Tokyo Olympiad

Dir. Kon Ichikawa. 1965, 170 mins. Restored DCP courtesy of Janus Films. Commissioned by the Japanese Olympic Committee to tout Japan’s triumphant return to the world stage, this groundbreaking document of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Games became something more than state propaganda under Kon Ichikawa’s devotional direction: a vast yet human-scaled vision of physical grace and competitive spirit. Armed with a one hundred-strong phalanx of cameras under the command of the great Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon, Ugetsu, Floating Weeds), Ichikawa fashioned a work of microscopic precision and near perfect proportions, where the epic always leaves space for the intimate.