Sadao Yamanaka

Yamanaka began his career in the Japanese film industry at the age of 20 as a writer and assistant director for the Makino company. In 1932, he began working for Kanjuro Productions, a small, independent film company similar to many others founded during the same period as it was centered around a popular jidaigeki film star, this time Kanjuro Arashi. Here, he began directing his first films, all of which were jidaigeki. During his first year at Kanjuro, he made six films. He was "discovered" by the critic Matsuo Kishi and gained a reputation for creating films that escaped clichés and focused on social injustices. During the 1930s he moved between several film companies, eventually settling in Kyoto and working for the Nikkatsu Company. Most of his films were silent films as sound did not gain a prominence in Japan until 1935-36. He worked twice with the Japanese theatre troupe Zenshin-za: first on The Village Tattooed Man (Machi no Irezumi-mono, 1935) and on his final film, Humanity and Paper Balloons. Wartime and Death Yamanaka was drafted into the Japanese army on the same day that Humanity and Paper Balloons premiered. After just over one year, Yamanaka died in a field hospital on 17 September 1938, aged 28, in the Japanese ruled Manchukuo, known today as Manchuria. The cause of death was inflammation of the intestines. ==Style and influences==

Style Early on, Yamanaka had stated an interest in blurring the lines between several genres: comedy, historical epics, and comedy-dramas focusing on average people. Viewers and critics (notably, Donald Richie and Tadao Sato in pioneering studies of Japanese cinema) note in his surviving films the genesis of ideas later explored by the internationally successful Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujirō Ozu and Seijun Suzuki. Yamanaka has been characterized as a minimalist, one whose style favored elegance and rhythm. In fact, he was a close friend of Ozu, who is often noted as a minimalist too. Influences Yamanaka based many of his films' narratives and imagery on foreign films and on Ozu adaptations of the same. Tange Sazen was based on Stephen Robert's 1932 Lady and Gent, about a boxer and a barmaid who bring up an orphan. Kōchiyama Sōshun was based on Ozu's Dragnet Girl, about a gangster who is attracted to an innocent young woman, based on Josef von Sternberg's gangster films. Yamanaka is also said to have been inspired by Hollywood films such as Rouben Mamoulian's City Streets, Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel and Frank Capra's It Happened One Night. Reception Director Kazuo Kuroki once said of Yamanaka, "Every film he made wonderfully depicted human purity and chastity with a tender, delicate gaze. I was astonished that a young man in his twenties accomplished such perfection." ==Partial filmography (surviving films)==

• Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryō (1935) - Tange Sazen Yowa: Hyakuman Ryo no Tsubo (丹下左膳余話 百万両の壺) • Kōchiyama Sōshun (1936) (河内山宗俊) • Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937) - also known as Ninjo Kamifusen (人情紙風船) ==References==