Masahiro Shinoda obituary: Japanese New Wave director behind Pale Flower and the original Silence
Shinoda, who has died aged 94, was one of the leading figures in 1960s Japanese cinema, whose taste for artifice and experimentation led to some of the New Wave’s most striking films.
Although less internationally celebrated than his contemporaries Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura, Masahiro Shinoda, who has died aged 94, ranked alongside them as one of the leading directors of the Japanese New Wave. At their best, his eclectic and imaginative films combined cinematic flair with thematic complexity, contriving extraordinary passages of visual and aural invention and commenting harshly on Japan’s history and social norms.
His directorial career spanned more than 40 years. His finest achievements, however, appeared during the fairly brief window from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. Such innovative films as Pale Flower (1964), Double Suicide (1969) and The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan (1970) partially or completely rejected realism in favour of a self-conscious artifice and experimentation. “Reality for its own sake is not what interests me,” Shinoda declared. “If my films had to be perfect reconstructions of reality, I would not make them. I begin with reality and see what higher idea comes out of it.”
The aesthetic of Double Suicide and Buraikan, rooted respectively in the bunraku puppet theatre and in kabuki, testifies to his background; he had studied theatre at Tokyo’s prestigious Waseda University, before his mother’s death compelled him to find work. He entered Shochiku in 1953, where he served a dutiful apprenticeship as an assistant director, including to Ozu on Tokyo Twilight (1957).
In 1960, Shochiku’s formidable boss, Shiro Kido, hoping to appeal to younger audiences and conscious of the success of the French nouvelle vague, attempted to kickstart a new wave in Japan. Still only in his 20s, Shinoda, along with fellow Shochiku assistant directors Oshima and Yoshishige (aka Kiju) Yoshida, was promoted with unusual haste to full director status.
He worked initially on assignments, but his artistic personality still registered in the disenchantment of films such as Dry Lake (1960), about a disillusioned leftist who attempts to bomb protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty. The theme reflected Shinoda’s belief that “politics leads to nothing”. Dry Lake also marked the acting debut of Shima Iwashita, who was to star in many of his films and would become his second wife.
His first mature film, Pale Flower (1964) enlivened the generic contours of the yakuza film with astonishing passages of abstract formal beauty; memorable sequences include the elaborately edited gambling scenes and the climactic murder, done to the accompaniment of Purcell’s ‘When I Am Laid in Earth’. He went on to make Assassination (1964), which was hailed as his masterpiece by fellow director Kon Ichikawa. The story of a ronin who shifts his support from shogun to emperor was told in morally ambivalent and visually stunning fashion; the extreme long shots that record the historical panorama testify to the director’s admiration for Mizoguchi.
But Shinoda’s modifications to the script of Pale Flower had offended screenwriter Baba Ataru, who complained to Shochiku. The film’s release was held up for nine months. Increasingly ill at ease at Shochiku, Shinoda left the studio after completing With Beauty and Sorrow (1965), a stylish melodrama adapted from a novel by Nobel Prize winning author Yasunari Kawabata.
Working for Japan’s leading independent production company, Art Theatre Guild, he realised arguably his finest film, Double Suicide (1969), based on a bunraku play by the so-called ‘Shakespeare of Japan’, Chikamatsu Monzaemon. This powerful tragedy boasted a superb performance from Shima Iwashita in a dual role. The style showed Shinoda at his most modernist. He began by filming at the Osaka bunraku theatre before gradually replacing the dolls with his human actors; yet the puppeteers continue to observe the drama, creating a powerful alienation effect.
His next film, Buraikan, was another imaginative critique of the repressive society that existed in Japan during the Edo period (1603 to 1868). Scripted by avant-garde filmmaker Shuji Terayama, it was colourful, ribald and funny, yet also a scathing condemnation of a puritanical and tyrannical regime.
In a change that reflected wider developments in Japanese cinema during the 1970s, the experimental impetus of Shinoda’s first decade gradually yielded to a more conventional style. His later work was proficient but relatively anonymous. In 1971, he directed a film adaption of Silence, the novel by Japanese Catholic author Shusaku Endo about a Portuguese priest facing persecution after the proscription of Christianity in 17th-century Japan. Shinoda’s version makes fascinating comparison with Martin Scorsese’s 2016 remake.
After this, a number of stylish but relatively superficial films followed. Demon Pond (1979) and Gonza the Spearman (1986) drew again on the plotting and imagery of traditional theatre (the latter was another Chikamatsu adaptation), but they lacked the formal imagination of Double Suicide and Buraikan.
Shinoda made a partial return to form with MacArthur’s Children (1984), the first in a loose trilogy of films about children growing up during and just after World War II. Sentimental and stylistically conventional, but lovingly atmospheric and humane, these films led Japan Times film critic Mark Schilling to describe their director as “Japan’s James Ivory”.
Latterly, he experimented with then novel computer-generated settings in the ninja film Owl’s Castle (1999) and in Spy Sorge (2003), a long-cherished project about German-Russian spy Richard Sorge, who passed Japanese war strategies to the Soviets. After this intermittently gripping but overlong biopic, Shinoda retired, and by the time of his death seemed like a figure from a fairly remote past. His finest films, however, belong to the ages.
Masahiro Shinoda, 9 March 1931 to 25 March 2025