Film at Lincoln Center to Spotlight Japan’s Cinematic Rebel
The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida
Friday, December 1 through Friday, December 8
Walter Reade Theater – 165 W. 65th Street (unless otherwise noted)
Admission: $17 General Public | $14 Students, Seniors, individuals with disabilities | $12 Members
Film at Lincoln Center presents “The Radical Cinema of Kijū Yoshida,” a retrospective spotlighting the films of one of Japan’s greatest cinematic rebels. Running from December 1 through 8, all 16 films will be presented on 35mm or 16mm at Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, and Japan Society.
The retrospective presents the most comprehensive collection of Yoshida’s work ever screened in the United States. Most notably, the series will feature Yoshida’s famed political trilogy, which captures significant moments in 20th century Japanese history: Eros + Massacre (1968), regarded as his masterpiece; Heroic Purgatory (1970), a kaleidoscopic, mazelike memory piece about an atomic engineer whose past as a college-age revolutionary militant erupts into the present; and Coup d’état (1973), a spellbinding portrait of notorious militarist Ikki Kita.
To purchase tickets, please visit Film at Lincoln Center’s website. Use promo code OKADA to enjoy $5 off all ticket purchases.
Lineup
Good-for-Nothing
Friday, December 1 at 2:00 p.m.
Tuesday, December 5 at 8:45 p.m.
Yoshida’s debut feature vividly depicts the ennui and intellectual and spiritual restlessness of a generation of bourgeois youth in Tokyo at the dawn of the 1960s.
Blood Is Dry
Friday, December 1 at 4:15 p.m.
Saturday, December 2 at 8:30 p.m.
Yoshida’s satirical second feature again ferociously critiques Japanese society following its postwar reinvention as a capitalist giant.
Eros + Massacre
Friday, December 1 at 7:00 p.m.
Tuesday, December 5 at 2:00 p.m.
Among the greatest of all political films and perhaps the work that best embodies the spirit of Yoshida’s artistic project, Eros + Massacre is an epic, historiographic examination of the points of intersection between the domains of desire and politics.
Affair in the Snow
Saturday, December 2 at 1:00 p.m.
A love triangle plays out in the snow in Yoshida’s eleventh feature, a striking deconstruction of the melodrama.
Heroic Purgatory
Saturday, December 2 at 3:15 p.m.
The second film in a trilogy (inaugurated by Eros + Massacre) concerning 20th century Japanese history, Heroic Purgatory is a kaleidoscopic, mazelike memory piece that is perhaps Yoshida’s most recognizably avant-garde work.
The Affair
Saturday, December 2 at 6:00 p.m.
Wednesday, December 6 at 1:00 p.m.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center – 144 W. 65th Street
Again using the melodrama genre as an instrument of oblique social critique, Yoshida’s ninth feature stars Mariko Okada as a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a philandering businessman who finds herself mysteriously drawn toward an old lover of her deceased mother’s.
Akitsu Springs
Sunday, December 3 at 1:00 p.m.
Thursday, December 7 at 1:00 p.m.
The first great commercial success of his young career, Akitsu Springs is a tear-jerking romance that finds Yoshida working in color and in collaboration with his frequent star and lifelong filmmaking partner Mariko Okada (in her 100th on-screen appearance).
Wuthering Heights
Sunday, December 3 at 3:30 p.m.
Thursday, December 7 at 3:30 p.m.
Emily Brontë’s Gothic romance is transposed to feudal Japan for Yoshida’s powerfully stark, elemental take on the story.
18 Who Cause a Storm
Sunday, December 3 at 6:30 p.m.
Wednesday, December 6 at 3:15 p.m.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center – 144 W. 65th Street
A group of migrant workers fed up with their being ruthlessly exploited by the society around them lash out in Yoshida’s rugged widescreen chronicle of proletarian unrest.
Women in the Mirror
Sunday, December 3 at 9:00 p.m.
In his final fiction feature, Yoshida returned to an old subject in his work: the unfathomable trauma known by Japan due to the United States’s dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Flame and Women
Tuesday, December 5 at 6:30 p.m.
Yoshida returned to the melodrama—this time synthesizing elements of the horror film in the process—with this chronicle of a woman’s suddenly swelling desire for her child’s biological father.
Coup d’état
Wednesday, December 6 at 6:30 p.m.
