Masahiro Shinoda
In this video appreciation, created in 2009, we present filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda’s observations on THE HUMAN CONDITION and director Masaki Kobayashi.
A young tofu maker, Eikichi comes from Kyoto to open a tofu shop in a friendly neighborhood. He meets there a feisty local girl Ofumi who befriends him as he sets up his shop, Kyo-ya and in spite of the difficulties stemming from cultural differences between the two ancient capitals including the favored taste of tofu itself, they eventually marry and become the owner of a tofu shop on a more respectable street. Behind the rock-solid business of Kyo-ya, their son, Eitaro bears the brunt of other tofu shops' animosity toward Kyo-ya's refusal to comply with Edo's way of running business and starts to frequent a gambling hall run by the mysterious "Boss", which throws the family into a critical situation that threaten to pull them apart...
As the great military commander Nobunaga Oda was consolidating his power across Japan, one of his actions was to wipe out a clan of assassins, killing every man, woman and child he found in the village. Years later, one of the survivors has hired a young but skilled assassin to avenge the deaths of his friends and family. His mission: to sneak into the most heavily guarded castle in Japan, and kill the supreme ruler of the country.
After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, a writer remembers travelling with his family to bury his brother after World War II.
The ukiyo-e (woodblock print) artist Sharaku is an enigmatic puzzle in the world of Japanese art. Working at an age when such masters of the trade as Hokusai and Utamaro were at their zenith, Sharaku suddenly emerged out of obscurity and produced roughly 140 strikingly brilliant portraits of Kabuki performers, only to disappear just as suddenly. To date, no one knows about his true identity or about his post-ukiyo-e career. Veteran director Masahiro Shinoda tries to fill in the blanks with this lavish period production. Set in the 1790s, the film centers on Tombo (Hiroyuki Sanada), a lowly Kabuki player who gets dumped from his troupe after breaking his foot. He joins a ragged traveling outfit run by former courtesan Okan. While not on-stage, he takes up drawing, for which he realizes he has considerable ability. His talents are noticed by Tsutaya Juzaburo, a ukiyo-e publisher who is desperate for a replacement after his star artist Utamaro defected to his rival's stable.
In this 1993 video interview, filmed for the Directors Guild of Japan at Tokyo’s Haiyuza Theatre, director Masaki Kobayashi talks to fellow filmmaker and longtime Kobayashi admirer Masahiro Shinoda (DOUBLE SUICIDE) about THE HUMAN CONDITION.
A story of childhood life during wartime Japan. Takeshi, the intelligent son of a fisherman, is the schoolyard bully. When his cousin comes to stay with his family to avoid bombing raids, Takeshi at first treats him well, then begins bullying him too. Takeshi eventually loses his position of leadership.
Based on a semi-autobiographical story by Ogai Mori, about a Japanese medical student who goes to Berlin to study in the 1880s and falls in love with a German ballet dancer.
The tragic story of Gonza, a handsome ladies man, set in the Tokagawa Period, a time in which appearences are very important. Gonza competes with Bannojo for the honor to perform the tea ceremony to celebrate the birth of an heir to the lord of their clan. To see the sacred tea scrolls Gonza promises to marry the daughter of the family which possesses them, even though he is unofficially engaged to another. When studying the scrolls with Osai, the mother of the house, Bannajo sneaks into the house and steals their obis and runs through the town proclaiming the two as adulterers.
In this drama at the end of World War II, the inhabitants of a small Japanese fishing village must come to terms with their nation's defeat and the sudden occupation of General MacArthur and his troops.
Famous detective Kosuke Kindaichi follows a dying man's words to an enigmatic island, where he meets beautiful twin sisters and tragic events unfold.
Outside of a small village in Japan, a mysterious pond is inhabited by mythic creatures. Their story is of revenge, tragedy, and the power of real love. A classical tale which translates wonderfully to film.
A blind traveling musician is abused and oppressed wherever she goes, even as the modern world imposes change around her.
A mountain man beheads his many wives to prove his love to an alluring woman he meets in an enchanted forest.
Follows a young med student's relationships with two women: a dangerous affair with a childhood friend and his mother's struggle to rebuild their estranged relationship.
