Tazuko Sakane

Tazuko Sakane (born December 7, 1904 in Kyoto , † September 2, 1975 in Japan ) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter and film editor . She was the first female film director in Japan and the only one until 1953.

Life

Sakane's father was a wealthy inventor and businessman who also had ties to the film industry, centered in Sakane's native city of Kyoto. In her youth, Sakane often went to the movies with her family. She attended a college for women to get a degree in English literature, but had to drop out under pressure from her stepmother. In 1924, her parents arranged to marry a gynecologist. The marriage was unhappy and ended in divorce in 1928. Sakane decided not to remarry but to take a job and in 1929, through her father's mediation, became the assistant to the film director Kenji Mizoguchi in the Nikkatsu Studios. That was at a time of transition from silent film to sound film, in which both systems were used and also with intermediate forms. For the first half year she was an unpaid assistant. Since she had to do all kinds of auxiliary work on the set, she switched to wearing men's clothes instead of kimono. Mizoguchi made her an assistant director and she also worked on scripts with and in film editing, sometimes without being named.

In 1932 she followed Mizoguchi to Tokyo , where she also applied for the first time in the studio as an independent director (the material was based on Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster ), but was refused. Instead, there were jealous rumors in the studio that she was having a relationship with Mizoguchi. In 1936 she went back to Kyoto with Mizoguchi (to the Daiichi Eiga Studios) and in the same year got her first chance as a director in the film Hatsu Sugata (New Clothes), which deals with the social obstacles of a love between a geisha candidate and a Buddhist candidate for priesthood who ended up in separation. However, she couldn't choose the material herself and the film received negative reviews from the critics and was not a hit at the box office. She then continued to work as Mizoguchi's assistant.

In 1940 she separated from Mizoguchi and was commissioned by the Tokyo Riken studio to make documentaries. Initially, a documentation was made about the Ainu in Hokkaido , but this already came into conflict with the censors who wanted to portray the Japanese as a homogeneous national body. From 1942 she worked on documentaries for the state Manchurian film company in occupied Manchuria again as a director, with her films aimed specifically at a female audience. Only brides at the border from 1943, who were supposed to lure Japanese women as settlers into the agriculture of Manchuria, are preserved of the documentaries . Some of her documentaries were educational films for gardening and housework. After the end of the war, she stayed in what was now communist China, teaching film techniques for the newly founded Chinese film studios and working on propaganda films. She also received an invitation to make a film about Soviet-Chinese friendship.

She returned to Japan in October 1946 but was unable to continue her career as a film director because she reportedly did not have a college degree. She was forced to work as an assistant for Mizoguchi again. In 1962 she retired, but continued to work as a screenwriter. In 1975 she died of stomach cancer.

Web links

• Biography of Xinyi Zhao , Women's Film Pioneer Project, Columbia University
• Tatsuko Sakane in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Remarks

1. ↑ That year the first film by former actress Tanaka Kinuyo came out.