- Born
- Died
- Masaki Kobayashi was born on February 14, 1916 in Hokkaido, Japan. He was a director and writer, known for Harakiri (1962), Samurai Rebellion (1967) and The Human Condition I: No Greater Love (1959). He died on October 4, 1996 in Tokyo, Japan.
- RelativesKinuyo Tanaka(Cousin)
- Often worked with actor Tatsuya Nakadai.
- Bitter, pessimistic endings
- Strong socio-political allegories in his films
- Films based around the Japanese experience in World War II, with a strong anti-war bent
- His protagonists are typically idealistic, independent men who face off against the corrupt and powerful and are invariably crushed
- Keisuke Kinoshita, Akira Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa and Masaki Kobayashi founded their own company, Yonki No Kai ('Club of The Four Knights'), in 1969 to assert an independent film making process and escape the studio system. They managed to produce only one movie, Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-den (1970).
- Attended art classes at Waseda University. His work with the Shochiku film company was interrupted by becoming a POW during the Sino-Japanese war. His most famous film, the epic "The Human Condition", set in a Manchurian forced labor camp, was partly based on his experience of wartime incarceration. With films like "Hara-Kiri" and "Kwaidan", he came to be feted in the 1960s as a master of both the samurai movie and the supernatural genre.
- Keisuke Kinoshita is his mentor.
- Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1969.
- Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985". Pages 527-533. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content
