Sadao Yamanaka

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**Sadao Yamanaka**

Born:	November 7, 1909 Kyoto City, Kyoto, Japan
Died:	September 17, 1938 Manchuria, China
Occupation:	Film director, writer

Sadao Yamanaka (山中貞雄, Yamanaka Sadao^?, November 7, 1909—September 17, 1938) was a Japanese film director and writer who directed 24 films during a seven-year period in the 1930s. He was a contemporary of Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi and one of the primary figures in the development of the jidaigeki, or historical film.

Only three of his films survived World War II and Yamanaka died of dysentary in Manchuria after being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. His cinematic influence would have seemed forgotten; however, interest in Yamanaka's work redeveloped after the recent restoration and Japanese DVD release of the three surviving films. His most internationally discussed film (in recent years), Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937), was given its first non-Japanese release in the UK on DVD.

1 Career
2 Style
3 Partial filmography (surviving films)
4 Notes
5 Sources
6 External links

[edit] Career

Born in 1907, Yamanaka began his career in the Japanese film industry at the age of 20 as a writer and assistant director for the Makino company.^[1]

In 1932, he began working for Kanjuro, a small, start-up film company similar to many others founded during the same period. Here, he began directing his first films, all of which were jidaigeki. During his first year at Kanjuro, he made 6 films. He gained a reputation for creating films that escaped clichés and focused on social injustices.^[1]

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 then on his final film, Humanity and Paper Balloons.^[1]

Humanity and Paper Balloons premiered the same day that Yamanaka was drafted into the Japanese army. He later died in a field hospital in the then-Japanese ruled Manchukuo, known today as Manchuria. The cause of death was inflammation of the intestines.^[1]

[edit] Style

Early on, Yamanaka had stated an interest in blurring the lines between several genres: comedy, historical epics, and shomingeki, or 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, Yasujiro Ozu and Seijun Suzuki.^[2]^[3]

Yamanaka has been characterized as a minimalist, one whose style would favour elegance and rhythm. In fact, he was close friends with fellow Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, whom is often noted as a minimalist as well.^[1]

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."^[4]

[edit] Partial filmography (surviving films)

1935: The Million Ryo Pot (Tange sazen yowa: Hyakuman ryo no tsubo)

1936: Soshun kochiyama

1937: Humanity and Paper Balloons (Ninjo kamifusen)

[edit] Notes

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