Alex Kong at n+1:
In matters of style, diligence is usually understood to be antithetical to spontaneity. This is the conventional wisdom when it comes to cinematic style too, and among viewers in the West, Japanese cinema in particular tends to be thought of as the effusive outpouring of maverick auteurs—iconoclasts raging against the machine and rejecting commercial constraints to protect their cherished individuality. So it can be surprising that many of that tradition’s great achievements in fact emerged from an industrial studio system built around mass production. Ozu and Mizoguchi, for instance, were above all journeymen directors for large studios, working under a mandate to churn out product at scale, and Naruse, too, was known as a faithful employee who always finished his films under budget and never said no to an assignment; needless to say, these conditions didn’t stop them from creating masterpieces. One of their colleagues was the woefully overlooked Hiroshi Shimizu, who made at least 163 films over the course of a career that spanned the silent era and the talkies. The assembly-line conditions don’t seem to have been especially onerous for him: “I’m going to make only three films the way the company wants me to,” Shimizu said in 1935, “and in exchange I can make two films that I want.”
more here.
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