Kon Ichikawa (b. 1915), one of the four Japanese directors first acknowledged in the West as masters-the others are Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Kurosawa-receives his first major North American retrospective in over three decades. Ichikawa is an artist with an astounding command of many genres, forms, and tones, from ferociously humanist war films to sophisticated social satires, formalist documentaries to extravagant period pieces. His many celebrated adaptations of famous Japanese novels have earned him a reputation as a "deadpan sophisticate" (Pauline Kael) with an elegant compositional style, venomous wit, and narrative daring, but he is also a crafty master of populist entertainments. This retrospective, including many new 35mm prints, offers a rare opportunity to encounter the work of perhaps the last living sensei of Japanese cinema.In a career extending from the mid-thirties to the present, Ichikawa has directed almost eighty films, and continues to make one or two annually. While often referred to as a link between the Golden Age of Japanese cinema and the New Wave of the sixties, Ichikawa has rarely been given his due as an innovator. As this retrospective reveals, his stylistic and thematic experiments are among the most daring and influential in postwar Japanese cinema, acknowledging the formidable influence of his scenarist, his wife Natto Wada, whose withdrawal from writing his scripts in the mid-sixties marked a turning point in his career. Many of his films, which are full of gallows humor, revolve around tenacity and madness (often synonymous). And his apprenticeship in manga films and animé shaped his approach to narrative structure and visual composition, which tends to be graphically organized, asymmetrical, and dynamic in its articulation. He often radically revised revered literary texts for his own pessimistic ends, and rejected Confucian values, offering a thorough critique of the conformism and rapacity of postwar Japan. (John Coleman called him "probably Japan's severest clandestine critic.") His trilogy of black comedies about that chaotic world are among the most underrated films in Japanese cinema and are one of the revelations of this series.James Quandt Cinematheque OntarioThe Kon Ichikawa retrospective is a presentation of The Japan Foundation and Cinematheque Ontario, Toronto, and was prepared by James Quandt of Cinematheque Ontario. Brent Kliewer, Moving Image Arts, College of Santa Fe, helped originate and organize the retrospective. Also: The Kawakita Memorial Film Institute, Tokyo; the four studios which cooperated in the organization of the retrospective (Daiei, Nikkatsu, Toho, and Kokusai Hoei); Linda Hoaglund, New York; Stewart Binns, Adrian Wood, and Kirsty Ayling, Olympic Television Archive Bureau, London; Janus Films (Fumiko Takagi); Kino International (Gary Palmucci), New York. A Major New Publication! Kon Ichikawa, edited by James Quandt, published by the Cinematheque Ontario, a Division of the Toronto International Film Festival Group. This important new book contains more than twenty articles covering the breadth of Ichikawa's career by commentators including Yukio Mishima, Donald Richie, Tadao Sato, Pauline Kael, and Audie Bock. Sold in our Box Office and Museum Store (see page 15 or www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/store for summer purchases while the Museum Store is closed for retrofit). Friday July 13, 2001
