Word: cinema
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Twenty-five years ago, it was among the healthiest of Japanese industries: six thriving studios produced 503 films that sold more than 1.1 billion tickets in 7,067 theaters. Today, in an entertainment world that moves to Sony Walkman rhythms and Pac-Man blips, Japanese cinema is troubled and timid. The five studios that have survived the national movie recession of the past decade or so-Toho, Toei, Shochiku, Nikkatsu and Daiei-find their profits in real estate, supermarket chains, Kabuki theater troupes and bowling alleys. Most of the 322 films produced last year were roman poruno, or lowbudget, soft...
...1950s Japan could boast not only a robust film industry but also a vibrant national cinema, with three directors-Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa-who could be counted among the handful of film-making giants. Mizoguchi died in 1956, Ozu in 1963, and no younger director has since achieved nearly their stature. As for Kurosawa, he has been able to realize only three films since 1965-all outside the studio system-and in 1971, frustrated by the industry's intransigence, attempted suicide. His latest project, a retelling of King Lear set in medieval Japan, was recently postponed...
Book of World Records as the longest movie series; the 31st Tora-San feature will be released in August. But none of these genres is likely to restore Japan to international prominence. Times look dark in the cinema of the rising...
...current state of near exhaustion, the Japanese cinema has returned to the exotic isolation of its earliest years. Moviegoing in Japan at the turn of the century was an experience more closely allied to other national arts than to the nickelodeon fever of the West. Until 1918 female roles were played by Kabuki actors in drag. Until the arrival of talking pictures in 1931, audiences depended upon spellbinding narrators called benshi to interpret the on-screen action; many were more popular than the country's movie stars. Though Japanese cinema was a strong force in Asia (so much...
Things may be changing. The Japanese cinema has not been so lucky as Chrysler in 1983, but there are small stirrings of renaissance. In May, for only the second time since 1954, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival went to a Japanese film: Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, an elemental and unsentimentahzed portrait of Japan's mountain people in the 1880s. The same festival also showcased Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a P.O.W. melodrama set in Java in 1942 starring David Bowie and two popular Japanese performers, Singer-Songwriter Ryuichi Sakamoto...