JAPANESE HORROR, a 25-film festival of Japanese horror classics and rarities, many in 35mm prints imported from Japan, will run at Film Forum from Friday, March 1 through Thursday, March 14. The festival, which spans over 90 years of Japanese cinema, from the silent era to the early 21st century, includes work by Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Masaki Kobayashi, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kaneto Shindō, Ishirō Honda, Nobuhiko Obayashi, Takashi Miike, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakata, and other directors. The two-week festival is a co-presentation of The Japan Foundation.
A comprehensive and colorful survey of some of the kaidan (ghost and horror stories) and kaiju eiga (monster movies) that are synonymous with the genre, JAPANESE HORROR groups Teinosuke Kinugasa’s avant-garde silent masterwork A PAGE OF MADNESS (1926), Mizoguchi’s UGETSU (1953), Honda’s GODZILLA (1954) and MOTHRA (1961), Kurosawa’s THRONE OF BLOOD (1957), Kobayashi’s multi-part ghost story KWAIDAN (1964), Obayashi’s HAUSU (1977), and Masahiro Shinoda’s DEMON POND (1979) with more contemporary cult hits like Takashi Miike’s AUDITION (1999), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s CURE (1997) and PULSE (2001), and Hideo Nakata’s RINGU (1998).
Special events and introductions in the series include:
* Shindō’s ONIBABA introduced by Akinaru Rokkaku and Shun Inoue of The Japan Foundation, New York, on Friday, March 1 (opening night of festival) at 6:30 pm.
* Film Forum staffer Tristan Pollack, grandson of director Hiroshi Teshigahara (WOMAN IN THE DUNES, ANTONIO GAUDI), will introduce Teshigahara’s bizarre THE FACE OF ANOTHER, starring Tatsuya Nakadai (RAN, KAGEMUSHA) and Machiko Kyō (RASHOMON), on Saturday, March 2 at 4:20 pm.
* Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum Repertory Artistic Director, will compare director Ishirō Honda’s original Japanese version of GODZILLA, with its strong anti-nuclear bomb message, with the heavily edited, sanitized and Americanized “Raymond Burr version,” following the 6:40 show on Sunday, March 3.
Says Masaya Shimoyama, Director General of The Japan Foundation, New York, “We’re very excited and proud to be collaborating with Film Forum on the JAPANESE HORROR festival. From among the genre’s wide variety of vengeful ghosts, sadistic killers and rampaging monsters, we’ve chosen some of the best and most influential J-Horror titles, spanning from the mid-1920s to the early 2000s, including rare films from the Japan Foundation library in Tokyo. We invite fans to join us on this terrifying look back at some of the most deranged works by many of Japan’s most prominent directors.” |
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