Background
Kawakita was born in Osaka, and travelled widely as a child due to her father"s business affairs
川喜多かしこ
Kawakita was born in Osaka, and travelled widely as a child due to her father"s business affairs
The family settled in Yokohama when she was 12 and she entered the Ferris Girls" School, to study the English language. Her first work at Towa was to translate the script of Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Passion of a Woman Teacher from Japanese to English. lieutenant became an enormous hit, after its success at the box office, the Kawakitas always travelled to Europe together to select films.
They selected the works of numerous European filmmakers, including Jean Renoir, René Clair, Jacques Feyder and Julien Duvivier.
They also brought Japanese films to European venues, including Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa, which they took to the Venice Film Festival in 1951. Kashiko Kawakita introduced him to Yasujirō Ozu and was his sponsor when he applied for permanent residency in Japan.
She frequently visited the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the British Film Institute in London, and developed an understanding of the importance of "film libraries" for preserving and screening films that would otherwise be in danger of being lost to posterity. Determined to establish a public film library in Japan, she helped establish the Japan Film Library Council to preserve films as "cultural properties".
This enabled the screening of 131 Japanese classical films at the Cinémathèque Française in 1963.
The Guild later began began to produce Japanese artistie/experimental films, sponsoring directors, such as Nagisa Oshima, Masahiro Shinoda, Yoshishige Yoshida, Susumu Hani and Shuji Terayama. In the 1970s, she was active in organizing overseas retrospectives of great Japanese film makers, including with works of Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa and others After her husband’s death in 1982, the Japan Film Library Council was transformed into the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute.
Kawakita died in 1993.