Katsu Kanai | |
---|---|
金井勝 | |
Born | |
Nationality | Japanese |
Occupation | Film director |
Katsu Kanai (金井 勝, Kanai Katsu, born 9 July 1936) is a Japanese experimental and avant-garde film director. The Harvard Film Archive has called him "one of the most vital and inventive filmmakers in the history of Japanese underground film". [1]
Born the son of a farmer in Kanagawa Prefecture, Kanai graduated from the College of Art of Nihon University before finding work at Daiei Film. [2] [3] He later became a freelance cinematographer and founded Kanai Productions in 1968. [2] His first film, The Deserted Archipelago (1969, aka The Desert Island) won the grand prix at the Nyon International Documentary Film Festival. [4] [3] His second film, Good-Bye (1971), was the "first post-war, post-liberation Japanese feature to be filmed in Korea," and according to the film scholar Oliver Dew, illustrated "how a surreal, decided non-representational approach could block the determinations of cultural essentialism". [5] His 2003 work, Super Documentary: The Avant-Garde Senjutsu, was awarded the FIPRESCI award at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. [6] Kanai has been the subject of retrospectives at Oberhausen, [7] the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival, [8] and the Harvard Film Archive. [1]