Freda Freiberg wrote articles, book chapters, monographs and book and film reviews about Japanese cinema. She also did video introductions and ‘select scene audio commentary’ on the British Film Institute’s initial boxset (in 2007) of key films by Naruse, about the films 'Floating Clouds', 'Late Chrysanthemums' and 'When a Woman Ascends the Stairs'. See the 2024 BFI release of a restored and high definition Blu-Ray of 'Floating Clouds'. The extras include commentary by Freda on a key scene in the film an article by freda and an Adrian Martin interview with her. This new edition of 'Floating Clouds' is co-dedicated to both Freda Freiberg and to Paul Willemen: https://shop.bfi.org.uk/floating-clouds-blu-ray.html. Freda also did commentary on the Madman Australian release of Kurosawa’s 'The Lower Depths'. Unfortunatley, this dvd is not, at time of uploading this informaiton, available. Check 'Madman Australia Kurosawa' on line to see if this is still the case.

When writing about the oeuvre of Mikio Naruse, critics invariably lapse into invidious comparisons and a list of negatives. A late addition to the pantheon of Japanese auteurs, he has always been rated below Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi. There is a common chorus of complaints. He made intimate domestic dramas but his work isn’t as playful or charming as Ozu’s. He served his apprenticeship at Shochiku’s Kamata studios, alongside Ozu, but couldn’t or wouldn’t master the lightly entertaining house style. They were glad to dispense with his services because he persisted in being heavy, sombre and depressing. He was a classic director whose career embraced two golden ages of Japanese cinema, but his work doesn’t exemplify the distinctive stylistic flourishes of the Japanese film as celebrated by Bordwell or the radical aberrances of Japanese aesthetic practice as outlined by Burch. He made women’s melodramas but they are not as exquisitely moving as Mizoguchi’s, either stylistically or emotionally. 

It was Rashomon that brought Japanese cinema to the attention of the West and led to the identification of Japanese cinema with the art movie, the period movie and Kurosawa. It was the first of a string of Japanese art movies with exotic period settings that won major awards at the Venice Film Festival in the early Fifties. The French critics were more entranced by Mizoguchi’s period films -  Ugetsu Monogatari, Sansho Dayu, Chikamatsu Monogatari, Saikaku Ichidai Onna – that were shown in subsequent years at Venice; but the American and Australian critics remained exclusively fans of Kurosawa for many years. Just as the Bengali art cinema of Satyajit Ray came to represent Indian cinema, so Kurosawa’s art cinema came to represent Japanese cinema. The films of both directors were regularly screened at international film festivals throughout the 50s and 60s; western film audiences rarely had the chance to see any other examples of Indian or Japanese cinema. The American critic, Donald Richie, who came to Japan during the Occupation, and came to be recognised as the expert on Japanese cinema, contributed to the cult of Kurosawa, by dismissing the bulk of Japanese film production as formulaic and sentimental and elevating Kurosawa to the position of the pre-eminent Japanese film artist. He was not recognised as such in Japan. When he died Richie called him a prophet without honour in his own country.

Comic books and animated films have generally been considered entertainment for children in the English-speaking world. In Japan, these media cater to a wide range of tastes and markets – lowbrow and highbrow, seekers of sensation and knowledge, children and adults, boys and girls, students and workers, housewives and office-workers. They are very popular with the public and the most profitable sections of the publishing and movie industries. Popular comic-strip books (known as manga) are turned into animated films (abbreviated in Japanese from animation to anime), which in turn produce a market for re-issues of and sequels to the original manga series. Ghost in the Shell, the 1995 animated film, was based on a 1989 manga, with the same title, created by the artist Masamune Shiro. Shiro’s earlier manga stories had featured wars between criminals and law enforcers, androids seeking the secret of their birth, and cyborgs running away from oppressive and corrupt corporations. His artful drawings combine organic forms with high-tech and mechanical (known in Japan as mecha) motifs.  

In the English-speaking world, Japanese cinema is best known for classic samurai movies and contemporary animated features. Before the current anime boom, the only Japanese films that received wide circulation were those made by Kurosawa, especially the ones that starred Toshiro Mifune as the samurai hero. Kurosawa’s action films inspired a number of Western filmmakers to make re-makes. TheSeven Samurai (Japanese title: Shichinin no Samurai, Toho, 1954) was adapted by Hollywood director John Sturges into a western in a Mexican setting under the title, The Magnificent Seven (United Artists, 1960); while the black comedy Yojimbo (Toho, 1961) inspired a series of spaghetti westerns, made by Italian director Sergio Leone and shot in Spain, starring Clint Eastwood in Mifune’s role as the Man with No Name. The first of the series, A Fistfulof Dollars (Italian title: Per un Pugno di Dollari, an Italian-American co-production, 1964), was an overt homage to Kurosawa, reproducing the narrative and even some of the surreal images of Yojimbo. The recent Hollywood film, The Last Samurai (Ed Zwick, 2003), starring Tom Cruise, is clearly indebted to the Japanese samurai film genre in general, rather than to Kurosawa specifically, as is Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume One (2003), if more tangentially and jocularly, amongst a mish-mash of references. A less obvious debt to the samurai film has been perceived in George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977/1980/1983) and George Miller’s Mad Max (1979/1981/1985) trilogies; both directors were Kurosawa fans.