| Kon Ichikawa | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 20, 1915 Ise, Mie Prefecture |
| Died | February 13, 2008 (aged 92) Tokyo, Japan |
| Occupation | Film director |
Kon Ichikawa (市川 崑 Ichikawa Kon, November 20, 1915 – February 13, 2008) was a Japanese film director.
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Ichikawa was born in Ise, Mie Prefecture. In the 1930s Ichikawa attended a technical school in Osaka. Upon graduation, in 1933, he found a job with a local rental film studio, J.O. Studio, in their animation department. Decades later, he told the American writer on Japanese film Donald Richie, "I'm still a cartoonist and I think that the greatest influence on my films (besides Chaplin, particularly The Gold Rush) is probably Disney."[1]
Eventually he was moved to the feature film department as an assistant director when the company became a complete production company, working under such luminaries as Yutaka Abe and Nobuo Aoyagi.
In the early 1940s J.O. Studios merged P.C.L. and Toho Film Distribution to form the Toho Film Company. Ichikawa moved to Tokyo. His first film was a puppet play short, A Girl at Dojo Temple (Musume Dojoji 1946), which was confiscated by the interim U.S. Occupation authorities under the pretense that it was too "feudal", though some sources suggest the script had not been approved by the occupying authorities. Thought lost for many years, it is now archived at the Cinémathèque Française.
It was at Toho that he met Natto Wada. Wada was a translator for Toho. They agreed to marry sometime after Ichikawa completed his first film as director. Natto Wada's original name was Yumiko Mogi (born 13 September 1920 in Himeji, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan); the couple both had failed marriages behind them. She graduated with a degree in English Literature from Tokyo Woman's Christian University. She married Kon Ichikawa on April 10, 1948, and died on February 18, 1983 of breast cancer.[2] During the rest of her life she wrote the scripts of many of her husband's films.
It was after Ichikawa's marriage to Wada that the two began collaborating, first on Design of a Human Being (Ningen moyo) and Endless Passion (Hateshinaki jonetsu) in 1949. The period 1950–1965 is often referred to as Ichikawa's Natto Wada period. It's the period that contains the majority of his most highly respected works, and continued through to 1965 with Tokyo Olympiad. She wrote 34 screenplays during that period, most of which were adaptations. Wada had a talent for adapting other sources to the screen and that's where most of their partnership concentrated.
He gained western recognition during the 1950s and 1960s with a number of bleak films, two anti-war films with The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, Alone on the Pacific (Taiheiyo hitori-botchi) and the technically formidable period-piece An Actor's Revenge (Yukinojo henge) about a kabuki actor.
Of his many literary adaptations, works including Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's The Key (Kagi), Natsume Sōseki's The Heart (Kokoro) and I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru), in which a teacher's cat critiques the foibles of the humans surrounding him, and Yukio Mishima's Conflagration (Enjo), in which a priest burns down his temple to save it from spiritual pollution, were brought to the screen.
After Tokyo Olympiad, Wada retired from screenwriting and it marked a significant change in Ichikawa's films from that point onward. Concerning her retirement, he spoke, "She doesn't like the new film grammar, the method of presentation of the material; she says there's no heart in it anymore, that people no longer take human love seriously."[3]
Of the change Wada's departure marked, it is hard to extricate her from his work. The two worked very closely and shared many ideals. Whereas Ichikawa can be said to be responsible for much of the black wit in his films (that trend certainly continued beyond Wada's departure), she also had a sardonic side, as evidenced in many of her essays. Whereas people will attribute much of the humanity of his earlier films to Wada, humanity is still a major theme in the post-Wada films. About the only thing critics can agree on is that post-Wada Ichikawa films had a definite lesser quality to them (with a few notable exceptions).
Ichikawa died of pneumonia on February 13, 2008 in a Tokyo hospital. He was 92 years old.[4]
The Magic Hour marked Ichikawa's last appearance and was dedicated to the memory of him. (This message can be seen in the end of this film.) In this film, movie director played by Ichikawa is shooting Kuroi Hyaku-ichi-nin no Onna, a parody of Kuroi Ju-nin no Onna.
Ichikawa's films are marked with a certain darkness and bleakness, punctuated with sparks of humanity.
It can be said that his main trait is technical expertise, irony, detachment and a drive for realism married with a complete spectrum of genres. Some critics class him with Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu as one of the masters of Japanese cinema.
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