Kiyoshi Kurosawa: An American Cinematheque Retrospective

ABOUT THE SERIES:

The American Cinematheque is thrilled to welcome legendary Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa to Los Angeles for a 7-film retrospective, kicking off during this year’s Beyond Fest with his newest films SERPENT’S PATH, CLOUD and CHIME.

These films that resemble the unsettling nature of his earlier work, evident in such films as PULSE, indicate Kurosawa’s return to the realms of suspense and dread with CLOUD, a mysterious foray into the unnerving depths of communication in a modern, alienated world; CHIME, a short-form film that exhibits the filmmaker’s mastery of suspense and terror; and SERPENT’S PATH, a French language remake of his violent 1998 revenge story of the same name.

Kurosawa’s oeuvre is not simply marked by dark and bloody stories, but by the philosophies observable within them that comment on the unavoidable presence of evil in our world. The overwhelming sense of existential dread surrounding his masterpiece CURE sheds a blinding light on philosophical questions that arise when faced with an absurdist embodiment of evil, regarding the “self,” free will, and the responsibility (or impossibility) correlated with the social contracts that bind us to the communities we exist in. Similarly, in RETRIBUTION themes of identity and causality are centered within the narrative, leaving us speechless and stiff as we voluntarily watch a series of murders plague a helpless community, with no logical refuge in moral reasoning or likelihood of aversion. The psychological burden of facing an unstoppable antagonist, an invisible agent of evil, weighs heavily on many of Kurosawa’s unlucky protagonists, as it does on detective inspector Takakura, in CREEPY. When an attempt is made on his life for no logical reason, he dedicates his life to understanding the criminal mind, in hopes of making sense of such brutality.

Although Kurosawa’s horror films and thrillers are certainly monumental and offer an unparalleled vision of evil, his more reserved dramas are just as devastating and intricately designed. Also playing as a part of this retrospective is perhaps his most salient film of this kind, TOKYO SONATA, in which the filmmaker presents his submission to the long and rich history of Japanese home dramas, detailing the collapse of the nuclear family caused by social circumstances outside of their control.