Ryuichi Sakamoto Tribute: 'Tony Takitani' / 'Love is the Devil'

Tony Takitani / Love is the Devil

July 7, 2023 - 7:30 pm

Billy Wilder Theater

Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

Tony Takitani

Japan, 2004

Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, Tony Takitani traces a delicate, melancholic tale of love, loneliness and obsession. The pensive son of an itinerant jazz musician, Tony (Issei Ogata) lives a life of resigned isolation until he meets and marries a younger woman, Eiko (Rie Miyazawa), with an overwhelming compulsion for designer clothes. The couple build a quiet life together around Eiko’s shopping habits until tragedy intervenes and Tony must face how to go on. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s spare, gentle piano lines are ever present throughout, providing the poignant emotional undercurrent to Ichikawa’s elegantly restrained images and pacing.

DCP, color, in Japanese with English subtitles, 75 min. Director: Jun Ichikawa. Screenwriter: Jun Ichikawa. With: Issei Ogata, Rie Miyazawa, Shinohara Takahumi.

Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon

U.K./France/Japan/U.S., 1998

Writer-director John Maybury’s biography of Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi) focuses on the British painter’s by turns tender and troubled affair with petty criminal George Dyer (Daniel Craig). Bacon’s grotesque, unsettling portraiture acts as Maybury’s own image book of refracted faces and fracturing psyches. From Bacon’s high camp drinking bouts to the terrifying nightmares that afflict Dyer, the two become enmeshed in each other's self-destructive drives just as Bacon’s celebrated career was reaching its zenith. Ryuichi Sakamoto matches the on-screen flights of passion and madness with a jangled, gristly, industrial score that gets deep under the skin.

DCP, color, 87 min. Director: John Maybury. Screenwriter: John Maybury. Wth: Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER:

Whether as an international pop star, music producer or composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto was always an innovator. In the late 1970s, as a member of the Japanese techno pop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto helped pioneer electronic music with the band’s influence extending well into the present day. As a prolific solo artist, Sakamoto expressed his own wide-ranging influences, from Debussy to John Cage to Balinese gamelan, moving between and blending melodic, experimental and ambient forms across an eclectic discography that defined and transformed world music. In 1983, with no prior experience, he composed his first film score for Nagisa Ôshima’sMerry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence(1983) (in which he also made his screen debut), a groundbreaking electronic work that spawned a hit single and earned Sakamoto a BAFTA Award for Best Film Music. Other film scores followed, including his Oscar-winning contribution to Bernardo Bertolucci’sThe Last Emperor(1989), Pedro Almodóvar’sHigh Heels(1991) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’sThe Revenant(2016). Sakamoto spent his career exploring the intersections of music, sound, images and technology. The Archive presents this three-night tribute, understanding that it captures only a fragment of Sakamoto’s boundless creative spirit.