Mizoguchi and neo-realism

[Naoki Yamamoto]

Just a quick note following up Markus's remark. In his 1956 book Eiga 
no riron (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten [Iwanami shinsho], 1956) Iwasaki Akira 
devoted one chapter entitled "Eiga geijutsu no sekai" (pp. 161-194) to 
making a comparison between Italian neo-realism and Japan's independent 
production filmmakers (i.e., Shindo Kaneto, Imai Tadashi, Yamamoto 
Satsuo, and so forth). Although Iwasaki, like Imamura to a certain 
degree, put too much emphasis on the possibility of Soviet social 
realism films, I think this book is still useful to know how Japanese 
film director/critics received Italian neo-realism in the 1950s.

Naoki Yamamoto

On Jun 11, 2007, at 12:06 PM, Mark Nornes wrote:

>
> On Jun 10, 2007, at 11:17 PM, <frannyandzoey at infoseek.jp> 
> <frannyandzoey at infoseek.jp> wrote:
>
>>> Just a little question for mizoguchian specialists : a french critic,
>>> Jean Douchet, wrote some ten years ago that Mizoguchi's Yoru no
>>> onnatachi, released in 1948, was in some way influenced by italian
>>> neo-realism. But if I'm not wrong, and Oshima Nagisa confirmed that 
>>> in
>>> his "taikenteki sengo eigaron", these italian movies had been all
>>> released in Japan from 1949 to 1950...
> Just an addendum: This is after the period you're asking about, but 
> Imamura Taihei wrote a whole book on neo-realism in 1953. He notes 
> that the postwar Italian cinema "shocked" Japanese filmmakers, but 
> also that no one wrote anything but impressionistic criticism until 
> his book. Unfortunately, he doesn't have anything to say about the 
> relationship of neo-realism to Japanese cinema (making the book rather 
> uninteresting). His main coordinate for thinking about neorealism is 
> the pre-Stalinist Soviet cinema.??
>
> Markus