was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, film producer, and writer, who directed 48 films and wrote scripts for 238. Many of his films were autobiographical, beginning with his 1951 directorial debut, Story of a Beloved Wife, and, being born in Hiroshima Prefecture, he also made several films about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the effect of nuclear weapons.
Shindō was one of the pioneers of independent film production in Japan, co-founding his own film company Kindai Eiga Kyōkai with director Yoshimura and actor Taiji Tonoyama in 1950. He continued working as a screenwriter, director, and author until close to his death at the age of 100.
Biography
Early life
Shindō was born in 1912 in the Saeki District of Hiroshima Prefecture as the youngest of four children. His family were wealthy landowners, but his father went bankrupt and lost all his land after acting as a loan guarantor. His older brother and two sisters went to find work, and he and his mother and father lived in a storehouse. His mother became an agricultural labourer and died during his early childhood. His older brother was good at judo and became a policeman. One of his sisters became a nurse and would go on to work caring for atom bomb victims. The other sister married a Japanese-American and went to live in the US.
In 1933, Shindō, then living with his brother in Onomichi, was inspired by Sadao Yamanaka's film Bangaku No isshō to want to start a career in films. He saved money by working in a bicycle shop and in 1934, with a letter of introduction from his brother to a policeman in Kyoto, he set off for Kyoto. After a long wait, he was able to get a job in the film developing department of Shinkō Kinema, which he joined because he was too short to join the lighting department. His job involved drying 200-foot lengths of film on a roller three metres long and two metres high, and he learned the relationship between the pieces of film he was drying and the scripts he read. He submitted scripts to Mizoguchi, only for Mizoguchi to tell him that he "had no talent" for screenwriting, events dramatized years later in Shindō's debut film Story of a Beloved Wife. His first realised screenplay was for the film Nanshin josei in 1940. Otowa became Shindō's mistress (he was married to his second wife at the time), and would go on to play leading roles in almost all of his films during her life. and, according to the producing Japan Teachers Union, for not being political enough.
After this international success, Shindō made Epitome in 1953. Nobuko Otowa is Ginko, a poor girl who must become a geisha in order to support her family, and cannot marry the rich client whom she falls in love with because of his family honor. Film critic Tadao Sato said, Shindō had "inherited from his mentor Mizoguchi his central theme of worship of womanhood...Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Shindō's view of women blossomed under his master's encouragement, but once in bloom revealed itself to be of a different hue...Shindō differs from Mizoguchi by idealizing the intimidating capacity of Japanese women for sustained work, and contrasting them with shamefully lazy men." Still, actor Tonoyama later called his role in Wolf his favourite of all of the director's films. Nobuko Otowa and Taiji Tonoyama are a couple living on a small island with their two young sons and no water supply. Every day they boat to another island to retrieve fresh water to drink and irrigate their crops. The film saved Shindō's company when it was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival in 1961. Shindō made his first ever trip abroad to attend the Moscow film festival, and he was able to sell the film in sixty-one countries.
Around this time, at the age of sixty, his second wife Miyo divorced him over his continuing relationship with Otowa. Also in 1972, he directed Sanka about a shamisen player and her submissive apprentice, his second adaptation of a literary source by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki after Akuto.
Shindō's 1974 film My Way was a throwback to films of his early career and an exposure of the Japanese government's mistreatment of the country's migratory workers. Based on a true story, an elderly woman resiliently spends nine months attempting to retrieve her husband's dead body, fighting government bureaucracy and indifference all along the way.
In 1977 The Life of Chikuzan was released, about the life of blind shamisen player Takahashi Chikuzan. It was entered into the 10th Moscow International Film Festival. That same year, Shindō travelled to America to film a television documentary, Document 8.6, about the Hiroshima atomic bomb. He met Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane which dropped the bomb, but was not able to interview him on film. The documentary was broadcast in 1978.
In 1978, after the death of his ex-wife, he married Nobuko Otowa. Jiro was the producer of many of his films since the mid-1980s. Kaze Shindō, Jiro's daughter and Shindō's granddaughter, later followed in Shindō's footsteps as a film director and scriptwriter.
During production of Shindō's film A Last Note, Nobuko Otowa was diagnosed with liver cancer. She died in December 1994, prior to the film's 1995 release. A Last Note won numerous awards, including Best Film awards at the Blue Ribbon Awards, Hochi Film Awards, Japan Academy Prizes, Kinema Junpo Awards and Mainichi Film Awards, as well as awards for Best Director at the Japanese Academy, Nikkan Sports Film Awards, Kinema Junpo Awards and Mainichi Film Award.
Final films and death
After Otowa's death, her role as lead actress in Shindō's films was taken over by Shinobu Otake, who would star in four of his films. In Will to Live (1999), a black comedy on the problems of ageing, Otake played a daughter with bipolar disorder of an elderly father who has fecal incontinence, played by Rentarō Mikuni.
In 2000, at the age of 88, Shindō filmed By Player, a biography of actor and long-time associate Taiji Tonoyama, incorporating aspects of the history of Shindō's film company, Kindai Eiga Kyokai, and using footage of Otowa shot in 1994.
The 2003 Owl, again starring Otake, used as a background the true story of farmers sent back from Japanese colonies in Manchuria to unworkable farmland at the end of the Second World War. The entire film was shot on a single set, partly because of Shindō's mobility problems.
In 2010, Shindō directed Postcard, a story of middle-aged men drafted for military service at the end of the second world war loosely based on Shindō's own experiences. Postcard was selected as the Japanese submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but did not make the January shortlist. Due to failing health, Shindō announced that it would be his last film at its premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival.
For the last forty years of his life, Shindō lived in a small apartment in Akasaka. After the death of Nobuko Otowa, he lived alone. Although he had been able to walk all over Tokyo in his eighties, he lost mobility in his legs in his nineties. Because of his need for care, Kaze Shindō moved into his apartment and lived with him for the last six years of his life, acting as his caregiver. Kaze Shindō appears in the credits for Shindō's later films credited as "Kantoku kenkō kanri", "Management of director's health".
From April to May 2012 a committee in the city of Hiroshima presented a tribute to Shindō to commemorate his 100th birthday. This event included screenings of most of his films and special guests such as Shindō himself and longtime admirer Benicio del Toro.
Shindō died of natural causes on 29 May 2012. According to his son Jiro, he was talking in his sleep about new film projects even at the end of his life.
Style and themes
Shindō said that he saw film "as an art of 'montage' which consists of a dialectic or interaction between the movement and the nonmovement of the image."
When asked by Benicio del Toro what the most important thing he had learned from Kenji Mizoguchi was, Shindō replied that the most important thing he had learned from Mizoguchi was never to give up. According to Shindō, although Mizoguchi made more than eighty films, most of them were boring, with only about five or six good films, but without the failures there would never have been successes like Ugetsu Monogatari.
Legacy
A retrospective on Shindō and Kōzaburō Yoshimura was held in London in 2012, organised by the British Film Institute and the Japan Foundation.
Awards
- 1961 Grand Prize at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival for The Naked Island.
- 1964 Grand Prix at the Panama Film Festival for Onibaba.
- 1971 Golden Prize at the 7th Moscow International Film Festival for Live Today, Die Tomorrow!
- 1998 Person of Cultural Merit.
- 1999 Golden St. George at the 21st Moscow International Film Festival for Will to Live
- 2002 Order of Culture.