Satoshi Kon: Beyond Imagination
June 27-July 1
In the films of writer/director Satoshi Kon, dreams violently break into the waking world, letting loose viral nightmares from fractured minds. From Perfect Blue to Paprika, Kon has fleshed out a niche in the anime world that is as maddeningly creative as it is giddily strange. They’re like miraculous acid trips that turn the world inside out and leave behind a slimy, gnarled wake of candy-coated destruction.
Dreams are the key to understanding Kon’s nightmares, making movies the ultimate code-breaker. They are the key to the past and the only way to restoring linear logic to an otherwise chaotic parade of clashing images. From June 27-July 1, the Film Society at Lincoln Center screens all of Kon’s feature-length films and his six-hour long TV mini-series, Paranoia Agent (screened in two three-hour installments). Together they form an oneiric tapestry of incandescent imaginary lives given meaning by dreams and movies.
Kon’s characters’ find themselves in films to make sense of the unfulfilled dreams that plague their lives. The ghost of John Ford haunts Tokyo Godfathers, Kon’s most sober film. Tokyo is Kon’s tribute to Ford’s Three Godfathers, making three bums—a bigoted drunk, a transvestite and a teenager—unclean caretakers of an abandoned baby they find in a dumpster on Christmas eve. Their Ford-inspired mission brings them together and makes them unlikely saints.
Whether he’s quoting Ford, Hitchcock or himself (the latter both pop up in Paprika, a boisterous, shimmering explosion of confetti), Kon uses movies as a diving board into a kaleidoscope of reminiscences. An actress jumps out of her mind and into her fear-infected memories in Perfect Blue and a film crew journeys through the many lives of a long-forgotten studio actress in Millennium Actress. To return balance to their lives, they return to illusions, making Kon’s films exquisite trips through the uniquely cinematic looking glass of his mind.
June 27-July 1
In the films of writer/director Satoshi Kon, dreams violently break into the waking world, letting loose viral nightmares from fractured minds. From Perfect Blue to Paprika, Kon has fleshed out a niche in the anime world that is as maddeningly creative as it is giddily strange. They’re like miraculous acid trips that turn the world inside out and leave behind a slimy, gnarled wake of candy-coated destruction.
Dreams are the key to understanding Kon’s nightmares, making movies the ultimate code-breaker. They are the key to the past and the only way to restoring linear logic to an otherwise chaotic parade of clashing images. From June 27-July 1, the Film Society at Lincoln Center screens all of Kon’s feature-length films and his six-hour long TV mini-series, Paranoia Agent (screened in two three-hour installments). Together they form an oneiric tapestry of incandescent imaginary lives given meaning by dreams and movies.
Kon’s characters’ find themselves in films to make sense of the unfulfilled dreams that plague their lives. The ghost of John Ford haunts Tokyo Godfathers, Kon’s most sober film. Tokyo is Kon’s tribute to Ford’s Three Godfathers, making three bums—a bigoted drunk, a transvestite and a teenager—unclean caretakers of an abandoned baby they find in a dumpster on Christmas eve. Their Ford-inspired mission brings them together and makes them unlikely saints.
Whether he’s quoting Ford, Hitchcock or himself (the latter both pop up in Paprika, a boisterous, shimmering explosion of confetti), Kon uses movies as a diving board into a kaleidoscope of reminiscences. An actress jumps out of her mind and into her fear-infected memories in Perfect Blue and a film crew journeys through the many lives of a long-forgotten studio actress in Millennium Actress. To return balance to their lives, they return to illusions, making Kon’s films exquisite trips through the uniquely cinematic looking glass of his mind.