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center – 144 W. 65th Street
The culminating film in the trilogy formed by Eros + Massacre and Heroic Purgatory, Yoshida’s 16th feature is a spellbinding portrait of notorious militarist Ikki Kita, whose 1936 attempt at staging a coup against the Japanese government would later serve as inspiration to the similarly controversial nationalist writer Yukio Mishima some years later.
A Promise
Wednesday, December 6 at 8:45 p.m. – Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
Friday, December 8 at 9:00 p.m. – Japan Society
Yoshida came out of his feature filmmaking retirement with this typically idiosyncratic meditation on what was, at the time, a taboo topic: euthanasia.
Farewell to the Summer Light
Thursday, December 7 at 6:30 p.m.
A fascinating transitional film for Yoshida, Farewell to the Summer Light finds the restless iconoclast heading to Europe to tell the tale of an on-again-off-again romance between Naoko, a married expat who specializes in import-export (Mariko Okada), and Makoto (Tadashi Yokouchi), a Japanese scholar who is searching for a cathedral that served as the architectural inspiration for a church built in Nagasaki by Portuguese missionaries.
Confessions Among Actresses
Thursday, December 7 at 8:45 p.m.
Something like Yoshida’s response to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Confessions Among Actresses finds Yoshida teaming up with three prominent Japanese actresses—Mariko Okada, Ruriko Asaoka, and Ineko Arima, each renowned for playing eminently modern women who have been wronged by the men around them—to craft a fragmentary, perpetually shapeshifting work on the relationship between performance and trauma.
A Story Written with Water
Friday, December 8 at 6:00 p.m.
Japan Society – 333 E. 47th Street
Bearing a title inspired by John Keats’s epitaph and taken from the Yōjirō Ishizaka novel it adapts, Yoshida’s first independent film is a startling affair, depicting the unbreakable love of mother and child.
For full descriptions of the films and to learn more about Kijū Yoshida, please visit Film at Lincoln Center’s website.
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METROGRAPH HOSTS SAKAMOTO RETROSPECTIVE
Ryuichi Sakamoto: A Celebration
Friday, May 5 through Thursday, May 18
Metrograph – 7 Ludlow Street (between Canal and Hester Streets)
Admission: $17
Metrograph, the iconic New York City cinema, presents a film celebration of the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of the most innovative and influential composers of the 20th century. The retrospective, which runs from May 5 through May 18, is a fitting tribute to a true iconoclast who helped shape the sounds of modern music and film.
Sakamoto first gained recognition as a founding member of the Japanese electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 1970s. He later went on to establish a successful solo career, producing a wide variety of music that blended elements of classical, rock, and electronic styles. His groundbreaking work on film scores, which began with his collaboration with director Nagisa Oshima on the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, in which he also starred opposite David Bowie and Takeshi Kitano, earned him worldwide acclaim.
The Metrograph retrospective features a selection of Sakamoto's most memorable film scores, including his collaborations with legendary filmmakers such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Pedro Almodóvar, Jun Ichikawa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu. In addition to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, screenings include The Last Emperor, for which Sakamoto won an Academy Award for Best Original Score; the experimental biopic Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis; and The Revenant, which marked Sakamoto’s return to film composition after throat cancer treatments.
On Sunday, May 14, Metrograph is hosting a special Q&A session with and writer Sadie Rebecca Starnes and Sakamoto's long-time collaborator, filmmaker Stephen Nomura Schible, who directed the 2017 documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda. The documentary, which explores Sakamoto's life and career, features interviews with the composer and his collaborators, and provides a fascinating insight into his creative process.
Don't miss your chance to celebrate the life and work of Ryuichi Sakamoto at Metrograph. For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit Metorgraph’s website.
Portrait © 2015 Wing Shya
Select Films
The Revenant
Saturday, May 6 at 1:00 p.m.
Wednesday, May 10 at 4:00 p.m.
Dir. Alejandro Iñárritu
2015 | 156 min.
Electronic experimentalist Sakamoto may have seemed an unusual choice to score a Western set on the 1820s frontier, but Iñárritu’s choice to have him do so paid off dividends. Triumphantly returning to film composition after treatment for throat cancer, Sakamoto, in collaboration with Alva Noto and Bryce Dessner of The National, created a grandly glacial soundscape to accompany Leonardo DiCaprio’s gravely wounded fur trapper Hugh Glass on his agonizing, hallucinatory mission of vengeance, towards a climactic confrontation with rival Tom Hardy that unleashes a terrible, glorious burst of aural violence.
