Homage to Madame Kawakita: 24 Japanese Classics

For decades and until her death, Madame Kashiko Kawakita (1908–1993) was the "Grande Dame" of Japanese cinema, the ambassador of Japanese films abroad. Together with her husband Nagamasa Kawakita (1903–1981), the president of the distribution and production firm Towa, she travelled to important film countries and film festivals starting in the 1930s to select foreign films for distribution in Japan and present Japanese films abroad. As early as 1932, she saw Leontine Sagan's film Mädchen in Uniform in Germany, which she was very enthusiastic about ("girls fighting against repression and for their freedom"). She brought the film to Japan, where it was a huge success. In later years, she also brought films by Renoir, Clair, Feyder, and Duvivier to Japan. In 1960 Madame Kawakita – inspired by the models Cinémathèque Française and the British Film Institute – founded the "Japan Film Library Council", an important and totally new film-cultural institution in Japan at the time, dedicated to collecting and distributing copies of Japanese classics and to consulting foreign festivals in selecting Japanese films.