Happy Birthday, Kon Ichikawa! Born today in 1915 as Giichi Ichikawa, this Japanese film director introduced sophisticated Western-style comedy to Japan in the 1950s. He later became concerned with more serious subjects such as antiwar sentiment.
Ichikawa grew up a sickly child and spent much of his childhood drawing, aspiring to be a painter like Akira Kurosawa.
As a child, Ichikawa loved drawing and his ambition was to become an artist. He also loved films and was a fan of "chambara" or samurai films.
Ichikawa's father died when he was four years old, and the family kimono shop went bankrupt, so he went to live with his sister.
He was given the name "Kon" by an uncle who thought the characters in the kanji 崑 signified good luck, because the two halves of the Chinese character look the same when it is split in half vertically.
Ichikawa had been influenced by artists as diverse as Walt Disney and French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author Jean Renoir.
Ichikawa's influence from an earlier career as a cartoonist is apparent in his skillful use of the widescreen, and in the strong, angular patterns seen in many of his compositions.
An enthusiastic movie fan, Ichikawa saw most of the early samurai epics by Japanese film director and screenwriter Daisuke Itō and Japanese film director Masahiro Makino. This was also while marveling at Charlie Chaplin films.
Yet it was in seeing Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies series as a teenager that proved to be a revelation for Ichikawa. Fascinated, he realized that animation could combine his passions for art and for film.
Decades later, he told the American-born writer on Japanese film Donald Richie, "I'm still a cartoonist and I think that the greatest influence on my films (besides Chaplin, particularly The Gold Rush) is probably Disney."
Ichikawa had attended a technical school in Osaka. Upon graduation, in 1933, he found a job with a local rental film studio, J.O. Studio in their animation department.
He later moved to the feature film department as an assistant director when the company closed its animation department, working under such luminaries as Japanese film director and actor Yutaka Abe and Japanese film director and film producer Nobuo Aoyagi.
In 1948, Ichikawa married Japanese script writer and film columnist Natto Wada. The two would remain married until Wada's death on February 18, 1983 at 62. They had two children together.
In the late 1950s, Ichikawa directed the first film of which he is best known.
This was the 1956 Japanese black and white war/drama film 'Biruma no tategoto' ('The Burmese Harp', also known as 'Harp of Burma').
It is based on Japanese writer, literary critic and scholar of German literature, active in Shōwa period Japan Michio Takeyama's 1946 children's novel of the same name. For the film, Wada wrote the screenplay.
When an Imperial Japanese Army surrenders to British forces in Burma in 1943, the platoon's harp player, Mizushima (Shôji Yasui), is selected from the prisoners of war to deliver a request for surrender to a Japanese regiment holed up on a mountain.
However, Mizushima fails to convince the soldiers to accept defeat, and a last stand commences.
Traumatized by the bloodshed of his fellow countrymen, Mizushima disguises himself as a Buddhist monk and begins a journey toward peace of mind amid the chaos.
Magnificently shot in hushed black and white by Japanese cinematographer Minoru Yokoyama, 'The Burmese Harp' is an eloquent meditation on beauty coexisting with death.
Today, it remains one of Japanese cinema’s most overwhelming antiwar statements, both tender and brutal in its grappling with Japan’s wartime legacy.
The following year, 'The Burmese Harp' received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. However, it didn't win. This occurred at the 29th Academy Awards in late March 1957.
Six years later, Ichikawa directed the second film of which he is best known.
This was the 1963 Japanese Eastmancolor drama film 'Yukinojō Henge' ('An Actor's Revenge', also known as 'Revenge of a Kabuki Actor'). For the film, Wada wrote the screenplay.
Set in the cloistered world of nineteenth-century kabuki theater, the film tells of a Kabuki actor of whom exacts a bloody revenge after he encounters the wealthy businessman who destroyed his family.
In the film, Ichikawa takes the conventions of melodrama and turns them on their head, bringing the hero’s fractured psyche to life in boldly experimental widescreen compositions infused with kaleidoscopic color, pop-art influences, and meticulous choreography.
Anchored by a magnificently androgynous performance by Kazuo Hasegawa, reprising a role he had played on-screen three decades earlier, 'An Actor's Revenge' is an eye-popping examination of how the illusions of art intersect with life.
'An Actor's Revenge' is a remake of the 1935 film of the same title (distributed in English-speaking countries as 'The Revenge of Yukinojō'), which also starred Japanese film and stage actor Kazuo Hasegawa. The 1963 remake was Hasegawa's 300th role as a film actor.
Wada's screenplay had been adapted by Japanese film director and screenwriter Daisuke Itō and Japanese actor and film director Teinosuke Kinugasa from a newspaper serial.
This had been originally written by Japanese writer Otokichi Mikami, of which was used for the 1935 version.
Two years after the release of 'An Actor's Revenge', Ichikawa co-wrote (along with Wada) and directed the third and final film of which he is best known.
This was the 1965 Japanese documentary/sport film 'Tōkyō Orinpikku' ('Tokyo Olympiad').
With a runtime of almost three hours, this impressionistic portrait of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics pays as much attention to the crowds and workers as it does to the actual competitive events.
Some of the highlights of the film include an epic pole-vaulting match between West Germany and America, and the final marathon race through Tokyo's streets.
Two athletes are highlighted: legendary Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila, who receives his second gold medal, and runner Ahamed Isa from Chad, representing a country younger than he is.
