WThe cinema of Japan has a history that spans more than 100 years. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; as of 2021, it was the fourth largest by number of feature films produced. In 2011 Japan produced 411 feature films that earned 54.9% of a box office total of US$2.338 billion. Films have been produced in Japan since 1897, when the first foreign cameramen arrived.
WBenshi (弁士) were Japanese performers who provided live narration for silent films. Benshi are sometimes called katsudō-benshi (活動弁士) or katsuben (活弁).
WEirin (映倫) is the abbreviated name of the Film Classification and Rating Organization , Japan's movie regulator. Eirin was established on the model of the American Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association's Production Code Administration in June 1949, on the instructions of the US occupation force. It classifies films into one of four categories depending on their suitability for viewing by minors of different ages.
WJ-POP SUMMIT is a Japanese cultural festival held every summer since 2009 in San Francisco, California, United States.[1] It is hosted by SUPERFROG Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
WJAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film is an annual festival of modern Japanese cinema held at New York City's Japan Society. The festival was first held in 2007, growing out of the Japan Society's popular bi-annual series, New Films from Japan. But where New Films from Japan was a series that showed, on average, ten films over the course of several months, the JAPAN CUTS festival has scheduled an average of 25-30 films, many of them premieres, over two weeks during the month of July. Screenings are held in Japan Society's 260-seat Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium.
WKenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director is a 1975 Japanese documentary film on the life and works of director Kenji Mizoguchi. It was produced, written and directed by Kaneto Shindō.
WJapan has submitted films for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film since the inception of the award. The award is handed out annually by the United States Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to a feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States that contains primarily non-English dialogue.
WThe Proletarian Film League of Japan was a left-wing film organization, known as Prokino for short, active in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Japan. Associated with the proletarian arts movement in Japan, it primarily used small gauge films such as 16mm film and 9.5mm film to record demonstrations and workers' lives and show them in organized events or, using mobile projection teams, at factories and mines. It also published its own journals. Most of its films were documentaries or newsreels, but Prokino also made fiction films and animated films. Prominent members included Akira Iwasaki and Genjū Sasa, although in its list of supporters one finds such figures as Daisuke Itō, Kenji Mizoguchi, Shigeharu Nakano, Tomoyoshi Murayama, Kiyohiko Ushihara, Kogo Noda, Takiji Kobayashi, Sōichi Ōya, Fuyuhiko Kitagawa, Tokihiko Okada, Matsuo Kishi, Kiyoshi Miki, Denmei Suzuki, Teppei Kataoka, and Shigeyoshi Suzuki. The movement was eventually suppressed by the police under the Peace Preservation Law, but many former members became prominent figures in the Japanese documentary and fiction film industries.
WDonald Richie was an American-born author who wrote about the Japanese people, the culture of Japan, and especially Japanese cinema. Although he considered himself primarily a film historian, Richie also directed a number of experimental films, the first when he was seventeen.