Post War Japanese Cinema

Catalog description

Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro, and Kurosawa Akira are recognized today as three of the most important and influential directors in Japanese cinema. In their films of the late 1940s and 1950s, these directors focused upon issues surrounding the human condition and the perception of truth, history, beauty, death, and other issues of the postwar period. This lecture course places their films in period context, and pays particular attention to the connections to other visual media, and to how "art" and "history" are being defined in the cinematic context. How other directors also took up these issues, and referred to the "big three" is also be discussed.