From opening to closing ceremonies. Sometimes he focuses on spectators, as athletes pass in a blur; sometimes he isolates a competitor; other times, it's a closeup of muscles as a hammer is thrown or a barbell lifted; or, we watch a race from start to finish.
We see come-from-behind wins in the women's eight hundred and the men's ten thousand meters.
We then follow an athlete from Chad from arrival to meals, training, competition, and loss.
Throughout, the film celebrates the nobility of athletes pushing themselves to the limit, regardless of victory.
Supervising a vast team of technicians using scores of cameras, Ichikawa captured the global event in glorious widescreen images.
This was along with his one hundred and sixty-four cameramen and the distillation of seventy hours of CinemaScope film footage.
For the epic, Ichikawa used cutting-edge telephoto lenses and exquisite slow motion to create lyrical, idiosyncratic poetry from the athletic drama surging all around him.
Drawn equally to the psychology of losers and winners—including Bikila, who receives the film’s most exalted tribute—Ichikawa captures the triumph, passion, and suffering of competition with a singular humanistic vision, and in doing so effected a transformative influence on the art of documentary filmmaking.
Like Leni Riefenstahl's (‘Triumph of the Will’) 'Olympia: Parts 1 & 2', which documented the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Ichikawa's film was considered a cinematographic milestone in documentary filmmaking.
However, 'Tokyo Olympiad' keeps its focus far more on the atmosphere of the games and the human side of the athletes rather than concentrating on winning and the results.
Opening and ending with the rising and setting sun, the film is truly a spectacle of magnificent proportions and remarkably intimate. Today, 'Tokyo Olympiad' remains one of the greatest films ever made about sports.
The following year, 'Tokyo Olympiad' won a BAFTA Award for Best Documentary. This occurred at the 19th British Academy Film Awards in 1966.
In 1985, Ichikawa remade 'The Burmese Harp' in color with a new cast, and the remake was a major box office success, becoming the number one Japanese film on the domestic market in 1985 and the second largest Japanese box office hit up to that time.
Ichikawa is one of those names that pops up frequently in discussions of Japanese cinema, but his filmography is so vast that it’s difficult to know where to jump in.
The Japanese Movie Database lists him as directing just shy of a hundred titles over the course of seven decades, and he tackled a huge array of genres along the way.
Ichikawa is often seen as a key modernist figure, bridging the gap from the classical golden age of the 1950s to the more formally experimental 1960s.
Some of his films were hugely successful at the box office, but the lack of distinctive visual tropes or recurrent themes in his work has led to him being considered a solid helmsman rather than an auteur.
However, there’s no overt political comment or agenda that compares to contemporaries like Shōhei Imamura ('The Ballad of Narayama') or Nagisa Ōshima ('In the Realm of the Senses', 'Taboo').
And yet, looking more closely, you’ll be sure to notice his painterly eye for a strong image (he’d started his career as an illustrator).
There’s also the frequent dramatic focus on the psychology of the solitary individual who, by choice or by accident, is set apart from Japanese society.
At various points in his career, Ichikawa has shown that he is capable of appealing to a popular audience without compromising his artistry.
His features cover a wide spectrum of moods, from the comic to the overwhelmingly ironic and even the perverse.
Ichikawa is considered one of the masters of the immediate postwar generation of Japanese filmmakers -- a generation often overshadowed by the titanic presence of Kurosawa.
Like Kurosawa, Ichikawa frequently took secondary sources and made them his own. Also, like Kurosawa, he was an exacting perfectionist and master of the widescreen format.
Yet, unlike Kurosawa, Ichikawa imbued his films with a sense of irony that swings from the sardonic to the compassionate.
It can be said that his main trait is technical expertise, irony, detachment and a drive for realism married with a complete spectrum of genres.
While often referred to as a link between the Golden Age of Japanese cinema and the New Wave of the 1960s, Ichikawa has rarely been given his due as an innovator.
In 2001, Ichikawa received his first major North American retrospective in over three decades.
Seven years later, Ichikawa passed from pneumonia in Tokyo, Japan on February 13, 2008. He was 92.
A spokeswoman for the Toho Company had confirmed the cause, of which had released many of Ichikawa's more than eighty films and announced his death, according to The Associated Press.
In 2015, a small museum was opened in Shibuya on the site of Ichikawa's former home. This was The Kon Ichikawa Memorial Room, dedicated to him and his wife. The museum displays materials from Ichikawa's personal collection.
Some critics have classed Ichikawa as one of the four Japanese directors to be first acknowledged in the West as masters-the others being Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu.
Ichikawa's 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.
The stylistic and thematic experiments of Ichikawa are among the most daring and influential in postwar Japanese cinema, acknowledging the formidable influence of his scenarist, Wada, whose withdrawal from writing his scripts in the mid-1960s marked a turning point in her husband's career.
Many of Ichikawa's films are full of gallows humor, revolve around tenacity and madness (often synonymous).
But it was his apprenticeship in manga films and anime that shaped his approach to narrative structure and visual composition, of which tended to be graphically organized, asymmetrical, and dynamic in its articulation.
Ichikawa 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.")
Ichikawa was 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.
Ichikawa was versatile, uniquely non-conformist, and an experimental auteur of the last century. His films are marked with a certain darkness and bleakness, but punctuated with sparks of humanity.
Ichikawa had been active from 1936–2006.
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