The Museum of Modern Art will present Beyond Ozu: Hidden Gems of Shochiku Studios, at The Museum of Modern Art screening June 10th through July 9th. The film series will screen a centennial selection of hidden treasures, most of them in archival 35mm prints, from the studio that produced such masterpieces as Yashuzirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story, Keisuke Kinoshita’s Ballad of Narayama, Nagisa Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth, and Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri.

Founded in 1920 by a pair of peanut vendors who hoped to achieve the commercial success of Hollywood, the Shochiku film studio adopted Western methods of filmmaking (a training institute, a star system, a studio campus) and made Western techniques of storytelling (closeups, flashbacks, panning shots, dissolves, montage editing) into something distinctively Japanese.

Moving beyond the traditional period film (jidai-geki), directors like Yasujirō Shimazu and Hiroshi Shimizu, perhaps the unsung heroes of this series, instead brought a more realist style to the lives of the lower working class, in a genre known as shomin-geki, while Yûzô Kawashima and Noboru Nakamura favored another popular genre, gendai-geki, finding bittersweet melodrama in modern cosmopolitan life.

For more information on the installation moma.org.