We're excited to unveil a never-before-seen 2015 talk between Professor Aaron Gerow and director Nobuhiko Obayashi, recorded at Japan Society during Japan Society's Obayashi retrospective. Please enjoy!
We're thrilled to unveil our brand-new trailer for Obayashi '80s! Braiding visually expressive fantasias with striking formal experimentation and wildly ingenious chroma-key composites, Nobuhiko Obayashi's youth symphonies attune themselves to the extraordinary nature of ordinary adolescence.
『ラブ&ポップ』 Rabu & Poppu
Japan Society is pleased to announce Obayashi '80s: The Onomichi Trilogy & Kadokawa Years, running February 7-14, 2025. The teenage symphonies of Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938-2020) are wound in a melancholy nostalgia for a period indelibly lost to time, neatly occupying the inexpressible gap between adolescence and adulthood. Woven through visually expressive fantasias with striking formal experimentation and pop-art boldness, Obayashi’s idiosyncratic cinematic language would produce some of Japan’s most beloved seishun eiga (youth films) throughout the 1980s, captivating generations of filmgoers…
Coinciding with Japan Society’s Performing Arts’ offering of a theater play by Shuji Terayama (1935-1983) in January 2025, Japan Society Film is pleased to announce a rare screening of Terayama’s celebrated 1974 ATG feature Pastoral: To Die in the Country (A.K.A. Pastoral Hide and Seek) on January 24th, presented on an imported 35mm print. The representative cinematic work of multi-hyphenate Shuji Terayama, the preeminent leader of the postwar Japanese Angura (underground) theater movement and founder of troupe Tenjo Sajiki, Pastoral…
Foreign Exchange: Anime Inspirations & Visionaries with LeSean Thomas
April 25 - May 27, 1977
Jan. 19 - March 18, 1977
Nov. 3, 1976 - Jan. 14, 1977
May 14 - 31, 1975 Co-presented with Film Society of Lincoln Center Gentle humor, classic love and daring adventure mark…
Feb. 13 - May 21, 1976
Dec. 12, 1975 - Feb. 6, 1976
Doc Films 6 films
Museum of the Moving Image 16 films
Museum of the Moving Image 37 films
Film Forum 24 films
Tokyo International Film Festival 33 films
35mm Presentation. Opening with a flurry of white shirts as bustling office workers chatter and congregate at train and bus routes for their morning commute, Ozu’s follow-up to Tokyo Story explores a young salaryman’s disillusionment with adulthood in postwar Tokyo. Bored with his passionless marriage and working a monotonous office job, salaryman Shoji (Ryo Ikebe) becomes involved with excitable co-worker “Goldfish” (Keiko Kishi), nicknamed for her big eyes, setting in motion a brief yet consequential affair. Targeting a younger audience,…
35mm Presentation. After a three-year stint in the penitentiary, rough-hewn yakuza Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) returns to the dimly lit gambling dens of postwar Tokyo in Masahiro Shinoda’s 1964 nuberu bagu (new wave) breakthrough. Within the claustrophobic halls of shuffling hanafudu cards and a sweaty haze of fanning bodies and irezumi-clad gamblers, Muraki notices the enigmatic angel-faced Saeko (Mariko Kaga), a thrillseeker on a losing streak who bets large sums with reckless abandon. Plagued by a pathological desire to “feel alive”—needing…
Following a painful breakup, macho biker Koh (Riki Takeuchi) skips town and hits the road on his beloved Kawasaki W3 650. On his countryside excursion, he encounters the free-spirited Miyo (Kiwako Harada, older sister of Obayashi favorite Tomoyo Harada) who quickly takes interest in both the leather-clad Koh and his motorbike. Koh and Miyo fall in love even as Miyo’s prodigious biking talent and thrill-seeking tendencies heighten Koh’s fear that she may push it all too far. A nostalgia-filled reminiscence,…
Based on Katsura Morimura’s 1966 best-selling travelogue, Obayashi’s paradise-laden coming-of-age tale is an island retreat to the white sands of New Caledonia. Fulfilling her late father’s (YMO’s Yukihiro Takahashi) dream to take her to “the island closest to heaven,” bookish teen Mari (Tomoyo Harada) ventures solo to the archipelago’s indigo waters in search of this mythic locale. Taking in the island’s sites, Mari journeys off the beaten path, befriending a host of friendly locals in the process, from islander Taro…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
(Criterion Challenge 2025 - 13/52 - "1950's" ... and lucked out seeing this at a 35mm screening at the NY Japan Society)
"Anyway, there's not much fun in the world right now. Nobody's completely happy."
Early Spring is a potent example in cinema where the script is one thing that works well enough and the execution of that material on set is another. This starts off seeming like this story could be Yasijiro Ozu's Revolutionary Road, about a suit and…
Some moron next to me said the movie was “terribly edited” and I’ve never been so astonished at a real person’s terrible opinion in my life.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
0328 @ Japan Society
exquisitely framed 4:3 wood-print; suburban Tokyo idyll; the two main components of life are 1) 對生活的嗟嘆 and 2) the following life that the former has anticipated; recurring and resonating complaints/signs prophesied life (there is so much "When I was at your age it was the same" "What is going to happen next is..."); the anticipated nature of life renders everyday conversations as something song-like instead of functional. The film is about tacit, open infidelity in modernized…
Seen at Japan Society NYC 3/28/25.
This is a long movie, Ozu’s longest, and the plot moves very slowly. And yet, every scene feels justified, either because it adds color and texture or because it actually moves the plot forward.
We follow our hero Sugiyama through his love affair and into the marital strife that ensues, with the lingering question of whether the relationship with his wife can be repaired. We get the sense that things have been strained ever…
Since its inception in the early 1970s, Japan Society Film has served as a nationally renowned resource for the study of Japanese cinema, pioneering the appreciation and understanding of Japan’s film culture at a time when international recognition of the country’s cinema was still nascent. While Japan Society’s repertory film programming gained new momentum and institutional support in the ’70s as a full-fledged program, the Society has actively introduced Japanese cinema to New York audiences since its first film screening in 1922, presenting works by masters such as Shohei Imamura, Seijun Suzuki, and Hiroshi Teshigahara upon their first release, and curating groundbreaking retrospectives on now canonical figures such as Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. A commitment to the year-round exhibition of classic Japanese cinema, John and Miyoko Davey Classics continues this crucial work with the aim to uphold and rediscover essential works of Japanese film, from the silent era and golden age to the nuberu bagu (new wave) and beyond.