Preliminary Observations on Keisuke Kinoshita

As of this writing I have seen 19 of Keisuke Kinoshita's 50 films, enough of a survey that I can begin to analyze the broad strokes of his artistic effort. I have not seen all his most popular works, but have focused on the immediate post-war period and then his contributions to the 50s 'golden age'.

1. The recurring subjects of his work are the contemporary and early 20th century developments in subjectivity, occurring on the level of the individual and of the family unit. Repeatedly he has made films about the importance of education (The Garden of Women, Twenty-Four Eyes, Times of Joy and Sorrow), about feudal romantic norms (The Girl I Loved, The Tattered Wings, She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum, Immortal Love), and about female emancipation (Woman, Carmen Comes Home, The Garden of Women). Behind all of these is a sense of the fragility of human decency and the post-war liberalism of Jaapn -- each effort by his heroes and heroines is haunted by the expectations of social convention, by the sabotaging of simple desire, and by the historical situation that must be contended with by each person in an imperfect and sometimes tragic way.

2. All the texts that I have read about Kinoshita have described him as having a flexible stylistic approach, and this is borne out by simply watching two of his films: one may be dominated by close-ups and dutch angles, another might feature these grand wide shots to the near-exclusion of any other technique. Kinoshita's crucial partners were DP Hiroshi Kusuda and composer Chūji Kinoshita, who was related to him, and together they collaborated on a majority of his filmography, so the eclectic formal choices were not imposed from the outside, but by an active decision by Kinoshita to tailor his skills differently to each film. For his big multi-generational 'intimate epics', like Twenty-Four Eyes, he adopts a more stately and reposed style, composing big tableaux that bring in a larger context for the drama, letting Chūji's scoring to fill-in the negative space, and keeping camera movement relatively spare; for an antsy and agitated social problem film like The Garden of Women, he dials-in with faster cutting, several montages, drawing our attention with specific details of performance. So to speak of Kinoshita's style is to identify what 'mode' he is working in, and as far as I can tell now, he was pretty consistent in this respect, making mostly dramas and comedies, a few period pieces, and not working outside of that register he knew best.

3. Kinoshita was Hideko Takamine's second-favorite director of choice after Mikio Naruse, making eight films with the former in addition to the twelve films with the latter. The even-tempered knowingness of Naruse could not be further away from the impassioned romanticism of Kinoshita, but Takamine was able to bridge that gap, and her performances in Kinoshita's movies are a testament to her range as an actress, from the burlesque stripper of Carmen Comes Home to the wise matriarch of Times of Joy and Sorrow. Naruse had a specific type of female protagonist: long-suffering, clever, emotionally withdrawn, but Kinoshita isn't as hidebound, and his films contain a broader segment of feminine experience that might arise from his own homosexuality -- whereas Naruse might simply be said to identify more with female protagonists, Kinoshita overtly sympathizes with their plights in the same way that Douglas Sirk plumbed the paradoxes of heterosexual romances past the point of 'normalcy' and achieved an insight and wisdom as to the structural and social forces that women endure under patriarchal systems.

4. Kinoshita's 'bad' films are usually the result of an undigested complexity to their stories, by which Kinoshita then tries to paper-over with an excess of stylization. Kinoshita made several films that look extremely unique -- She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum emulates the early smudgy-circular framing of silent cinema in its depiction of an old man's recollection of his youthful yearning, and the film is immediately identifiable because of this, no other movie looks like it. But sometimes Kinoshita's modulation of his effects is crude and overdone: Carmen's Innocent Love, although enjoyably exaggerated, is almost a parody of an over-directed sensibility, with wacky transitions that even George Lucas wouldn't use and a whirling dervish of a camera that can't seem to find a 'normal' perspective in any scene. At his best, Kinoshita lets us feel the power of an actively-engaged storyteller who has given thought to every composition -- at his worst, he comes across as trying really, really hard, laboring over the most simple emotions or ideas with an academic ponderousness.

What has impressed by so far is that Kinoshita is a type of filmmaker that does not really exist anymore in most national cinema industries: he is a socially-conscious entertainer whose films are not aggressive or pointed, a satirist who does not deal in ludicrous caricature, a humanist who is not afraid of directly engaging with Japan's darker history. His balanced empathy is a hard tightrope to walk, and sometimes he is too sentimental, but he also made some tough, very didactic and matter-of-fact films like Morning For The Osone Family, which does not shirk from the devastation wrought by the reactionary elements of his culture. Kinoshita's liberalism was such that several of his films are sympathetic to communists, if not communism itself, because he believes that an open democratic society requires the validity of free debate and expression, that the suppression of any individual or their beliefs is what allows oppression to then thrive in those shadows. Kinoshita's talent was the kind of a natural, easygoing acceptance of things-as-they-are, but always looking forward to a progressive enlightenment for Japan and humanity, which is why even the long-term suffering of his intimate epics is made bearable by an optimism that is able to withstand the trials of time.

As I get older, I begin to value a director like Kinoshita more and more for his open political dialogue, he doesn't smuggle his beliefs into a film with subtext, which isn't a bad thing in-itself, but it IS refreshing when compared to today, where so many major releases are designed to carefully encourage certain interpretations with calculated vagaries masquerading as complexities. What's great about Kinoshita is that you know where he stands: he is the ideal model of a populist artist who is in harmony with his subject matter, an enthusiast of human dignity with an eye towards both the past and the future.