For Fans of Kon Ichikawa

The Eye That Would Not Look Away

Kon Ichikawa made films that refuse to be comfortable. From the early 1950s through the following decades, he was one of postwar Japanese cinema's most formally rigorous directors, but what set him apart was not technique alone. It was the particular quality of his attention: a cool, sometimes merciless observation of the body under duress, the mind unraveling under ideology or grief, the ways people lie to themselves about what they have seen or done.

His most celebrated work sits in the long shadow of war. The Burmese Harp (1956) and Fires on the Plain (1959) are among the most searching anti-war films ever made, but they work nothing like propaganda. They are closer to horror, studying the collapse of the human animal under sustained violence, asking what is left when duty and survival separate entirely. Fires on the Plain in particular is almost unwatchably bleak, following a solitary soldier through a landscape that has consumed every ordinary meaning of existence. It does not argue against war. It simply shows.

Beyond war, Ichikawa was a remarkable adapter of literary material. His The Key (1959) and An Actor's Revenge (1963) show the range: the former a psychologically dense study of obsession and desire in a Tanizaki adaptation, the latter a visually extravagant kabuki-influenced formal experiment that doubles as a meditation on performance and revenge. He could be darkly comic, almost absurdist in places. He could also be immaculately lyrical, as in Tokyo Olympiad (1965), his documentary record of the 1964 Summer Games, which treats athletes as something between sculpture and mortality made visible.

If you love Ichikawa, you love films that do not explain what they mean. You love images that do the work without commentary, literary intelligence applied to purely cinematic problems, and the particular kind of humanism that refuses sentimentality and still, somehow, opens into grief.