Word: kabuki
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last summer's trip was funded by $40,000 in corporate contributions, Sinclair said. New York's Sheraton Hotel donated $8,000 in accommodations, while United Airlines provided a cut-rate flight to Seattle and Kabuki Bicycles gave a discount on equipment...
...entertainment world that moves to Sony Walkman rhythms and Pac-Man blips, Japanese cinema is troubled and timid. The five studios that have survived the national movie recession of the past decade or so-Toho, Toei, Shochiku, Nikkatsu and Daiei-find their profits in real estate, supermarket chains, Kabuki theater troupes and bowling alleys. Most of the 322 films produced last year were roman poruno, or lowbudget, soft-core-sex pictures. The number of theaters is down 68% since 1958, and ticket sales were a pathetic 150 million (down 87%). Even compared with reduced attendance figures in the West, Japan...
...near exhaustion, the Japanese cinema has returned to the exotic isolation of its earliest years. Moviegoing in Japan at the turn of the century was an experience more closely allied to other national arts than to the nickelodeon fever of the West. Until 1918 female roles were played by Kabuki actors in drag. Until the arrival of talking pictures in 1931, audiences depended upon spellbinding narrators called benshi to interpret the on-screen action; many were more popular than the country's movie stars. Though Japanese cinema was a strong force in Asia (so much so that in Thailand...
...world through Western-style intelligence. Once, when a Westerner looked at Japanese movies-at Kurosawa's kamikaze-type warriors in The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, or Ozu's gentle heroines in Tokyo Story and The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, or Mizoguchi's evocations of Kabuki drama in Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff-he, could tell himself, 'This is Japan!' He can't find that kind of false reassurance in the works of Imamura or Oshima...
Dustin Hoffman was a raw ingenue in Tootsie. Though only 33, Bando is already a master onnagata, a man who plays female roles in the centuries-old art of Kabuki. So apposite are his opposite-sex portrayals that he is the object of study by aspiring actresses and real-life geishas seeking to refine their feminine ways. "To act as an onnagata, "he says, "is to try to create an ideal; what I as a man would consider to be the ideal woman." Bando has also done non-Kabuki work, including heralded performances as Lady Macbeth and Desdemona...