Offscreen Notes
Kaneto Shindô 1912-2012
The great Japanese director, a contemporary of Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, and others, passed away on May 29, 2012 at the age of 100 (born April 28, 1912). As noted in the Guardian obit, Shindo was influenced by his mentor Kenji Mizoguchi (on whom he did an over two hour long documentary, Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director, which is available on the Criterion DVD of Ugetsu), and in terms of his outlook on life and art, the bombing of Hiroshima (where he was actually born). My own lasting impressions of Shindo were based on two striking black and white, cinemascope films, Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), powerful horror films centered around Japanese supernatural stories of war-time greed, jealousy and retribution.
