Cinema of East Asia

The scope of East Asian cinema is huge and covers a vast array of different film styles and genres, as the region's rich cinematic traditions are particularly well-known internationally for its production of the following types of genres such as: Unlike the film industries in the Western world, East Asian film industries in its early days were not dominated by American distributors, and developed in relative isolation from Hollywood cinema; while Hollywood films were screened in East Asian countries, they were less popular than home-grown fare with local audiences.

At the beginning of the decade, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953) both captured prizes at the Venice Film Festival and elsewhere, and by the middle of the decade Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (1953) and the first part of Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy (1954) had won Oscars.

By the end of the decade, several critics associated with French journal Cahiers du cinéma published some of the first Western studies on Japanese film; many of those critics went on to become founding members of the French nouvelle vague, which began simultaneously with the Japanese New Wave.

As the popularity of East Asian films has endured, it is unsurprising that members of the Western film industry would cite their influences (notably George Lucas, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese citing Akira Kurosawa; and Jim Jarmusch and Paul Schrader's similar mentions of Yasujirō Ozu), and—on occasion—work to introduce less well-known filmmakers to Western audiences (such as the growing number of Eastern films released with the endorsement "Quentin Tarantino Presents").

A number of East Asian films have also been based upon Western source material as varied as the quickie Hong Kong film remakes of Hollywood hits as well as Kurosawa's adaptations of works by William Shakespeare (The Bad Sleep Well, Throne of Blood, and Ran), Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths), and Ed McBain (High and Low).