March 9-19, 2011

This season, the Globus Film Series presents the Japanese gangster movie genre through its various avatars, transformations and contradictions, from 1960s productions featuring chivalrous kimono-clad, sword-wielding gangsters and gamblers to today's ruthless gun-toting villains dealing in debt, hustling hardcore porn and scheming and scamming in dark trades and deeds. Over the past 50 years, they've remained snarling, swaggering, tattooed and inexplicably sexy. In the line-up, there will be blood and broken bones, hookers and hopheads, and plenty of juicy political blackmail… in 15 films that rack up the stiffs like Jacobean tragedies and show grand visions of manly amity and betrayal: classics and lesser known titles by Kinji Fukasaku, Takashi Miike (Dead or Alive), Hideo Gosha (The Wolves), Takeshi Kitano (Outrage), Rokuro Mochizuki (A Yakuza In Love, Onibi: The Fire Within) and Sydney Pollack (The Yakuza), among other offerings you can't refuse.

The violent romantic world of the yakuza (the Japanese mafia) steeped in cryptic ritual and customs involving full-body tattoos and missing digits, has long excited the imagination, decades before viewers started existing on a diet of Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire melodrama, and has been one of the mainstays of the Japanese film industry since the 1960s. Harking back to the days when samurai still embodied traditionalist values of honor, selfless duty (giri) and the noble warrior spirit (ninkyo) on the silver screen, the shadowy demimonde of organized crime (which included wandering gamblers and lowly peddlers) rivaled with the noble swordsmen as the representatives of honor and heroism, in the context of a rapidly changing society trying to come to terms with a shameful defeat. In the darkness of movie theaters, they became the very picture of superhuman macho cool and reptilian menace.

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 Offering you the roughest, the sharpest... and the smoothest of today’s cutting-edge film scene!

March 31 - April 18 At the opposite end of the stereotype of docile Japanese women—heroic good mothers, chaste daughters and hardworking faithful wives—actresses Ayako Wakao, Mariko Okada and Meiko Kaji embodied the transgression of limits, breaking rules, flouting norms and generally upsetting everyone. This series explores the idea of unconventional beauty that these spellbinding actresses created through an unparalleled body of films. Both Wakao and Okada were muses and inspiration for two major film directors, Yasuzo Masumura and Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida, respectively, while Kaji navigated between filmmakers, a wild card of Japanese cinema at the time. Put together, their films delineate what one could call an aesthetic of “convulsive beauty” (André Breton). Featuring a line-up of 13 films of many different genre, from anti-melodrama to jidaigeki, girl gang movies to women in prison films, with entries from Kiju Yoshida, Yasuzo Masumura and Toshiya Fujita. Don't miss the DRESSED TO KILL party following the opening screening of "Tattoo," Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 7:30 PM. Visit http://www.japansociety.org/content.cfm/mad_bad__dangerous_to_know for full line-up and schedule. Buy Tickets Online or please call the Japan Society Box Office at (212) 715-1258, Mon. - Fri. 11 am - 6 pm, Weekends 11 am - 5 pm.

December 2009 - May 2010 With the centennial of director Akira Kurosawa’s birth coming up, 2010 will certainly be the year of sword fighting films (chambara)! While Kurosawa will always remain the "Emperor", two actors dominated postwar Japanese genre cinema: Daiei Studios’ cult stars Shintaro Katsu (1931-1997) and Raizo Ichikawa (1931-1969). Two actors, two styles, apparently poles apart yet actually complementary: earthy Katsu was the affable anti-idol rogue, unpredictable on- and off-screen, while ethereal, coolly enigmatic Ichikawa was considered the “James Dean of Japan”. Beyond their differences, both stars instilled in their roles a poisonous poetry and existential angst that lifted their art into genre-transcending territory. Curated by Chris D., genre film expert and author of Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film. Two of the most versatile, underrated and comparatively unknown movie performers post-WWII were not from America or Europe, but from Japan. Shintaro Katsu and Raizo Ichikawa defined their generation as surely as actors like Robert Mitchum, Montgomery Clift, James Dean and Clint Eastwood defined theirs. And like Mitchum and Eastwood they were equally at home in rugged action roles as in heavy drama and light comedy. Katsu’s blind swordman Zatoichi and Ichikawa’s misanthropic halfbreed samurai Kyoshiro Nemuri stand out as unforgettable, iconic characters on the panoramic screen of 20th century world cinema. – Chris D. Join us for this retrospective honoring two Japanese film legends.