
Birthday: November 07, 1909
Death: September 17, 1938
Sadao Yamanaka (山中 貞雄, Yamanaka Sadao, November 7, 1909 – September 17, 1938) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter who directed 26 films between 1932 and 1938. 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 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. Early on, he had stated an interest in blurring the lines between several genres: comedy, historical epics, and comedy-dramas focusing on average people. Viewers and critics note in his surviving films the genesis of ideas later explored by the internationally successful Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujirō Ozu and Seijun Suzuki. He formed the Narutaki-gumi with his friends, and they wrote under the pseudonym Kimpachi Kajiwara. Yamanaka has been characterized as a minimalist, one whose style favoured elegance and rhythm. 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. Yamanaka died of dysentery in Manchuria after being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. He is the uncle of the Japanese film director Tai Kato, who wrote a book about Yamanaka, Eiga kantoku Yamanaka Sadao. Only three of his films survive in nearly complete form. Description from the Wikipedia article Sadao Yamanaka, licensed under CC-BY-SA.

November 01, 1934

August 25, 1937

June 15, 1935

April 30, 1936

November 29, 1934

January 15, 1935

April 03, 1935

October 20, 1939

June 15, 1933

November 11, 1929

November 20, 1956

February 04, 1932

August 09, 1959

October 31, 1933

November 28, 1933

December 14, 1933

March 01, 1934

November 01, 1935

March 18, 1937

April 13, 1933

May 29, 1930

June 15, 1932

February 02, 1935

February 17, 1963