[KineJapan] Introduction + Inquiries about Prokino and Pre-WWII cinema

[Henrique Quadros]

Hello everyone,

I'm sorry if this is not properly formatted, or if I'm not sending this
email correctly, this is my first time participating in an e-mail list. I
hope this is correctly addressed. First of all, I'd like to introduce
myself. My name is Henrique Quadros, I live in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I
studied Cinema in college from 2018 to 2020, and currently I'm working on a
completely independent (not associated with any university or organization)
research project on pre-WWII cinema, more specifically the left-leaning
cinema of the 3 countries of the Axis from before their respective fascist
governments united in the Tripartite Pact in 1940. This, of course,
involves the cinema of Japan before the war and mostly before the middle to
late 1930s. My research involved learning about the "keiko-eiga" genre of
films, some of the jidaigeki of directors like Daisuke Ito, and the films
from the Proletarian Film League of Japan (Prokino), the latter of which
have become my main area of interest currently.

I've been contacting some scholars in the field of studies of pre-war
Japanese cinema, like Professor Markus Nornes and Professor Aaron Gerow,
but I didn't consider contacting the KineJapan list for a broader response
that could help me get more info on the topic. So here I am. I'll lay out
my general inquiries and some more specific ones, if you have any way of
assisting me in any of these aspects, I'd be deeply thankful for your help.

*First*, I'd like to ask what are some good English texts on Daisuke Ito,
keiko-eiga and Prokino that I can easily find online (either through stores
like Amazon or via pdf download, for example) that would give me
information on the history and, specifically, how these films were
perceived by the Japanese public and authorities. *Second*, if you think
there are specific films that I should research that were left-leaning in
nature (or perhaps perceived as such) and generated some sort of
controversy and censorship in the pre-war years, can you point them out
please? Part of my research involves creating a chronological list of the
films that fit the criteria. *Third*, this is a more specific one, do you
know who directed the individual Prokino films that are extant today (like
the ones in the Purokino Sakuhinshu collection)? I want to add the Prokino
films to the TMDB database so that it's easier to find information about
each production, but I wasn't able to find much information about the
production crew. If you know who made each film or if you know where to
find this specific information, please let me know.

That is it for now. I hope this e-mail reaches you properly and that I've
done this correctly. I'd like to thank Professor Markus Nornes for
recommending this list, and also I'd like to preemptively thank everyone
for their time and patience in reading this and trying to help. Have a
great Friday, a great weekend, and a great July.

Yours truly,
Henrique
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20220701/c8c0ede6/attachment.html>