Toshi Ichiyanagi

Originally commissioned to record urban redevelopment in Osaka’s Kamagasaki district, Hideo Arai transcends reportage to capture a haunting portrait of displacement during Japan’s economic miracle. With a dissonant score by experimental composers Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yuji Takahashi, the film juxtaposes the brutal reality of shantytown "barracks" against the state's modernization projects. Slum remains a visceral critique of social erasure and a vital, observational work of Japanese documentary film.

Two interwoven stories. The first is a biography of anarchist Sakae Osugi which follows his relationship with three women in the 1920s. The second centers around two 1960s students researching Osugi's theories.

A short documentary by Hiroshi Teshigahara about his father, the sculptor Sofu Teshigahara, preparing an exhibition.

A man wanders into a seemingly deserted town with his young son in search of work. But after a bit of bad luck, he joins the town's population of lost souls.

Writes Matsumoto, "I used the Erekutoro Karapurosesu (Electro Color Processor), which is mainly used in the field of medicine and engineering, to create moving image textures Metastasis, I was interested in layering images of a simple object and its electronically processed abstraction. The electronic abstract image is manipulated in a certain rhythm, depicting an organic process."

Shot on 16mm film, this experimental piece is inspired by a short story by Ango Sakaguchi about a doomed romance set against the backdrop of blooming cherry trees. Michishita dispenses with the lovers and retains only the cherry blossoms. Caught from every angle, they bloom and fall, communicating a sense of enrapturement with this local and eternal cycle. The music is by Toshi Ichiyanagi, a major figure in postwar Japanese music.

The entire human body is made of cells, and health is maintained through the continuous process of old cells making way for new cells. Bones are no exception. This film looks into how bones are made up of cells, how they are broken up and how they are reformed. What do the cells that are continuously engaged in bone formation and bone resorption do, and how is balance maintained within the body? Color 17 min. (1982) Sponsored by Teijin Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd. And Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (Astellas Pharma Inc.) Produced by Yone Production Inc.

In this intricately layered Japanese film, the nature of actresses and what they gain from acting is explored. The lives of three actresses are laid bare, and scenes from their lives are woven in and out of interviews with each of them. Each of them has experienced a traumatic event which contributes to their particular enjoyment of becoming someone else in dramatic roles.

Struggling with his true emotions, dreams, memories of the past and the reality Shizuo is about to marry, but is torn between his wife-to-be and the love to his mother.

Erotic thriller about a porn photographer who has to deal with a psychopath.

Rikiya Shoda is an engineer working for the Atomic Agency in Japan. One day, his wife Nanako returns home with a lost teenager called Ayu. A man, pretending to be the father, comes to get her back; Ayu keeps telling him that Rikiya and Nanako are her parents. Through this disruption, Rikiya suddenly starts remembering his youth as a revolutionary.

"In medical terminology, absence of genitalia in females is referred to as "gynatresia". In other words, an extreme defect that goes beyond a mere illness" Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive

Based on the novel of the same name by Yoshio Kataoka.

A Documentary on the Japanese baseball player Sadaharu Oh

A spontaneous romance blooms between Kawamura, a professor touring Europe, and Naoko, a married woman living in Paris, scarred by the Nagasaki atomic bombings. The two protagonists travel around Europe trying to find themselves.

There's more to picture than meets the eye in this journey into oriental metaphysical imagery. Starting (in a very Christian manner) with the Word, the film draws an explosion of visible forms, as if a sign of the shattering of shapes in the mundane world. But time is cyclical, of course, and what was once a multitude of sensible realities must eventually return to the Word and, finally, to sheer Color. (Sound of Eye)

A freestyle biopic of Ikki Kita, the ultranationalist intellectual whose ideas inspired the failed military coup in 1936.

Part documentary, part fiction this film revolves around the life of the haiku poet Seigetsu Inoue who wandered Ina Valley for about 30 years from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji era.

ĀTMAN is a visual tour-de-force based on the idea of the subject at the centre of the circle created by camera positions (480 such positions). Shooting frame-by-frame the filmmaker set up an increasingly rapid circular motion. ĀTMAN is an early Buddhist deity often connected with destruction; the Japanese aspect is stressed by the devil mask of Hangan, from the Noh, and by using both Noh music and the general principle of acceleration often associated with Noh drama.

Why Not is hypnotic, compulsive and claustrophobic. It is bathed in a cold, pervasive eroticism, which, oblique and displaced at first, finally becomes explicit in one of the most bizarre masturbation sequences ever filmed. For almost two hours, we observe a young, strikingly pretty girl, nude most of the time and alone in an apartment, engaged in a sonambulistic and sensuous attempt at coming to terms with herself.

For Deborah Hay’s SOLO, Larry Heilos designed the control systems for eight radio-controlled carts that moved around the Armory floor, which were then covered with wooden boxes to make platforms for dancers to stand or lie on. At the rear of the space, eight formally dressed performers operated the radio-control system to move the platforms into and around the space. Composer Jim Tenney acted as the “conductor” of the “orchestra”. Sixteen dancers entered the brightly lit space either walking or riding on a cart. They then walked in solo, duet, or trio formations or rode on the moving platforms, following Hay’s specific rules and choreography. The sound for the performance was David Tudor’s realization of Toshi Ichiyanagi’s work FUNAKAKUSHI. [Overview courtesy of Anthology Film Archives]

Cameraman Yonesaku Kobayashi (1905-2005) is a pioneer of scientific films of Japan. He and producer Sozo Okada made many scientific educational films, and in 60's - 70's, many avant-garde composers composed music for these films.

Jun has come to Tokyo from his family home, an island which resembles a ship. He works in a machine shop and is attempting to develop a career as a cartoonist in his spare time. When he travels around the town by subway, he has grown into the habit of groping female passengers in a sexual way. They never denounce him, and many seem to respond very favorably, moaning in apparent ecstasy. However, when his girlfriend sees him doing this, she denounces him to the police.

Cameraman Yonesaku Kobayashi (1905-2005) is a pioneer of scientific films of Japan. He and producer Sozo Okada made many scientific educational films, and in 60's - 70's, many avant-garde composers composed music for these films.

Documentary series about art. Yoshida's camera documents the history of painting and artistic expression with delicate intimacy.