-
Saturday, Nov 27, 2021
3:30 PM (170 mins)
Buy Tickets
BAMPFA
Tokyo Olympiad
(Tôkyô orinpikku)
Digital Restoration
I tried to grasp the solemnity of the moment, when man defies his limits, and to express the solitude of the athlete who, in order to win, struggles against himself . . . I wanted people to rediscover with astonishment that wonder which is a human being.
Kon Ichikawa
This is a masterpiece of poetic documentary filmmaking, presented in its original almost-three-hour version. Kon Ichikawa, inspired by Leni Riefenstahl’s immortal coverage of the 1936 Olympics, decided to make a documentary of the 1964 games in Tokyo. His project involved 164 camera operators (supervised by Kazuo Miyagawa and Shigeo Hayashida) plus a crew of 500, making it an Olympian feat. But Ichikawa was intent on making “a visual poem of peace and human equality.” The result: every frame is an exercise in film experimentation, “an idiosyncratic, formally innovative, and surprisingly intimate film” (James Quandt).
FILM DETAILS
Screenwriter
- Kon Ichikawa
- Natto Wada
- Ishio Shirasaka
- Shuntaro Tanigawa
Cinematographer
- Shigeo Hayashida
- Kazuo Miyagawa
Language
- Japanese
- with English subtitles
Print Info
- Color
- DCP
- 170 mins
Source
- Janus Films