Born in Hamamatsu in 1912 and died in 1998, Keisuke Kinoshita was one of the most popular Japanese directors of the postwar decades, a colleague of Kurosawa at Shochiku. He moved between comedy and sentimental drama, and experimented with form, as in Carmen Comes Home (1951), the first Japanese colour feature. Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), the story of a schoolteacher and her pupils from the 1920s to the end of the war, was a great success and is regarded as a pacifist classic. He also made The Ballad of Narayama (1958), staged as a kabuki play.
Filmography
- Morning for the Osone Family (1946)
- Carmen Comes Home (1951)
- A Japanese Tragedy (1953)
- Twenty-Four Eyes (1954)
- The Garden of Women (1954)
- The Rose on His Arm (1956)
- The Ballad of Narayama (1958) (1958)
- Immortal Love (1961)