ICJS Event: Japanese Cinema Eclectics—Curated by Donald Richie

A Multi-part Series Devoted to Unexplored Tangents of the Japanese Film

Film: Avalon

About the Film: Avalon

Directed by Oshii Mamoru, written by Ito Kazunori 2001, 106mins.
A road not taken. Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) Mamoru's brilliant and beautiful live-action anime about the perils of alternate reality games. Set in ruined Europe, it shows us our Polish heroine's finding a hidden level in the Game. Involving and involved, the film won foreign prizes but no imitators - the experiment was never repeated.

About the "Japanese Cinema Eclectics"

This monthly series will feature relatively unknown but important Japanese avant garde films selected by Donald Richie, the former Curator of Film at the New York Museum of Modern Art in New York (1969-1973), and a renowned authority on Japanese film.

Donald Richie came to Japan in 1947 as feature writer for the Pacific Stars and Stripes. After the end of the Occupation, he became film critic for The Japan Times and still continues with that paper as Arts Critic. During the following years he wrote a number of books, including The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1965); Ozu (1974), and One Hundred Years of Japanese Film (2002). In addition, he has written over forty books about the country in which he has been resident for nearly sixty years. These include: The Inland Sea (1971), Japanese Portraits (1991), and his latest work, The Japan Journals: 1947-2004. From 1968 to 1973 he was Curator of Film at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Named by TIME magazine," the dean of Japan's arts critics," he is regarded as the preeminent authority on Japanese film. Susan Sontag has said of him "Donald Richie writes about Japan with an unrivaled range, acuity, and wit."