Toshi Ichiyanagi
Birth : 1933-02-04, Kobe, Japan
History
Toshi Ichiyanagi (一柳 慧 Ichiyanagi Toshi, born 4 February 1933) is a Japanese composer and pianist.
Ichiyanagi was born in Kobe. He studied with Tomojirō Ikenouchi, Kishio Hirao [fr; ja], and John Cage. One of his most notable works is the 1960 composition Kaiki, which combined Japanese instruments, shō and koto, and western instruments, harmonica and saxophone. Another work, Distance (1961), required the performers to play from a distance of three meters from their instruments. Anima 7 (1964) stated that chosen action should be performed "as slowly as possible".
Ichiyanagi was married to Yoko Ono from 1956 to 1963.
Ichiyanagi is the recipient of the 33rd Suntory Music Award (2001) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award (2018). He has been honored with Japan's Order of Culture.
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Part documentary, part fiction this film revolves around the life of the haiku poet Seigetsu Inoue who wandered Ina Valley for about 30 years from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji era.
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Erotic thriller about a porn photographer who has to deal with a psychopath.
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Over a long process of evolution, animals developed the complex functions of bones. Not only do bones support the body, they also serve to store and release minerals that the body needs, such as calcium and phosphorus. In addition, bones are constantly being broken down and reformed, and this is controlled by vitamin D and other hormones. Vitamin D works on the cells that create bone to promote bone formation. The bones that these cells build support life itself. Academic supervisor
Hajime ORIMO (Faculty of Medicine, University of Tokyo) and Tetsuo INOUE (Hamamatsu University School of Medicine)
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Based on the novel of the same name by Yoshio Kataoka.
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The entire human body is made of cells, and health is maintained through the continuous process of old cells making way for new cells. Bones are no exception. This film looks into how bones are made up of cells, how they are broken up and how they are reformed. What do the cells that are continuously engaged in bone formation and bone resorption do, and how is balance maintained within the body? Color 17 min. (1982) Sponsored by Teijin Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd. And Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (Astellas Pharma Inc.) Produced by Yone Production Inc.
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A documentary profiling a Japanese taiko drumming group based in the remote Sado Island, Japan. The film blurs the line between real-life documentary footage of the troupe's training and practice regimes, and staged performances of their varied musical acts, with sets designed by artist Tadanori Yokoo and an additional experimental electronic music score by Toshi Ichiyanagi.
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Jun has come to Tokyo from his family home, an island which resembles a ship. He works in a machine shop and is attempting to develop a career as a cartoonist in his spare time. When he travels around the town by subway, he has grown into the habit of groping female passengers in a sexual way. They never denounce him, and many seem to respond very favorably, moaning in apparent ecstasy. However, when his girlfriend sees him doing this, she denounces him to the police. The woman he was groping at the time refuses to press charges; indeed, she says that what was happening was nobody's business. Still, Jun's girlfriend leaves him. He goes to his father's grave to pay his respects, but somehow cannot find it. On his way back, he sees a number of men molesting a woman and does nothing to stop them. Eventually his girlfriend comes back to him, and his indulgence in train-groping tapers off.
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A Documentary on the Japanese baseball player Sadaharu Oh
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ĀTMAN is a visual tour-de-force based on the idea of the subject at the centre of the circle created by camera positions (480 such positions). Shooting frame-by-frame the filmmaker set up an increasingly rapid circular motion. ĀTMAN is an early Buddhist deity often connected with destruction; the Japanese aspect is stressed by the devil mask of Hangan, from the Noh, and by using both Noh music and the general principle of acceleration often associated with Noh drama.
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There's more to picture than meets the eye in this journey into oriental metaphysical imagery. Starting (in a very Christian manner) with the Word, the film draws an explosion of visible forms, as if a sign of the shattering of shapes in the mundane world. But time is cyclical, of course, and what was once a multitude of sensible realities must eventually return to the Word and, finally, to sheer Color. (Sound of Eye)
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A freestyle biopic of Ikki Kita, the ultranationalist intellectual whose ideas inspired the failed military coup in 1936.
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Expansion remixes the images of Matsumoto’s Esctasis into an more colourful psychedelic short.
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In this intricately layered Japanese film, the nature of actresses and what they gain from acting is explored. The lives of three actresses are laid bare, and scenes from their lives are woven in and out of interviews with each of them. Each of them has experienced a traumatic event which contributes to their particular enjoyment of becoming someone else in dramatic roles.
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Writes Matsumoto, "I used the Erekutoro Karapurosesu (Electro Color Processor), which is mainly used in the field of medicine and engineering, to create moving image textures Metastasis, I was interested in layering images of a simple object and its electronically processed abstraction. The electronic abstract image is manipulated in a certain rhythm, depicting an organic process."
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Rikiya Shoda is an engineer working for the Atomic Agency in Japan. One day, his wife Nanako returns home with a lost teenager called Ayu. A man, pretending to be the father, comes to get her back; Ayu keeps telling him that Rikiya and Nanako are her parents. Through this disruption, Rikiya suddenly starts remembering his youth as a revolutionary.
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Why Not is hypnotic, compulsive and claustrophobic. It is bathed in a cold, pervasive eroticism, which, oblique and displaced at first, finally becomes explicit in one of the most bizarre masturbation sequences ever filmed. For almost two hours, we observe a young, strikingly pretty girl, nude most of the time and alone in an apartment, engaged in a sonambulistic and sensuous attempt at coming to terms with herself.
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A work in which Yoji Kuri added animation to Toshi Ichiyanagi's music. CG is used, which is rare in Yoji Kuri's work. In addition, detailed furniture such as those drawn in copperplate prints and illustrations of unknown machines are used to create a Gothic atmosphere.
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Two interwoven stories. The first is a biography of anarchist Sakae Osugi which follows his relationship with three women in the 1920s. The second centers on two 1960s students researching Osugi's theories.
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A spontaneous romance blooms between Kawamura, a professor touring Europe, and Naoko, a married woman living in Paris, scarred by the Nagasaki atomic bombings. The two protagonists travel around Europe trying to find themselves.
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A short animated film by Furukawa Taku.
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A small white box. Everything happens in that little world. A woman's face comes out from the side of the room and roars, birds peck at human flesh, trains run through, and a couple quarrel begins. When the billiard ball penetrates the room, the billiard ball changes into various shapes ... Each room is a world, and what happens there is a microcosm of modern times.
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A man sets out to search for his brother among the survivors of Hiroshima after an anonymous letter.
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Struggling with his true emotions, dreams, memories of the past and the reality Shizuo is about to marry, but is torn between his wife-to-be and the love to his mother.
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Tadanori Yooko superb animation.
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Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive
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Presentation of polymer chemistry-based synthetic fiber, and the manufacturing facilities and production process used by Toray, Japan’s leading textile maker. Also depicts the textiles being sold throughout Europe and the US.
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A short documentary by Hiroshi Teshigahara about his father, the sculptor Sofu Teshigahara, preparing an exhibition.
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A man wanders into a seemingly deserted town with his young son in search of work. But after a bit of bad luck, he joins the town's population of lost souls.
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Cameraman Yonesaku Kobayashi (1905-2005) is a pioneer of scientific films of Japan. He and producer Sozo Okada made many scientific educational films, and in 60's - 70's, many avant-garde composers composed music for these films.
