Japanese Comedy
Japanese film comedy was first mass-produced as studio series. Hisaya Morishige's Company President series ran to 33 films and the Station Front series to 24; the same shape was repeated for fourteen years, the same faces returning every year.
Otoko wa Tsurai yo, which began in 1969, pushed that to its limit — and the way it began is the interesting part. It started on television: 26 episodes from 1968. In the final episode Torajiro dies, bitten by a snake while hunting for one on Amami Oshima. Complaints flooded the broadcaster, and that is what led directly to the films. At the time cinema looked down on television, and Shochiku is said to have been reluctant; Yoji Yamada and others talked them into it. A character killed off on television was brought back by the audience's objections. Forty-eight films followed over twenty-seven years, until Kiyoshi Atsumi's death. Guinness recognised it as the longest film series in the world by number of films — with the caveat that the Bond films run longer in years. (This map first wrote only 'the longest series with the same lead actor', which was not accurate.) Yamada has said: meeting an actor of Atsumi's gift was an enormous piece of luck in my life.
In 1984 Juzo Itami became a director with The Funeral, and the following year Tampopo carried that humour to the world — he called it a ramen western himself. Then in 1997 someone from the theatre stepped in: Koki Mitani. Here is one of the most surprising lines on this whole map. Mitani has spoken about what shaped him, and named Billy Wilder — the same Wilder who directed Double Indemnity in another band on this map. The person sitting in the film noir band connects to Japanese comedy of the 1990s, because the same hand made both a dark insurance-murder story and comic, dialogue-driven films. Mitani has also said that if he had not seen Neil Simon's The Odd Couple he probably would not have gone into theatre at all. One more form travelled: the ensemble piece in a single room. Twelve Angry Men in 1957, 12 Gentle Japanese in 1991. The jury room moved house, thirty-four years later.
At the newest end of this band stands One Cut of the Dead — an independent film out of an actors' workshop, made for ¥3.25 million, which took ¥3.12 billion. Stephen King watched it and wrote that if you think you have seen every possible variation on the zombie movie, you are wrong; he found it a lot of fun.
Read this band from top to bottom and you can see the place where comedy gets made moving. First the studios turning it out with the same company of actors; then people from the theatre; now workshops. Itami's own way in was unusual too: a man already known as an actor and an essayist became a director for the first time at 51, and swept the awards with his first film. For A Taxing Woman the National Tax Agency cooperated fully, and the word 'marusa' entered ordinary speech. One thing I could not write: what shaped Itami, in his own words. There are essays connecting him to Godard, to Bunuel, to 1930s Hollywood, but all of them are other people's. So no line is drawn from this node for that.