Keisuke Kinoshita

A bitter look back at responsibility for the war, a new interpretation of democracy as popular justice instead of license, and encouragement for women to assert themselves. A widow with three sons and an outspoken daughter relies on her militarist brother-in-law to manage the family during the war. The oldest son is jailed for pacifist thoughts, and the uncle breaks his niece’s engagement as a result. The two younger sons are drafted and both die, and by the end of the war the widow realizes that her brother-in-law’s counsel has all been self-aggrandizement. She throws him out and joyfully receives her newly released pacifist son as morning dawns for the liberal family.

Winner of Kinema Jumpo #1 for the year 1946.Read More »

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A Japanese businessman is sent to Sri Lanka and meets a beautiful Japanese woman with a past. They befriend an old Japanese-Indian widow who has an estranged son in Japan.Read More »

Criterion’s title for this film is “You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum.”

From the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Films of Keisuke Kinoshita” program notes:

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Masao (Ozu regular Chishu Ryu) returns to his hometown after a successful career in business; the visit prompt memories of the time right before he left to study, when as a young man he fell in love with Tamiko, a beautiful, high-spirited young woman who also loved him but whom he was forbidden to marry as his family—and especially his mother—already had plans for him. Kinoshita brilliantly captures the flush of young love, played out against stunning landscapes—a love made all the more poignant as we know it will remain unrequited. Film scholar Donald Richie called it “one of the most nostalgically beautiful of Kinoshita’s films.”Read More »

A young woman fends off a series of aggressive marriage proposals from a man who committed atrocities during World War II.Read More »

Hikaru and Ichiro are close friends in high school. Hikaru’s elder brother Tadashi fell in love with Ichiro’s elder sister, Mikako at first sight. Although she gave the cold shoulder to Tadashi, she gradually became fond of Tadashi.Read More »

Nick Wrigley, Masters of Cinema wrote:
At the close of the war in Japan, a widowed mother makes every possible sacrifice to bring up her ungrateful son and daughter who are unimpressed with their poor standard of living at home. They gradually reject her in search of the material comforts that working as a maid cannot provide. The mother’s despair becomes interminable.Read More »

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Sentimental egalitarianism in a love story that crosses class barriers. A lower-class entrepreneur on his way up is proposed a match wth a lovely girl of an aristocratic family. He soon learns her household is bankrupt and hoping he will bail them out, and he feels he has none of the refined culture this girl enjoys. But in the end the girl herself realizes she is really in love with this boorish but charmingly frank and devoted young man…Read More »

SYNOPSIS
The title “Twenty-four Eyes” refers to the 12 pairs of eyes belonging to the young students of a small branch school on Shodo Island in the Japanese Inland Sea. The story unfolds in the spring of 1928, when Hisako Oishi (Hideko Takamine) takes over as the new teacher at the local grammar school. At first, the small village does not accept the young schoolteacher who wears Western clothes and rides a bicycle to school. It doesn’t take long, however, before the pupils, their parents, and the entire village fall under the spell of this special teacher. However, trauma does not lie far. The peaceful lives of Shodo Shima contrast the war occurring just over its horizon.Read More »

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A light-heartedly humorous take on post-war female emancipation, Carmen Comes Home is a fairly typical offering from Shochiku, a studio renowned at the time for its conservative output specialising predominantly in comedies and domestic dramas based firmly within the framework of the traditional Japanese family structure. Produced at a time when the company’s fortunes were still riding high, to celebrate their 30th anniversary studio head Shiro Kido (himself the subject of a retrospective at the Nederlands Filmmuseum in 1994) allowed director Keisuke Kinoshita to direct this light and breezy comedy drama in Fujicolor, and thus Japan’s first ever colour motion picture came to be made.Read More »