Keisuke Kinoshita
Keisuke Kinoshita
Although lesser known internationally than his fellow filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu, Keisuke Kinoshita was nonetheless a household figure at home beloved by audience and critics alike, especially in the forties through the sixties. He was also prolific, turning out some 42 films in the first 23 years of his career. For this, Kinoshita explained, "can’t help it. Ideas for films have always just popped into my head like scraps of paper into a wastebasket." Born on 5 December 1912 in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, about halfway between Tokyo and Kyoto, to a family who owned a grocery store, Kinoshita was already a movie fan when he was eight. Vowing to become a filmmaker, he was, however, faced with opposition from his parents. His determination to become a filmmaker finally moved his parents into letting him pursue his own career and his mother even secured him an introduction to the Shochiku Kamata studios, where Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse, and other famous directors worked. Without a university education, however, Kinoshita was not allowed to work as an assistant director and had to start as a photographer, for which he applied to the Oriental Photography School and graduated before he was finally admitted into Shochiku. There, he first worked in the film processing laboratory, then as a camera assistant, before he was advised by Kōzaburō Yoshimura to switch to assistant director.
