Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujirô, and Kurosawa Akira are recognized today as three of the most important and influential directors in Japanese cinema. In their films of the late 1940s and 1950s, these directors focused upon issues surrounding the human condition and the perception of truth, history, beauty, death and other issues of the postwar period. This course will place their films in period context, and will pay particular attention to connections to other visual media, such as painting, photography, and printmaking, as well as to the modern concepts of “art” and “history” in the cinematic context. How three directors of the 1980s and 1990s – Itami Jûzô, Takeshi Kitano, and Miyazaki Hayao – also took up these issues, and referred to the “big three” will be discussed at the end of the course.