Shiguéhiko Hasumi: Another History of the Movie in America and Japan

From 9 to 18 October, Japan Society in New York presents a special programme dedicated to film critic and theorist Shiguéhiko Hasumi, titled Another History of the Movie in America and Japan. The series celebrates Hasumi’s far-reaching influence on both Japanese and Western cinema, tracing his ideas on gesture, performance and cinematic space through a wide-ranging selection of films. The programme features works by Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse, Kenji Mizoguchi, Seijun Suzuki, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, shown alongside American films such as Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948) and Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004), illuminating the crosscurrents that have shaped Hasumi’s thinking on film.

“Since the 1960s, the revered critic and theorist Shiguéhiko Hasumi has yielded an extraordinary body of work extending far beyond his initial beginnings as a scholar of French literature. Once instrumental in introducing Foucault and Deleuze to Japan, Hasumi has lent his interdisciplinary approach to a wide breadth of cultural and literary criticism, from Soseki to Madame Bovary, revolutionizing the field of film studies during the 1970s with his writings and fabled lectures at Rikkyo, and later, the University of Tokyo. Counted among his former students are master filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa along with other celebrated cineastes of the Rikkyo New Wave, or Second Japanese New Wave, including Shinji Aoyama, Masayuki Suo and Akihiko Shiota; Hasumi’s direct influence spreads further, having maintained rapports with Pedro Costa, Hou Hsien-Hsiao and Jean-Luc Godard as well as the contemporary face of Japanese cinema with auteurs Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Sho Miyake (who will attend the program’s second weekend).” – Japan Society

On this occasion Japan Society has invited several prominent figures to curate special programmes, including critic and essayist Susan Sontag, filmmaker Donald Richie, photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, and avant-garde composer John Zorn, among others.

The programme closes with On Hasumi and Ford – Talk & Screening, a free event featuring a conversation with filmmaker Sho Miyake, followed by a brief recorded lecture and rare screening of Hasumi and Miyake’s John Ford montage film John Ford and Throwing – Complete Edition.