Katsu Kanai
Directing
Biography
Katsu Kanai (金井 勝, Kanai Katsu, born 9 July 1936) is a Japanese experimental and avant-garde film director. The Harvard Film Archive has called him "one of the most vital and inventive filmmakers in the history of Japanese underground film". Born the son of a farmer in Kanagawa Prefecture, Kanai graduated from the College of Art of Nihon University before finding work at Daiei Film. He later became a freelance cinematographer and founded Kanai Productions in 1968. His first film, The Deserted Archipelago (1969, aka The Desert Island) won the grand prix at the Nyon International Documentary Film Festival. His second film, Good-Bye (1971), was the "first post-war, post-liberation Japanese feature to be filmed in Korea," and according to the film scholar Oliver Dew, illustrated "how a surreal, decided non-representational approach could block the determinations of cultural essentialism". His 2003 work, Super Documentary: The Avant-Garde Senjutsu, was awarded the FIPRESCI award at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Kanai has been the subject of retrospectives at Oberhausen, the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival, and the Harvard Film Archive.
Known For
A young man kills his bride on the day of his marriage and goes insane. He wakes up in an asylum with no memory, left in the hands of two mysterious doctors who relate his condition with his biological identity.
Dogra Magra
A young man reaches adolescence and escapes the nunnery where he survived a tortured upbringing; the world outside suddenly seems even more frightening than before.
The Deserted Archipelago
Eri Manaka lives alone in the big city. She writes a romantic novel on impulse and is startled when it gets rave reviews and makes her a literary celebrity. But doubts soon kick in, and Eri begins work on an anti-romantic sequel, in which her heroine Rie goes through the torments of the damned.
Body Drop Asphalt
An aphasic young boy living in South Korea meets, on one of his regular paths, a “Koguryo Beauty” who shows him how to trace his heritage.
Good-Bye
A five-part documentary chronicling Toshio Matsumoto, the legendary filmmaker known as a pioneer of experimental cinema in Japan and also active as a film theorist, who exerted a profound influence on innovative film expression from the 1950s onward. Directed by filmmaker and critic Takefumi Tsutsui—himself both a filmmaker and critic like Matsumoto—the project was filmed over the course of ten years. Interweaving excerpts from Matsumoto’s works with an extensive series of interviews with collaborators and critics, the documentary retraces, through the figure of Matsumoto, the tumultuous decades from the 1950s to the 2000s across five parts, totaling 700 minutes.
Discovery of Image – The Era of Toshio Matsumoto
The Stormy Times is a collection of three short films created as a series of visual poems (Dream Running, Grasshopper’s One-Game Match, andWe Can Hear Joe’s Poem). Katsu Kanai screened this films together, along with extra documentary footage, as a memorial to his friend Jônouchi Motoharu.
The Stormy Times
A popular poet, Goku, becomes depressed when his editor jokingly suggests that he is a sell-out.
The Kingdom
It’s said that people die twice. The first death is a physical one and the second, true death comes when there is no one to remember that person.
Holy Theater
A unique film in which an elderly man creates miracles in his daily life by playing the leading role himself. The film depicts the process of creating a mysterious world that transcends reality through the act of filming and leads to a surrealistic conclusion.