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context: movies > genres
General Points about Genre
Donald Richie makes a good case for Japanese movies being less tied to genre. Important early director Heinosuke Gosho specialised in comedies with deep sadness, and dramas with absurd comedic parts, and this 'goshoism' became widely accepted to a degree not found anywhere else, so even in the toughest, nastiest dramas (see Miike, for instance) you get very silly moments, with no concern about breaking a mood, instead a preference for contrast. (cf cartoonist Osamu Tezuka's tendency to put ridiculous cartoony non sequiturs in even - or especially! - the most serious passages of his comics.)
On the other hand, there was immense consciousness of genres, and there were far more named genres in Japanese cinema than anywhere else.