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Saturday 9 February 2019

Jose Torres (1959): A Film by Hiroshi Teshigahara

A young Jose Torres strikes a pose.

Original Title: Jose Torres
Year: 1959
Running Time: 25 min
Country: Japan
Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Screenwriter: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Music: Toru Takemitsu
Cinematography: Hiroshi Teshigahara (B&W)
Cast: Jose Torres, Cus D’Amato
Producer: Teshigahara Productions
Genre: Documentary | Biography | Boxing | Half-length Film | Sports Documentaries

Synopsis/Plot:

Teshigahara studied under Kamei Fumio and demonstrated his belief that documentary is a subjective creation by its director in his short film Jose Torres (1959). His subsequent documentaries and dramatic features have been stripped of all trace of the emotion and lyricism that could have accompanied the creation of such dramatically-composed works from the clearly-defined perspective of the filmmaker. The filmmaker uses his aesthetic sense to pick out fragments of reality, the recombination of which transforms abstract concepts into images. These unique qualities of Teshigahara’s filmmaking polish his subjects’ beauty further without making any concessions to commercialism, thanks perhaps in part to Teshigahara’s position as the head of the Sogetsu school of Japanese flower arrangement. Endowed with both a gift and the environment in which to express it, Teshigahara was in as sense a fortunate, pure-cultured successor to postwar avant-garde art.

The aforementioned information is reproduced from the website of Film Affinity.

Adeyinka Makinde is a contributor to the Cambridge Companion to Boxing. One of his two contributions is Chapter 19, “Jose Torres: The Boxer as Writer”.


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