15 Facts About Keisuke Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita was a Japanese film director and screenwriter.

Keisuke Kinoshita was born Masakichi Kinoshita on 5 December 1912, in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, as the fourth of eight children of merchant Shukichi Kinoshita and his wife Tama.

Keisuke Kinoshita's family manufactured pickles and owned a grocery store.

Keisuke Kinoshita befriended actor Bando Junosuke when the latter came to his store for local products.

Keisuke Kinoshita's mother secured him an introduction to the Shochiku Kamata studios, where Ozu, Mikio Naruse, and other famous directors worked.

In 1940, Keisuke Kinoshita was drafted into the Sino-Japanese War and went to China, but returned the following year due to an injury.

Keisuke Kinoshita re-entered Shochiku and was promoted to director in 1943.

In 1951, Keisuke Kinoshita travelled to France to meet his idol, French director Rene Clair.

Early on, Keisuke Kinoshita gathered a steady group of co-workers around him: Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiko Kuga, Keiji Sada and Yuko Mochizuki had repeated starring or bigger supporting roles, while his brother Chuji scored, and cinematographer Hiroshi Kusuda photographed many of his films.

In 1953, Keisuke Kinoshita wrote the script for Masaki Kobayashi's first feature length film, Sincerity.

The mid-1950s marked the release of two of Keisuke Kinoshita's most acclaimed films, Twenty-Four Eyes, a portrait of a school teacher who sees the dreams of her young pupils fall apart due to economical constraints and the war, and You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum, a Meiji era period drama about the unfulfilled love between two teenagers.

Screenwriter and frequent collaborator Yoshio Shirasaka recalls the "brilliant scene" Keisuke Kinoshita made with the handsome, well-dressed assistant directors he surrounded himself with.

Keisuke Kinoshita's grave is in Engaku-ji in Kamakura, very near to that of his fellow Shochiku director, Yasujiro Ozu.

Keisuke Kinoshita was an avid stylist who experimented with cinematic form in his films.

Keisuke Kinoshita used expressionist camera angles in Carmen's Innocent Love, daguerreotype-like framing of images in She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum, or partial tinting to evoke the impression of Japanese woodblock prints in The River Fuefuki.