Shohei Imamura: The Free Thinker

Portuguese filmmaker Paulo Rocha had lived in Japan a number of years, spoke the language and had even made a film there (the beautiful The Island of Love); he set out to make his film portrait of Shohei Imamura in the hope of revealing a “grotesque anarchist,” the bold iconoclast whose films had seemed so shocking in the Sixties and Seventies. Yet Rocha arrives to discover a much tamer man than he imagined, well-spoken with a professorial air. Only gradually does the essential Imamura begin to emerge. (60m)

Screening with:
One Day in the Life of Andreï Arsenevitch / Un journée d’Andreï Arsenevitch
Chris Marker | 2000 | France | 55m

In 1995, Labarthe gave an interview in which he expressed his great regret that the series had not yet made a film about Andreï Tarkovsky; a short time later, Chris Marker contacted him and revealed that he had footage he had never shown of Tarkovsky in the months between finishing The Sacrifice and his death. With liberal use of clips from Tarkovsky’s films, Marker creates a brilliant study of Tarkovsky’s working methods as well as a monument to one of the great visionaries of the cinema.

Image courtesy of OPERA/RAI-2/SOVIN / THE KOBAL COLLECTION