Susan Oxtoby, Senior Film Curator at BAMPFA, Pacific Film Archive, and curator of the “Against Authority: The Films of Masaki Kobayashi” series retrospective running in July and August 2019, in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.
Masaki Kobayashi directed twenty films from the early 1950s into the 1990s, but it was over a brief eleven year span that he became a legend of Japanese cinema, beginning with “I Will Buy You” in 1956, and continuing with the three-part “The Human Condition,” “Hara Kiri,” “Kwaidan,” “The Inheritance” and “Samurai Rebellion.” In these films he moved from a realist cinema to one that used Japanese stylizations to present films that are humanist in philosophy, strongly anti-war and poke holes in authority and authority figures.
BAMPFA presents these films in late July and August. For times and dates:
https://bampfa.org/program/against-authority-cinema-masaki-kobayashi