Masao Inoue
Some "shinpa" stage actors like Masao Inoue were heavily involved in film, and a form called rensageki or literally "chain drama" appeared which mixed cinema and theater on stage. With the rise of the reformist Pure Film Movement in the 1910s, which strongly criticized "shinpa" films for their melodramatic tales of women suffering from the strictures of class and social prejudice, films about contemporary subjects eventually were called gendaigeki in opposition to jidaigeki by the 1920s, even though "shinpa" stories continued to be made into film for decades to come. On the stage, "shinpa" was no longer as successful after the Taishō era, but good playwrights such as Matsutarō Kawaguchi, actresses like Yaeko Mizutani and such Living National Treasures as Rokurō Kitamura and Shōtarō Hanayagi helped keep the form alive. "Shinpa" also had an influence on modern Korean theater through the "shinp’a" (신파) genre.