“This year's big news was the belated discovery of a long-dead Japanese director (Tomu Uchida C hopefully coming soon to a retro near you).” - Dennis Lim, The Village Voice
"A major auteur. . . As implacable as Mizoguchi, sensitive as Ozu, human as Kurosawa, and subtle as Naruse." - Philippe Roger, Jeune Cinéma
“Uchida crystallized the social, political, and artistic passions of an epoch crucial to modern Japan and did so with a vitality and a love of cinema that we search for in vain in the films of today.” - Max Tessier
Oh Lord, another terrific Japanese director to discover? It has been a pleasure over the seventeen years of the Cinematheque's existence to present retrospectives dedicated not only to the well known and widely acknowledged masters of Japanese cinema - Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Imamura, Teshigahara, and Naruse - but also to directors from Japan who are less known: Kinji Fukasaku, Yasuzo Masumura, Seijun Suzuki, Susumu Hani, Hiroshi Shimizu. Because the latter five were familiar to specialists, it is possible to claim that our current retrospective of the films of Tomu Uchida is the real revelation, the true “buried treasure” of the lot, as his work has been little shown until very recently. The La Rochelle festival presented a handful of his films in 1998, a few others turned up in Paris, but when a dozen or more were presented at the 2005 Tokyo Filmex festival in new prints, word quickly spread among critics and curators that here was a major overlooked director. Clutches of films subsequently turned up at the Rotterdam and Melbourne festivals, but only this season are his films being presented in substantial number in North America, in Berkeley, Toronto, and New York, and afterwards in London, England. (Note that these are primarily postwar films, as most of his prewar work has not survived.) Unavailable on DVD, full of visual beauty and invention, magnificently crafted and acted, Uchida's films deserve the full attention of all cinephiles and lovers of Japanese film. The opportunity will never come again - all
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