Description:
A spectacle of magnificent proportions and remarkable intimacy, Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad remains one of the greatest films ever made about sports. Supervising a vast team of technicians using scores of cameras, Ichikawa captured the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo in glorious widescreen images, using cutting-edge telephoto lenses and exquisite slow motion to create lyrical, idiosyncratic poetry from the athletic drama surging all around him. Drawn equally to the psychology of losers and winners - including the legendary Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila, who receives the film's most exalted tribute - Ichikawa captures the triumph, passion, and suffering of competition with a singular humanistic vision, and in doing so effected a transformative influence on the art of documentary filmmaking.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Audio commentary from 2001 by film historian Peter Cowie
- New introduction to the film by Cowie
- Over eighty minutes of additional material from the Tokyo Games, with a new introduction by Cowie
- Archival interviews with director Kon Ichikawa
- New documentary about Ichikawa featuring interviews with camera operator Masuo Yamaguchi, longtime Ichikawa collaborator Chizuko Osada, and the director's son Tatsumi Ichikawa
- New interview with restoration producer Adrian Wood
- Trailers
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar James Quandt