banshi explained, with flourishes, what was happening, with the premise that there was something of moment to communicate beyond what visual images provided.
Japanese cinema of the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s owed much to the new drama of Shingeki, the social drama born in the early 1900s and influenced by the works of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). Film, like theater, would be an arena of social assessment, a means of examining and exploring the fate of society. Kaoru Osanai, a founder of the Shingeki movement, had studied at the Moscow Art Theater, where Sergey Eisenstein (1898–1948) was also a presence. (In this article, Japanese names are presented surname first.) Crucial to the history of Japanese film are Osanai's films and Minoru Murata's landmark Rojo no Rekion (Souls on the Road), made in 1921 and based partly on Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths, a work that Akira Kurosawa would adapt as well.
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