| architecture |
| calligraphy |
| ceramics |
| clothing |
| comics |
| gardens |
| lacquerwork |
| literature |
| movies |
| music |
| painting |
| poetry |
| sculpture |
| tea ceremony |
| television |
| theatre |
| weaponry |
| thematic routes |
| timeline |
| the site |
context: movies > directors
Kinji Fukasaku, 1930-2003
I've seen it claimed that Fukasaku was Japan's most successful director ever. He specialized in crime dramas (also making some samurai and SF movies). His films are sharply critical of Japanese society - the morality on show in Yakuza Graveyard and his big hit in the West, Battle Royale, are good demonstrations of this. His yakuza are portrayed with no glamour - they are people full of hypocrisy and greed and viciousness, living in areas of high poverty. He depicts the police and yakuza as equally bad. He was a pioneer of this kind of yakuza movie, after years of films showing them as honourable and bound by a code rather like the samurai's bushido. There is an obvious Godard influence on these early films - if you read the Oshima and Teshigahara pieces, you'll see that he was a giant figure for the new breed of film directors in the '60s.