Sadao Yamanaka

Sadao Yamanaka (山中 貞雄) was a Japanese film director and writer who directed 24 films during a seven-year period in the 1930s. He was a contemporary of Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi and one of the primary figures in the development of the jidaigeki, or historical film. Yamanaka died of dysentary in Manchuria after being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. He is the uncle of the Japanese film director Tai Kato, who once penned a book about Yamanaka, Eiga kantoku Yamanaka Sadao.

Only three of his films survive in nearly complete form. While long considered a master filmmaker in his native Japan, interest in Yamanaka's work redeveloped after the recent restoration and Japanese DVD release of the three surviving films. His most internationally discussed film, Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937), was given its first non-Japanese DVD release in the UK as a Masters of Cinema release.

Career
Yamanaka began his career in the Japanese film industry at the age of 20 as a writer and assistant director for the Makino company.

In 1932, he began working for Kanjuro Productions, a small, independent film company similar to many others founded during the same period as it was centered around a popular jidaigeki film star, this time Kanjuro Arashi. Here, he began directing his first films, all of which were jidaigeki. During his first year at Kanjuro, he made six films. He was "discovered" by the critic Matsuo Kishi and gained a reputation for creating films that escaped clichés and focused on social injustices.

During the 1930s he moved between several film companies, eventually settling in Kyoto and working for the Nikkatsu Company. Most of his films were silent films as sound did not gain a prominence in Japan until 1935-36. He worked twice with the Japanese theatre troupe Zenshin-za: first on The Village Tattooed Man (Machi no Irezumi-mono, 1935) and on his final film, Humanity and Paper Balloons.

Humanity and Paper Balloons premiered the same day that Yamanaka was drafted into the Japanese army. He later died in a field hospital in the then-Japanese ruled Manchukuo, known today as Manchuria. The cause of death was inflammation of the intestines.

Style
Early on, Yamanaka had stated an interest in blurring the lines between several genres: comedy, historical epics, and shomingeki, or comedy-dramas focusing on average people. Viewers and critics (notably, Donald Richie and Tadao Sato in pioneering studies of Japanese cinema) note in his surviving films the genesis of ideas later explored by the internationally successful Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujirō Ozu and Seijun Suzuki.

Yamanaka has been characterized as a minimalist, one whose style would favour elegance and rhythm. In fact, he was close friend of Ozu, whom is often noted as a minimalist too.

Director Kazuo Kuroki once said of Yamanaka, "Every film he made wonderfully depicted human purity and chastity with a tender, delicate gaze. I was astonished that a young man in his twenties accomplished such perfection."

Partial filmography (surviving films)

 * 1935: The Million Ryo Pot (Tange sazen yowa: Hyakuman ryo no tsubo)
 * 1936: Kōchiyama Sōshun (1936 film)
 * 1937: Humanity and Paper Balloons (Ninjo kamifusen)