Kaneto Shindo was a leading Japanese film director and screenwriter whose career in cinema stretched over eight decades. He directed nearly 50 films, and scripted more than 150, winning plaudits at home and abroad.
His most critically celebrated film was The Island (1960), a stark account of peasant life which boldly dispensed with spoken dialogue, narrating its story entirely through imagery and sound. The film scooped the Grand Prize at the 1961 Moscow Film Festival, while The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther praised its “sense of the pride and pathos in primitive life”. Later in the 1960s Shindo was also to win acclaim for two stylish horror films, Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968).
He was born in Hiroshima in 1912, the year which saw the death of the Meiji Emperor who had presided over Japan’s late 19th-century modernisation. By the mid-1930s, he had found work in the film industry, initially as an art director. He served as assistant director to one of Japan’s leading filmmakers, Kenji Mizoguchi, and by the early 1940s, was working as a screenwriter. During the war, he was conscripted as part of a unit of 100 men. He was one of only six of these not to see active service; the other 94 were killed.
After the war Shindo returned to the film industry. In 1947, while under contract to one of Japan’s leading studios, Shochiku, he scripted The Ball at the Anjo House, a Chekhovian study of the decline of Japan’s prewar aristocracy directed by Kozaburo Yoshimura. This won the top prize in the annual critics poll for the Japanese film magazine, Kinema Junpo, and initiated a fruitful collaboration between the two men.
Both unhappy at their studio, they left to establish an independent production company, Kindai Eiga Kyokai. It was here that Shindo directed his first film, the semi-autobiographical Story of a Beloved Wife (1951), which starred his own future spouse, Nobuko Otowa, who was to appear in almost all his films until her death in 1994.
Advertisement
He followed this up with a series of politically conscious films initiated by Children of Hiroshima (1952), the first film to dramatise the atomic bombing of Shindo’s native city. The director visualised the bombing in an intense montage sequence inspired by Soviet silent cinema. He went on to make Epitome (1953), a grim geisha story, The Gutter (1954), a searing account of urban poverty, and Lucky Dragon No 5 (1959), a sombre account of the sufferings of a crew of tuna fisherman afflicted by radioactive contamination in the aftermath of US nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll. Although these films were wellreceived by many critics, they made little money, and Shindo’s production company was facing bankruptcy at the time he made, on a minimal budget, The Island, which restored his fortunes. He went on to make Mother (1963), another story about the legacy of Hiroshima.
Alongside the films that he directed himself, Shindo continued to write subtle, well-constructed screenplays for his friend and fellow director, Kozaburo Yoshimura, including the Kyoto-set geisha film Clothes of Deception (1951).
He was also to script films for other important Japanese directors, including Yasuzo Masumura, Kenji Misumi and Seijun Suzuki.
The mid-1960s saw an unexpected move away from realism. With Onibaba and Kuroneko, Shindo directed two of the seminal works of Japanese horror cinema. In these chilling films, his flamboyant direction was complemented by Kiyomi Kuroda’s stunning chiaroscuro cinematography and Hikaru Hayashi’s menacing scores. Also in the 1960s, he made a number of erotic films. Heat Wave Island (1969) and Live Today, Die Tomorrow (1970) were crime films with a focus on alienated youth.
Although The Strangling (1979) played in competition at Venice, where Nobuko Otowa won the award for best actress, Shindo’s later work won less acclaim on the whole than his output from the 1950s and 1960s. But he continued to make original and individual films.
Advertisement
In 1975 a documentary about his mentor Kenji Mizoguchi became the first in a series of films about artists. He went on to direct, in fictional form, The Life of Chikuzan (1977), about the youth of a shamisen player who had become a cult figure in later life; Edo Porn (1981), an iconoclastic portrait of the celebrated 19th-century woodblock artist Hokusai; and The Strange Story of Oyuki (1992), about writer and flâneur Nagai Kafu, who had chronicled Tokyo’s interwar demi-monde. Another documentary, Sakuratai chiru (1988), recounted the lives and work of the members of a left-wing theatre group who perished at Hiroshima.
At the age of 82 Shindo made The Last Note (1995), a study of the trials and tribulations of old age. He marshalled a superb veteran cast, including his wife, Nobuko Otowa, in her last appearance; she died of cancer only days after shooting was completed. Shindo himself continued to direct into extreme old age. The Owl (2003), a black comedy with themes of sex and death, was released when he was already past 90. He made his final film, Post Card (2010), in which he revisited his wartime experiences, at the age of 98. He was obliged to direct it from a wheelchair. After completing this film, he announced his retirement. But he lived to celebrate his centenary in April 2012, an occasion commemorated by tributes and retrospectives in Japan and abroad.
From 1972 to 1981, Shindo served as president of the Japanese Association of Scenario Writers. He was pronounced a person of cultural merit in 1998 and was awarded the Order of Culture in 2002.
Shindo was married three times. His first wife died in 1940. His second marriage apparently ended in divorce. His marriage to Nobuko Otowa lasted until her death in 1994. He is survived by his son, Jiro. A granddaughter, Kaze Shindo, is also a film director.
Kaneto Shindo, screenwriter and film director, was born on April 22, 1912. He died on May 29, 2012, aged 100