Keisuke Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita
Keisuke Kinoshita (early 1950s)
Born	(1912-12-05)December 5, 1912
Died	December 30, 1998(1998-12-30) (aged 86)
Occupation	Film director

Keisuke Kinoshita (木下 惠介, Kinoshita Keisuke^?, December 5, 1912 – December 30, 1998) was a Japanese film director.

Kinoshita was highly prolific, turning out some 42 films in the first 23 years of his career. For this, Kinoshita explained that he "can’t help it. Ideas for films have always just popped into my head like scraps of paper into a wastebasket." While lesser-known internationally than contemporaries such as Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu, he was nonetheless a household figure in his home country, beloved by both critics and audiences from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Born on 5 December 1912 in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, about halfway between Tokyo and Kyoto, to a family who owned a grocery store, Kinoshita was already a movie fan when he was eight. Vowing to become a filmmaker, he was, however, faced with opposition from his parents. When he was in high school, a film crew arrived in Hamamatsu for location shooting one day. He befriended actor Bando Junosuke when the latter came to his store for local products. Bando later helped him run away to Kyoto where most period films were made. But his grandfather came and took him back home the next day. His determination to become a filmmaker finally moved his parents into letting him pursue his own career and his mother even secured him an introduction to the Shochiku Kamata studios, where Ozu, Mikio Naruse and other famous directors worked. Without a university education, however, Kinoshita was not allowed to work as an assistant director and had to start as a photographer, for which he applied to the Oriental Photography School and graduated before he was finally admitted into Shochiku. There, he first worked in the film processing laboratory, then as a camera assistant, before he was advised by Kōzaburō Yoshimura to switch to assistant director.