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Tokyo Olympiad

Tôkyô orimpikku

Japan

1965

170 Min
Color
2.35:1
Japanese
  • Currently 4.2/5 Stars.
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DIR Kon Ichikawa

PROD Suketaru Taguchi

DP Kazuo Miyagawa, Shigeo Murata, Shigeichi Nagano, Kenji Nakamura, Tadashi Tanaka

ED Tatsuji Nakashizu

MUSIC Toshirô Mayuzumi

SOUND Ichirô Hoshi

Cannes (Out of competition)

Synopsis

A spectacle of magnificent proportions, Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad ranks among the greatest documents of sport ever committed to film. Utilizing glorious widescreen cinematography, Ichikawa examines the beauty and rich drama on display at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo, creating a catalogue of extraordinary observations that range from the expansive to the intimate. The glory, despair, passion, and suffering of Olympic competition are rendered with lyricism and technical mastery, culminating in an inspiring testament to the beauty of the human body and the strength of the human spirit. —The Criterion Collection

Director

Original

Kon Ichikawa

Kon Ichikawa was considered one of the masters of the immediate postwar generation of Japanese filmmakers, a generation often overshadowed by the titanic presence of Akira Kurosawa. Unlike Kurosawa, Ichikawa imbued his films with a sense of irony that swings from the sardonic to the compassionate. Born in 1915 in southern Mie Prefecture, Ichikawa grew up a sickly child and spent much of his childhood drawing. Like Kurosawa, he aspired to be a painter. He also grew to be an enthusiastic movie fan, seeing most of the early samurai epics by Daisuke Ito and Masahiro Makino while marveling at Charles Chaplin films. Yet it was Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies series that proved to be a revelation for Ichikawa, as he realized that animation could combine his passions for art and for movies. After finishing technical school in Osaka in the 1930s, he got a job at the animation department of J.O. studios just as it was expanding from a rental film house to a full-fledged production company. As… read more

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Displaying 4 of 7 wall posts.

Jeremy Ashlyn

18Mar12

This one really is something.

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ryOtoha

28Sep11

Anybody could assumed that he will eventually fast forward through some of it. But it's so spectacular, well executed, well edited, it's just mesmerizing.

Jeremy Ashlyn likes this

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Patrick

22May11

The Best Movie Ever.

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gtwiggs

18Mar11

I would watch it just for the documentary of the 1964 Olympics; that it is directed by Ichikawa, of Fires on the Plain, is fantastic.

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