Sadao Yamanaka
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Sadao Yamanaka (山中 貞雄 Yamanaka Sadao) (November 7, 1909 – September 17, 1938) was a Japanese film director and writer who directed more than 20 films during a seven-year stretch of the 1930s. Yamanaka was a contemporary of Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi. Yamanaka was one of the primary figures in the development of jidaigeki, or historical films.
Nonetheless, only three of Yamanaka's films survived World War II, and Yamanaka died of typhoid in Manchuria after being drafted into the Japanese Army, and his cinematic influence would have seemed forgotten. But interest in Yamanaka's work redeveloped after the recent restoration and Japanese DVD re-release of the three surviving films, and Yamanaka's most internationally discussed film (in recent years), Humanity and Paper Balloons (1938) was given its' first non-Japanese release via a U.K. DVD release.
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[edit] Characteristics
Yamanaka's professional career was with Nikkatsu Studios. Early on, Yamanaka had stated an interest in blurring the lines between several genres: comedy, historical epics, and shomingeki, or comedy-dramas focusing on average people. In this, viewers and critics (notably, Donald Richie and Tadao Sato in pioneering studies of Japanese cinema) note in Yamanaka's surviving films the genesis of ideas later explored by the internationally successful Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and Seijun Suzuki (see references below).
[edit] Partial filmography (surviving films)
- The Million Ryo Pot (Tange Sazen Yowa: Hyakuman Ryo No Tsuba) - 1935
- Soshun Kochiyama - 1936
- Humanity and Paper Balloons (Ninjo Kamifusen) - 1937
[edit] References
- Richie, Donald. A Hundred Years Of Japanese Film. Kodansha America, 2001. ISBN 4-7700-2995-0.
- Sato, Tadao. Currents In Japanese Cinema. Kodansha America, 1982. ISBN 0-87011-815-3.
