The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.The success of his latest release, Wife of a Spy (2020), has once again positioned Kiyoshi Kurosawa atop the list of international cinema's most celebrated filmmakers. Continuing what has been an exceptional festival circuit reign in recent years, the Kobe-born director's World War II drama was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and it is, as Notebook’s Aaron E. Hunt observes, an emblematic feature from Kurosawa, retaining several of the archetypes and tropes he has so often embraced. Indeed, a consistency in distinct systems of narrative and audiovisual expression has been central to Kurosawa's cinema, manifest in films spanning multiple genres and locations and relayed in mutable tones and mesmeric formal motifs. And though it took time to find traction with a global audience, this approach was something...
- 9/22/2020
- MUBI
Kiyoshi Kurosawa has always been a director for hire. He came up in the film industry during Nikkatsu’s 17 year regression into “Roman Porno” and pinku eiga, a style of soft-core filmmaking, before they filed bankruptcy in the ‘90s. In its golden age, the Japanese movie studio promoted young assistant directors, like Seijun Suzuki and Shohei Imamura, to direct genre films on break-neck shooting schedules and stingy budgets. Working under contract, the directors possibly saw something of themselves in the chain-smoking contract killers they so often portrayed in their Yakuza films. To them, making movies was just a job. But many saw art, fetishized it, or noted patterns and symbols the directors proudly wrote off in interviews. Any creativity in style and form was merely a way of differentiating one film from the others Nikkatsu produced en masse. In the “Roman Porno” days, Kurosawa was directing softcore films for the...
- 9/14/2020
- MUBI
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