Tazuko Sakane She is remembered as the first Japanese female director. While doing both fictional and educational work, Sakane had a major impact on the distribution of information during the Segunda Guerra Mundial, making several educational films.
He fought against the strict patriarchal borders in Japan and constantly asked that the promoted to director. It was only when Sakane began making educational films that accurately portrayed the domestic relationship between men and women, highlighting how one gender coexisted with another, that her directing and her films began to attract public attention.
Born in Kyoto Born in a wealthy family, Sakane's early life was characterized by a high degree of freedom rarely enjoyed by other women. For example, her father encouraged her to go to the movies as many times as she wanted. Develop your interest in art.
She even briefly studied English literature in college before her mother forced her to quit and arranged their marriage. She did, possibly to get her mother off her back, but then she quickly divorced and went on with something that bordered on scandalous in those days: she got a job.
Her father helped her get hired as an assistant Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the most influential figures in Japanese film history who was known for his stories with complex female leads who challenge social norms and fight resiliently against a patriarchal society that tries to crush them.
Mizoguchi and Sakane quickly developed a relationship and the young woman became his disciple. She worked as an editor on his films and even helped him direct on occasion. Throughout all of this, Mizoguchi continued to lobby various studios to allow Sakane to make her own films. Finally, one agreed.
Sakane hoped her debut film could be about female students reshaping the fabric of Japanese society, however, the studio Daiichi Eiga en Kyoto forced her to produce a period drama about the doomed love between a geisha apprentice and a Buddhist acolyte. Unfortunately, Hatsu Sugata (1936) has now been lost and all that remains of it is the promotional profile of Sakane that the studio published before the premiere.
After the failure of Hatsu Sugata, the studio lost faith in Sakane, if they ever had faith. She subsequently returned to work as Mizoguchi's assistant, and then the WWII.
The war period of Japan it meant stricter censorship of films, but it also increased the demand for filmmakers to make government propaganda films. In 1942, after years of being marginalized because of her gender, Sakane moved to manchukuo, the puppet state created after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, to make "educational" films that encouraged the Japanese to move west.
One of those movies was Brides of the Frontier (1943), Sakane's only surviving directorial piece. Although her goal was to get Japanese women to come to manchukuo and they married farmers, the movie has some real art to it, yet it's hard to miss the fact that the movie was promoting colonialism.
After the fall of manchukuo, Sakane stayed in China to help form a new generation of Chinese filmmakers.
After returning to Japan In 1946, Sakane could not be hired as a director anywhere, so she returned to being the right hand of Kenji Mizōguchi, which fueled decades-old rumors that there was something going on between the two, but there is no historical source to back this up.
Despite his death on September 2, 1975, Sakane leave a legacy who was a pioneer in the inclusion of women in the cinema in Japan.
