Masahiro Shinoda, a leading director of the postwar Japanese New Wave whose films, notably “Pale Flower” and “Double Suicide,” fused pictorial beauty and fetishistic violence, died on March 25. He was 94.
His production company, Hyogensha, said in a statement that the cause was pneumonia. It did not say where he died.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Japanese New Wave cinema, like its French predecessor, tapped into the fantasies of disgruntled youth by embracing brazen sexuality and countercultural politics, with a tinge of nihilism.
But unlike his peers, Mr. Shinoda refused to shun tradition. Instead, he used feudal-era theatrical forms like Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki to recount how cycles of violence have persisted since imperial Japan. His films were wrought with poetic imagery — hooded puppeteers, striking femmes fatales (including his wife, the actress Shima Iwashita) — but for all their sensuality, they espoused the idea that nothing really matters.
“Culture is nothing but the expression of violence,” Mr. Shinoda said in an interview with Joan Mellen for her book “Voices From the Japanese Cinema” (1975), adding that “human tenderness is unthinkable without violence.”
Mr. Shinoda’s best-known film was “Pale Flower” (1964), the story of a Yakuza hit man (Ryo Ikebe) who has an affair with an angel-faced young woman (Mariko Kaga) whose appetite for cheap thrills and high-stakes gambling sends them both throttling through a seedy underworld. Roger Ebert described it in 2011 as “one of the most haunting noirs” he had ever seen and lauded it as “an exercise in existential cool.”
The critic Chuck Stephens wrote in 2010, “A sumptuous sonnet to unrequited amour fou, ‘Pale Flower’ remains Shinoda’s most enduring creation.”
But it’s “Double Suicide” (1969) that is widely regarded as Mr. Shinoda’s finest feature. An adaptation of a puppet play about the fatal romance between Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura), a paper merchant, and Koharu (Shima Iwashita), a courtesan, it revealed Mr. Shinoda’s preoccupations with duality and artifice.
Stagehands clad in black orchestrate the action and break the fourth wall by discussing directorial choices with Mr. Shinoda on the phone. Ms. Iwashita plays both the merchant’s mistress and his wife, toggling between Koharu’s erotic freedom and Osan’s sense of duty.
Mr. Shinoda experimented with dual casting again in “Demon Pond” (1979), which was described by the critic Michael Atkinson as “a jolt of delicious weirdness.” Against a sumptuous backdrop of blue-skinned ghosts, the renowned male Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando played both a lovelorn princess living under a lake and a young girl who will be sacrificed to appease her.
Other American critics claimed that Mr. Shinoda’s lush imagery was an example of style over substance. Roger Greenspun of The New York Times called him “a tirelessly arty director” who was “continually discovering effective composition where others might find a revelation or two.”
Mr. Shinoda maintained that his highbrow aesthetic was a statement in itself. Some agreed. “His contribution to the generation of the 1960s has been his devotion to beauty,” the film scholar Audie Bock wrote.
Masahiro Shinoda was born on March 9, 1931, in Gifu Prefecture, in central Japan. He was a teenager during World War II when Japan surrendered. In a 2010 interview at the University of California, Berkeley, he recalled seeing Allied soldiers riding in jeeps and “tasting delicious Hershey’s chocolate bars melting in their mouths,” indications that “there would be a wonderful bright future ahead for them.”
His own future felt daunting. In 1946, U.S. forces compelled Emperor Hirohito to renounce his status as a living deity, which caused 15-year-old Masahiro to contemplate ending his life and instilled in him a distrust of authority.
“All Japanese culture flows from imperialism and the emperor system,” he told Ms. Mellen, the author. “I find, however, that politics leads to nothing, and that power politics remains empty.”
In 1949, he began studying Japanese classic theater at Waseda University in Tokyo with the goal of becoming a scholar. He graduated in 1953, but his mother’s sudden death forced him to take a job instead of remaining in academia.
That year, he joined Shochiku Studio as an assistant director to Yasujiro Ozu, with whom he worked on “Tokyo Twilight” (1957), and other filmmakers. He made his directorial debut in 1960 with the romantic drama “One-Way Ticket to Love,” based on a hit song in Japan by Neil Sedaka. It was a box-office failure, but after a brief demotion, Mr. Shinoda found himself back in the director’s chair for a spate of films scripted by the avant-garde poet Shuji Terayama: “Dry Lake” (1960), “Killers on Parade” (1961) and “Tears on the Lion’s Mane” (1962).
Mr. Shinoda made his first foray into period pieces in 1964, with “Assassination,” which chronicled an 1860s power struggle between the empire and Japan’s military leadership. He told Ms. Bock that his interest in history stemmed from a desire to “take hold of the past and make it stand still” in order to “examine it from different angles.”
“Pale Flower” came out the same year, though its release was delayed for nine months after the screenwriter, Masaru Baba, complained to studio managers that Mr. Shinoda had emphasized visual style over plot points in an “anarchistic” treatment of his script.
Dissatisfied with Shochiku Studio’s system of development, Mr. Shinoda left in 1966 to form his own production company, Hyogensha.
He divorced his first wife, the poet Kazuko Shiraishi, and in 1967 married Shima Iwashita, who went on to star in several of his films. She survives him, along with a daughter from his first marriage, Yuko Shiraishi, an artist.
“I think I was lucky as a film director to have met Shima Iwashita,” Mr. Shinoda said in 2017 during a celebration of Hyogensha’s 50th anniversary. “I was possessed by the monster called film, and we were exorcising the monster together.”
After directing “Double Suicide,” Mr. Shinoda spent the 1970s blending traditional and modernist aesthetics in films like “The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan” (1970), a feudal-period drama; “Silence” (1971), about Christian missionaries; and “Himiko” (1974), a retelling of a myth. All three competed in the Cannes Film Festival.
Over the next two decades, he departed from the dynamism of his earlier work with a trilogy of nostalgic films about postwar Japan. “MacArthur’s Children” (1984) — in which Ken Watanabe made his big-screen debut — was its crown jewel.
He retired in 2003 after “Spy Sorge,” a three-hour epic about a real-life Soviet spy, performed poorly at the box office.
“Looking at the evil parts, the dark parts of people, is very interesting,” Mr. Shinoda said of his filmmaking aesthetic in 2010. “Rather than investigating why we should have peace, or the ways we can have peace, it is much more interesting to me to investigate why we have war.”
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