Gosho, heinoske

Early years

Hayemon (this is the real name of the future filmmaker) was illegitimate ^[2] . His mother was a geisha , whose father will take Hayemon after his only legitimate heir dies ^[2] . The father, a tobacco merchant, who also had a grocery store, from the moment Hayemon appears in his house (at the age of five) will prepare the child for him to inherit the family business. He will be forbidden to contact his mother even by phone, and he will lose sight of her, while she and his brothers and sisters will have a very hard time ^[3] . After graduating from high school, the father will give Hayemon to Keio's School of Commerce ^[2] , where the smart boy will diligently study accounting, but will also show interest in learning English, for which he will attend separately in classes in a special English school ^[2] .

Young Hayemon's father and grandfather, among other things, instilled a love for art: the boy often had to be present when his grandfather visited artists. Even in his youth, Hayemon began writing poems haiku ^[2] and became addicted to going to the cinema, and even occasionally starred in the crowd at Dyaytsu studio ^[2] . Therefore, after finishing his studies (in 1921 ) and the departure of the year of compulsory military service, he, contrary to the will of his ancestors, decides to devote himself not to the family business, but to the cinema. He is already independent in everything, including the fact that he will change his name to Heinosca, since his name Hayemon seemed somewhat old-fashioned ^[2] .

On the advice of Shiro Kido, with whom he met in the tea house "Hirata" ^[2] , from 1923 , Heinoske Gosho began working in the film company " Shotiku " as an assistant director at the venerable Yasujiro Shimazzu . For this, he was deprived of his inheritance rights by an angry father, since cinema at that time was not considered a serious occupation. Shiro Kido, who ran the studio in Kamata at the time (owned by the film company “Sjetky”), saw the talent in the guy, because he was famous for his ingenious intuition, and among others he discovered and fostered such talents as Yasujiro Odzu and Hiroshi Shimizu .

Movie career

Heinoske Gosyo made his debut with independent work, putting the film "Spring on the southern islands" ( 1925 ). Great success fell to the film " Country Bride " ( 1928 ). Already from his first productions, the director develops his own style, which some critics will call “stateism”. The image on the background of the poetic nature of pastoral fun and sadness of rural provincials, which makes you cry and laugh at the same time - this is “stateism”, as critics define it ^[4] , and its films always featured the image of the season, which is typical of Japanese art. Gosho, influenced by his mentor Yasujiro Shimazu ^[2] , one of the first, even a little earlier than his colleague in the studio Yasujiro Odzu, began developing the topic of "Semin-geki" - a drama from the life of the working class, "little citizens".

Gosyo staged the first Japanese sound film “ Neighbor and Wife ” ( 1931 , winner of the Kinema Jumpo magazine award as the best film of the year). Among his best works of the 1930s : the silent film "The Dancer from Izu " ( 1933 ), the best among the many screen versions of the story Yasunari Kawabata ; “ The Burden of Life ” ( 1935 ), in which the traditional way of life of the Japanese faces the western one; The Woman of the Night ( 1936 ); “The Song of the Flower Basket ” ( 1937 ) - about the inhabitants of the outskirts of the city suburbs. From the late 1930s until the end of the Second World War, he worked at the Dayei studio.

During the war, the director shot little, the most interesting works of this period: “New Snow” ( 1942 ), “Five-Storey Pagoda” ( 1944 ), “Girls from Izu” ( 1945 ). After the war, he worked at the Toho studio, where he produced the film “Once more” ( 1947 , the Mainiti award for the best film of the year) about love ruined by the war. The film was a success, but next year Gose will take part in the famous studio strike, for which he will be counted among the Communists and dismissed from Toho. In 1951, together with other filmmakers, he founded the independent company Studio Eight Productions, which will include such films as: “Branching Clouds” ( 1951 ), “Morning Waves” ( 1952 ) and one of the most high-profile works of the director “ Where factory pipes are visible ”( 1953 ), marked by the prize of the international film festival in West Berlin ( 1954 ), with the wording“ for the best film fighting for freedom ”. Studio Eight Productions studio will exist until 1954 , the last Gosho film filmed on it was Hotel in Osaka ( 1954 ), which was ranked among his best cinematographic works. At the studio "Sin-toho" will be made one of his interesting works " Peers " ( 1955 ), the heroine of which since childhood prepared for the fate of a prostitute. Among the best films of the director of the 1950s are also the films “ A Memorial Song ” (“Elegy”, 1957 ) and “The Yellow Crow ” ( 1957 ^[5] , which was awarded the Golden Globe with the American film award as the best foreign film in the USA ).

Subsequently, Heinoski Gose will return to “Sjetika”, where, among other things, he will be staged the film “ Mother and Eleven Children ” ( 1966 ), the second of his works after The Yellow Crow (and the director for forty-three years of film making 97 films), which will be shown in the USSR box office ^[6] .

Since 1964, Gose was General Secretary of the Japan Film Directors Association, retiring from this post in 1975 . Repeatedly, his films became laureates of the Kinema Jumpo magazine’s award and the Mayniti award as the best films of the year. In 1966, Heinoski Gose was awarded the honorary imperial award of the Order of the Rising Sun , and in 1972 he was awarded the Order of Culture , or as it is also called the Order of the Purple Ribbon ^[7] . In the last years of his life the director worked a lot on television. He died in 1981 at the age of 79. Over the next years, his films will be revived out of oblivion, both in Japan and abroad: retrospectives of his films will be held in Paris , London , New York ^[3] and Moscow (in the Cinema Museum, 2003 ).

• Heinoske Gosyo (Eng.) On the Internet Movie Database

• Akira Iwasaki , "Contemporary Japanese Cinema", 1958, (Russian translation of 1962, Translators: Vladimir Grivnin, L. Levin), - Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1962.
• "Kinoslovar" / Edited by S. I. Yutkevich. - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1986-1987. - p. 100. - 640 s.
• “Director's Encyclopedia: Cinema of Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America”, Scientific Research Institute of Cinema, T. Vetrova (responsible editor), Mainland - M., 2001, ISBN 5-85646-053-7
• Joseph L. Anderson & Donalg Richie , The Japanese Film, Grove Press, inc., New York, 1959/1960
• MacDonald, Keiko I. , Cinema East: A Critical Study of Major Japanese Films, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983.
• Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History, edited by Arthur Nolletti Jr. and David Desser , Indiana University Press, 1992.
• Jacoby Alexander A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. - Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press, 2008. - p. 268-273. - ISBN 978-1-933330 -53-252295