Kaneto Shindo

A socialist by conviction, he specialised in stories about the underclass — poor fishermen, prostitutes and other victims of society. Born in Hiroshima, he identified especially with the fate of that city and first came to international attention with a film about the legacy of the atom bomb: Children of Hiroshima (1952).

Unlike many Japanese directors, Shindo rarely ventured into period subjects. When he did, in Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), he made a brace of virtuoso horror pictures, demonstrating a masterly use of the CinemaScope screen. Both were widely seen in the West and are now regarded as his most accomplished works. As with his contemporary subjects, they focused not on the nobility but on poor people scratching a living on the fringes of a chaotic world.

Shindo admired the strength and endurance of Japanese women . His first film, The Story of My Beloved Wife (1951), was a portrait of his first wife. Others with a strong feminist flavour included The Life of a Woman (1953) and Sorrow Is Only for Women (1958) .

That Shindo never attained the stature of his mentor Kenji Mizoguchi was due to a streak of sentimentality in his work. Even Children of Hiroshima was dismissed in Japan as a tear-jerker, though in the light of its patent sincerity that was a harsh verdict.

He was also prone to pretension. The Naked Island (1960) was a prime example. The story of a poor couple living on a remote, arid island with their two small children, it depicts their daily ritual of descending a huge flight of stone steps, crossing the sea to the mainland to fetch water and carrying it painfully back up the steps on their shoulders, spilling much en route. Throughout the ordeal not a word is exchanged. The film is silent except for natural sounds and a lachrymose score. Though it won first prize at the Moscow Film Festival, there were many dissenters. The absence of speech was particularly criticised; far from reinforcing the impression of a dour environment where there is no time to talk, it struck many as absurd, at odds with any likely reality.

Stylistically, Shindo favoured ostentation. Onibaba and Kuroneko embrace several shock effects and frenzied action as lurid as anything in a Hammer horror film, though in the context this is appropriate.

The atom bomb scene in Children of Hiroshima was constructed in the same vein as such Soviet silent films as The Battleship Potemkin. The last minutes before the bomb drops and its immediate aftermath are edited in an accelerating montage of individual shots, emphasising the metronomic countdown to detonation.

There were several phases in Shindo’s career. The early realist films were in keeping with his professed socialism. But in the mid-Sixties, at the same time that he was experimenting with historical themes seen through peasant eyes, he took a sudden detour into sex comedies. Nothing very raunchy happens in them, since their recurring theme is impotence; but Lost Sex (1966), The Origin of Sex (1967) and Operation Négligé (1968) seemed so far in spirit from the man who had made Children of Hiroshima that they left Western critics baffled.

Kaneto Shindo was born in Hiroshima on April 28 1912, the son of impoverished farmers; the family had once been affluent landowners . In 1934 he left home and joined a small film production company called Shinko as a laboratory apprentice. Rising to the post of art director and eventually scriptwriter, he acted as an assistant to several established film-makers, including Mizoguchi.

In 1942 he joined another small unit, Koa Films, which was taken over the following year by the Shochiku studio, one of the giants of the Japanese film industry. Between 1942 and 1951, when Shindo made his directorial debut, he wrote scripts for some of the foremost film-makers in Japanese cinema. For Mizoguchi, whom he acknowledged as the greatest influence on his work, he wrote two feminist pictures, Women’s Victory (1946) and My Love Is Burning (1949); and for Kimisaburo Yoshimura, he produced a stream of outstanding screenplays that made them one of the most successful screen partnerships in post-war Japanese cinema. The finest of their collaborations were A Ball at the Anjo Family (1947) and two elegant costume pictures, The Tale of Genji (1951) and The Beauty and the Dragon (1955).

Neither Shindo nor Yoshimura was popular with the Shochiku management, which continually upbraided them for their “dark outlook”. They walked out in 1950 and established their own independent company, known as Kindai Eiga Kyokai (Modern Film Association), enabling Shindo in 1951 to make his directorial debut with the very personal Story of My Beloved Wife. She had died in 1940, and Shindo was criticised for wallowing in an excess of pathos and sentimentality. An unusual feature of the film is that the role of Shindo’s first wife was played by his second, the actress Nobuko Otowa, who regularly appeared in his subsequent movies. She played a key role in Children of Hiroshima as a young teacher who returns to Hiroshima seven years after the dropping of the atom bomb to seek out survivors among the pupils she had taught at that time.

The film was commissioned by the Japan Teachers’ Union and for the most part used non-professional actors, some of whom had been injured in the blast or lost loved ones. The sponsors, however, were dissatisfied with it. They had looked for a political tract laying the blame squarely on American shoulders. Shindo, however, implied that Japanese militarism bore equal responsibility for the catastrophe.

The Union insisted that he had “reduced the story to a tear-jerker and destroyed its political orientation”. They preferred another film on the same subject made by Hideo Sekigawa, in which America was condemned for dropping the bomb on the Japanese people in a spirit of scientific experimentation, using them as “laboratory animals”.

Though reservations about his handling of the theme persisted, Shindo’s integrity was never in doubt. As a Hiroshima citizen, he identified strongly with the subject. Indeed, he returned to the nuclear debate in 1959 with Lucky Dragon No 5, an account of the Japanese fishermen who were contaminated by fallout from the atomic tests in the Bikini islands.

Through the 1950s, Shindo concentrated principally on social themes in such films as Epitome (1953), about a woman driven to prostitution, and Gutter (1954), a Zolaesque study of low life. None of his later films made much impact in or out of Japan until Onibaba in 1964.

His first period film, Onibaba embraced an earthy sexuality unusual in the cinema of the time . A 16th-century saga set in an era of brutal clan warfare, it shows how two women strive to stay alive by murdering samurai and selling their armour to the highest bidder. In its later stages, the film plunges into horror. The older woman dons a mask, stolen from a dead samurai, who wore it to conceal a ghastly skin affliction. But once assumed, it will not come off and has to be forcibly removed to reveal the hideous reality beneath.

Shindo came close to matching this tour de force in another fable, Kuroneko, made in 1968. Like Onibaba, it was a historical film, centred on two women who are raped and left to die and turn into avenging cats preying on wandering samurai. There is a strong Freudian element in this film since the ghosts seduce their victims before tearing them apart, and one of them turns out to be the demon-woman’s son.

Shindo’s 1966-68 sex trilogy (Lost Sex, The Origin of Sex and Operation Négligé) was more enjoyed than admired, but there was general agreement that the thrillers Heat-Wave Island and Live Today, Die Tomorrow (both 1970) were superior genre pieces.

In 1975, under the title Life of a Film Director, he made an engrossing documentary about Kenji Mizoguchi, the long-dead director from whom he claimed to have learnt most. Though Mizoguchi was gone, those who worked with him and acted for him were still alive. By interviewing them and interspersing their comments with well-chosen film clips, Shindo constructed a model biopic.

Shindo’s later films were eclectic. In 1982 he made a historical biopic of the woodblock artist Hokusai (Hokusai Manga) which focused more on his highly-charged sex life than on his art . The Horizon (1984) was based on his sister’s life as a mail-order bride sold to a Japanese-American . He continued to make films into his late nineties.

Kaneto Shindo’s second wife, Nobuko Otowa, died in 1994.

Kaneto Shindo, born April 28 1912, died May 29 2012