Atman (1975)

Toshio Matsumoto (Japan) was a filmmaker and film theoretician born in Nagoya in 1932. A pivotal figure in Japanese cinema, his body of work across and in conflict with documentary, televisual, narrative, journalistic, and experimental modes represents a sustained confrontation with the contradictions of cultural and political systems in post-war Japanese society. He graduated from University of Tokyo (1955), majoring in aesthetics. He founded Jikken-Kobo (“Experimental Workshop”) along with the composer Toru Takemitsu and others, devising a method of “neo-documentarism” that fused avant-garde and documentary elements. The resulting films, such as The Weavers of Nishijin (1961) and Mother (1967), won major awards at two different Venice International Documentary Film Festivals. Matsumoto later turned to experimental cinema with films such as For the Damaged Right Eye (1968), then directed Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), a narrative film that exemplified Tokyo’s gay underground and the turmoil of the era. He expanded his activities to produce dozens of cross-genre works including narrative films such as Demons (1971), experimental films such as Engram: Kioku Konseki (1987), and video artworks such as Shift: Danso (1982). Matsumoto also wrote several essays on film theory including The Discovery of Film: The Avant-Garde and Documentary (Sanichi-Shobo, 1963), which exerted an incalculable influence on the Japanese film movement. He was Dean of Arts at the Kyoto University of Art and Design and was also president of the Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences. He died in Tokyo in 2017; the Postwar Japan Moving Image Archive carries on his legacy through the archivization and promotion of his films and those of his contemporaries.