Yoshitarō Nomura (野村 芳太郎,Nomura Yoshitarō; 23 April 1919 – 8 April 2005) was a prolific Japanesefilm director,film producer, andscreenwriter. His first accredited film,Pigeon (鳩,Hato), was released in 1952; his last,Kikenna Onna-tachi (危険な女たち), in 1985. He received several awards during his career, including theJapanese Academy Award for "Best Director" for his 1978 filmThe Demon.[1]
Nomura was the son of Hotei Nomura, a contract film director at theShochiku film studio. He enteredKeio University to study art in 1936, graduated in 1941, and then joined the Shochiku studios as well. He was first hired as anassistant director but before being assigned any projects he was drafted into the army before being discharged in July 1946. In the fall of the same year, he returned to Shochiku and spent his entire film career working there.
During his years as an assistant director, he worked under the helm of film directors such as Keisuke Sasaki, Yuzo Kawashima, andAkira Kurosawa, whom he worked with in 1951 on the filming ofThe Idiot, based on thenovel byFyodor Dostoyevsky. In 1952, Nomura was promoted to director and made his directorial debut in 1953 with the filmPigeon (鳩,Hato), which was such a success that the studio gave him five more films to direct the following year.
He is considered one of the pioneers of Japanesefilm noir and frequently collaborated with mystery writerSeichō Matsumoto, adapting eight of his works into films. Nomura directed 89 films in total. He worked in several different genres, includingmusicals andjidaigeki (period dramas), but was considered most proficient within the thriller genre. Nomura's films frequently contain veiled criticism of Japanese society. His 1974 thrillerCastle of Sand, for which he won a diploma at the9th Moscow International Film Festival in 1975,[2] is considered by many critics as his best work. Nomura retired from directing in 1985, after which he worked as a TV producer and as consultant to other Japanese directors. In 1995, he was decorated by the Japanese Government with theOrder of the Rising Sun, the second highest order of Japan.
In 2014, theNational Science and Media Museum in the UK organised a programme of five Nomura films, all of which were adaptations of Seichō Matsumoto stories.[3]
^Vincent, Tom (23 May 2014)."Discovering Yoshitaro Nomura".National Science and Media Museum blog. National Science and Media Museum. Retrieved1 May 2020.
