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ASIA
Jay Leyda. Kurosawa is, without dispute, a director of the highest talents with an astonishing control over and knowledge of the cinema's techniques and a superb sense of movement on the screen. Both Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai ( 1 954) were among the most important and significant films of the decade under review.
Of the many other Japanese films and directors which must be recorded are: Yasujiro Ozu's leisurely and very human Their First Trip to Tokio (1953); Keisuke Kinoshita's They Were Twelve (1954); Hideo Sekigawa's charming Trumpet Boy (1955) and The Boyhood of Dr. Noguchi (1956); So Yamamura's The Cannery Boat (1953) and The Black Tide (1954); Shiro Toyoda's Wild Geese (1953) and Love Never Fails (1955); Kaneto Shindo's moving and socially most important Children of Hiroshima (1953), Hiroshi Shimizu's Children of the Beehive (1949); Kon Ichikawa's pacific argument The Burmese Harp (1956) and Tadashi Imai's Squalor (1954), Shadows in the Sunlight (1956) and the outspoken and topical Story of a True Love (1957). All these films dealt with contemporary subjects. If I do not include the popular mediaeval picture Gate of Hell (1954) by Teinosuke Kinugasa, it is because to me it was of importance only for its use of colour.
One aspect of Japanese production which is of great interest to the future of world cinema is that the cost of making films is relatively low. Nothing like the inflated salaries in Western cinema are paid to leading actors and directors and it would appear that a good deal more respect is paid by producers to the creative talent employed by them than is found in Britain or the USA.1
From China there is unfortunately little to be recorded. There must have been considerable production but scarcely any of it has reached Europe. The Letter with the Feathers (1953) by Shih Hui, a story of the antiJapanese war seen through its impact on a little boy's mind, had a freshness
*For a general picture of Japanese production and distribution, vide: International Film Annual (Calder), No. 2, 1958. 60 years of Japanese Cinema, by David Robinson.
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