SILVER

THE KOUMIKO MYSTERY [LE MYSTÈRE KOUMIKO]
New DCP
Chris Marker's THE KOUMIKO MYSTERY is a stream-of-consciousness outsider's examination of Japanese culture that starts out covering the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ends by following a young Japanese woman (Koumiko Muraoka) around Tokyo as she recounts her feelings of alienation and longing. Marker's film is a brilliant commentary on the cultural follies of touristic Olympics journalism and the inadequacies of national identity. Featuring an original score by Tōru Takemitsu. DIR/SCR/PROD Chris Marker. France, 1965, color, 54 min. In French with English subtitles. NOT RATED

Followed by: THE INLAND SEA
New DCP
In the early 1990s, Lucille Carra ventured to the heart of Japan to painstakingly reenact a journey taken by legendary Japanese film and cultural scholar Donald Richie, two decades before. Richie had traveled alone to the islands of the Seto Inland Sea, an area he intended to scour for any preserved remnants of ancestral Japanese traditions not yet spoiled by Western modernity. The final product of Carra's reenactment, the poetic essayistic travelogue THE INLAND SEA, is a sublime and sumptuous meditation on the traveling condition, and a sobering distillation of modern Japanese society. Narrated by Richie and featuring an original score by Tōru Takemitsu. DIR/SCR/PROD Lucille Carra; from the book by Donald Richie; PROD Brian Cotnoir. U.S., 1991, color, 56 min. NOT RATED

Co-presented with the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and their Cinema Revived series. Max Carpenter introduces two additional Takemitsu-scored documentaries at the Freer on Sunday, December 8 at 2:00 p.m.: Noriaki Tsuchimoto's THE MINIMATA MURAL and Kon Ichikawa's KYOTO.

AFI Member passes accepted.