Japanese filmmaker Kinuyo Tanaka (1909—1977) was a pioneering woman in a studio system that actively discouraged female directors. She made six groundbreaking features over the course of a decade, dismissing the passivity assigned to most female protagonists of the era and creating a small, radical oeuvre of progressive heroines.
Though she has long been renowned as an iconic actor, having starred in films by directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Mikio Naruse, Tanaka’s own work as a filmmaker has been conspicuously absent from most studies of Japanese cinema. This presentation of three Tanaka-directed films complements a presentation this March of her remaining films at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art and a selection of films starring Tanaka at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring, MD to take place in May.
Film descriptions courtesy Janus Films.