The Last Emperor
Saturday, May 6 at 9:00 p.m.
Sunday, May 7 at 1:15 p.m.
Tuesday, May 9 at 6:15 p.m.
Thursday, May 11 at 4:00 p.m.
Wednesday, May 17 at 3:45 p.m.
Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci
1987 | 163 min.
Sakamoto, his work featured alongside that of David Byrne and Cong Su, composed nine of the 15 original pieces on the soundtrack of Bertolucci’s film, a dazzlingly lavish, non-linear biopic on the decadent early life, love, and ignoble exile of Pu Yi (John Lone), China’s last ruling emperor, much of it shot on location in Beijing’s Forbidden City. A meeting between traditional Chinese instrumentation and contemporary avant-garde sensibilities, Sakamoto, Byrne, and Su’s soundtrack would win Best Original Score at the 60th Academy Awards.
Tony Takitani
Friday, May 5 at 4:45 p.m.
Saturday, May 6 at 4:10 p.m. and 7:15 p.m.
Sunday, May 7 at 1:00 p.m. and 5:20 p.m.
Monday, May 8 at 9:15 p.m.
Tuesday, May 9 at 7:15 p.m.
Wednesday, May 10 at 9:30 p.m.
Thursday, May 11 at 7:15 p.m.
Dir. Jun Ichikawa
2004 | 75 min.
Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, Ichikawa’s graceful, coolly elegant film tells the story—with the help of a drily detached third-person narrator—of the lonesome existence and sudden romantic awakening of its title character (Issey Ogata), who finds happiness in married life after years of isolation, with his only complaint that his lovely wife, Eiko (Rie Miyazawa), has a passion for designer clothes that threatens to drive a wedge between them . . .
A sublimely sensitive work of sly social commentary, newly restored, with Ryuichi Sakamoto’s delicate score adding subtle emotional shading.
Ryuichi Sakamoto in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Friday, May 12 at 4:30 p.m.
Saturday, May 13 at 12:30 p.m.
Thursday, May 18 at 6:45 p.m.
Dir. Nagisa Ōshima
1983 | 123 min.
Sakamoto’s first film score was for Ōshima’s taut World War II-set drama in which the musician also starred as Captain Yonoi, the bushido code-obsessed commandant of a Japanese POW camp in occupied Java who enters a war of wills with unbreakable South African internee David Bowie, a conflict fraught with repressed, forbidden lust. In addition to proving himself a commanding, focused screen actor, Sakamoto delivered a plaintive, haunting score of delicate synths expressing the characters’ unspoken desires, its glass harp-sampling title track becoming a minor radio hit when matched with lyrics by David Sylvian and released as “Forbidden Colours.”
Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis
Friday, May 12 at 6:30 p.m.
Sunday, May 14 at 9:15 p.m.
Wednesday, May 17 at 9:00 p.m.
Dir. John Maybury
1998 | 87 min.
Derek Jacobi stars as Francis Bacon in John Maybury’s experimental biopic of the revolutionary painter, inspired by the authorized biography The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon and employing distorted visuals that approximate the tormented grotesquerie of the subject’s canvases, which focuses on Bacon’s tumultuous relationship with his penny-ante East End hoodlum muse George Dyer (a pre-Bond Daniel Craig, in his breakthrough role). Sakamoto’s drone and noise-heavy score adds immeasurably to the overall sense of disgust and disorientation in a film that endeavors not just to recap the facts of Bacon’s life, but to filter them through his anguished vision.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA
Sunday, May 14 at 6:50 p.m.
Wednesday, May 17 at 6:45 p.m.
Thursday, May 18 at 9:20 p.m.
Dir. Stephen Nomura Schible
2017 | 100 min.
A precious glimpse into the creative process of the late synth-pop star, film composer, and activist Ryuichi Sakamoto, Stephen Nomura Schible’s deeply affecting film picks up with its introspective subject as he returns to music-making after having been diagnosed with cancer, channeling his new awareness of his mortality into his latest work.
Q&A with director Stephen Nomura Schible and writer Sadie Rebecca Starnes on Sunday, May 14th