An Introduction to Film

filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi, who is best known
for House(1977). This stylistically bizarre horror film
demonstrates a strong familiarity with French,
British, and Italian cinema of the 1960s as well as
Japanese film history and silent film tradition.
Although a short-lived movement, the Japanese
New Wave—along with the postwar filmmakers of
China—influenced the style and content of the New
American Cinema (discussed on pages 472–477).

China and Postwar Filmmaking

After the Second World War, film production

resumed in the People’s Republic of China (often

referred to as mainland China) as well as in two

distinct political entities: Taiwan (the Republic of

China), which asserts its independence from the

People’s Republic, and Hong Kong (a British colony

until 1997, when it was transferred by treaty to the

People’s Republic). The People’s Republic, a vast

Painterly composition in Mizoguchi’s Sansho the
BailiffNothing could be further from the color and chaos of
Kurosawa’s Ranthan the calm compositions of Kenji
Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff. After her husband is banished
to a distant province, an aristocratic woman named Tamaki
(Kinuyo Tanaka), her lone servant, and her children are
forced to wander from place to place. In this image, the wife
(center right), who cannot find shelter elsewhere, builds a
shelter of branches and reeds under the spreading limbs of a
tree, with the servant and children helping her. The black-
and-white composition of this image shows why Mizoguchi is

revered as a master of mise-en-scène. The tree is theatrically

perfect, as is the light through the upper branches of the

tree, on the mother and daughter, and on the grasses at the

right and left of the image. This pictorially pleasing image

gives no hint of what’s to come: the children are sold into

slavery and Tamaki is exiled to an island where she is forced

to become a prostitute. Despite the loss of her daughter and

her other hardships, Tamaki perseveres; finally, blind and

alone, she is reunited with her son. Overall, the movie

demonstrates Mizoguchi’s interest in issues of freedom and

women’s place in society.

1947—PRESENT: NEW CINEMAS IN GREAT BRITAIN, EUROPE, AND ASIA 467