A documentary about the 1972 Winter Olympic Games in Sapporo, Japan.
An outlaw pushes the residents of Edo's red light district to rebel against a growing number of stifling, moralistic laws.
Successful and married with children, paper-mill owner Jihei knows better than to contradict the strict social and moral codes of 18th-century Japan. But when he meets the lovely courtesan Koharu, he becomes a man obsessed. Koharu returns his love, even foregoing other customers while Jihei schemes to somehow buy her freedom. His efforts yield ruinous consequences for his business and his family life, and Koharu is meanwhile purchased by another client.
Seeking revenge against the guard who tormented him, a young man returns to the island where he was imprisoned in reform school. But his plans for vengeance are disturbed when he encounters a strange and beautiful young woman
Years of warfare end in a Japan unified under the Tokugawa shogunate, and samurai spy Sasuke Sarutobi, tired of conflict, longs for peace. When a high-ranking spy named Tatewaki Koriyama defects from the shogun to a rival clan, however, the world of swordsmen is thrown into turmoil. After Sasuke is unwittingly drawn into the conflict, he tracks Tatewaki, while a mysterious, white-hooded figure seems to hunt them both. By tale’s end, no one is who they seemed to be, and the truth is far more personal than anyone suspected. Director Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, filled with clan intrigue, ninja spies, and multiple double crosses, marks a bold stylistic departure from swordplay film convention.
When the man who seduced the famous painter Otoko as a teenager--and then wrote a bestselling novel about it--reappears in her life, her pupil--and lesbian lover--hatches a plot to destroy the man and his family.
Muraki, a hardboiled Yakuza gangster, has just been released from prison after serving a sentence for murder. Revisiting his old gambling haunts, he meets Saeko, a striking young upper-class woman who is out seeking thrills, and whose presence adds spice to the staid masculine underworld rituals. Muraki becomes her mentor while simultaneously coping with the shifts of power that have affected the gangs while he was interred. When he notices a rogue, drug-addicted young punk hanging around the gambling dens, he realizes that Saeko's insatiable lust for intense pleasures may be leading her to self-destruction.
Assassination begins with the events of 1853 when "four black ships" anchored at Edo Bay, sparking civil unrest and the major political manoeuvring that saw the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. At a time when assassination had become a disturbing political tool, Shinoda's film follows Hachiro Kiyokawa, an ambitious, masterless samurai whose allegiances drift dangerously between the Shogunate and the Emperor.
When two sisters fall in love with the same man, one must decide to look elsewhere.
A treasury official passed over for promotion and obsessed with careerism interferes in the lives of his three sons, who seek escape from his relentless pressure in the mortal danger of mountain climbing.
Takashi Fujiki stars as a rebel in this drama about life on the Yokohama waterfront by New Wave director Masahiro Shinoda. The rebel works as an errand boy for a shipping company and vents his frustrations by plucking on the guitar. His interpretations of popular trends in music are sometimes right-on, and sometimes not exactly. Bereft of his guitar, the rebel's modes of expression are not as effective in generating interest as the Yokohama docks themselves, a fascinating world in their own right.
Mod-sixties visuals and black humor mark this wild New Wave masterpiece about a vengeful contractor who hires a series of young killers to target a woman muckraker. Trouble brews when an amateur marksman shows up his eclectic competition.
Ishihara Kiyoshi plans to marry the woman he loves, Chiee, a coffee shop girl. After an accident, Chiee loses her memory. A romance movie whose original work by Ayako Sono was made into a melodrama by a combination of Shinoda Masahiro and Terayama Shuji.
A woman brings her injured daughter to the hospital, only to realize that the doctor is the estranged father of her child.
The backstage romances of an egotistical singer and his under-valued manager, a lovelorn bandman and a nude dancer.
A reckless student contemplates terrorism in a prescient film that confirmed Shinoda as a fearless member of Shochiku’s iconoclastic New Wave. At the height of student protests, Shimojo (Shinichiro Mikami) takes his aggressions to another level, beset by seemingly insoluble feelings of alienation.
Two sisters find out the existence of their long-lost mother, but the younger cannot take the truth of being abandoned as a child.
