Kon Ichikawa

Award-winning Japanese film director best known for Tokyo Olympiad

'I have attempted to capture the solemnity of the moment when man defies his limits. And to express the solitude of the man who, to succeed, fights against himself." This statement of intent, made at the opening of Tokyo Olympiad, the film of the 1964 Olympic games, was made by the director Kon Ichikawa, who has died aged 92, and could well apply to most of his major films. War, and the memory and threat of war, are also dominant themes, concerning the effect of the Japanese defeat in the second world war and the anguish and degradation that resulted from it.

Ichikawa, who was born Uji Yamada, graduated from Tokyo University in 1933 and started working as an animator on cartoon and puppet films at the Toho Motion Picture Company. One of them, The Girl at Dojo Temple (1946), a puppet version of a kabuki play, was banned by the occupying Americans because the script had not been submitted for approval.

There followed a number of witty comedies, such as The Woman Who Touched the Legs (1952) and Mr Pu (1953), based on a cartoon character. To those occidental audiences who got to know Ichikawa's films from the mid-1950s, it was rather surprising to discover that he had once earned the nickname of the Japanese Capra.

There was nothing Capraesque about the films that made his name in the west. In fact, Ichikawa is credited with having introduced sophisticated, western-style satirical comedies to Japan. On these films, and most others in the future, he collaborated with his screenwriter wife Natto Wada, whom he had met at Toho where she was a translator, and married in 1948.

Although the early films were popular in Japan, they were seldom shown abroad. Finally, in 1956, after The Burmese Harp won a prize at the Venice film festival, Ichikawa became known internationally. The first film of his to explore what he termed "the pain of the age", it told the story of a young soldier-musician in Burma at the time of the Japanese capitulation in 1945 who takes on the role of a Buddhist priest and tries to bury as many bodies as he can. Fires on the Plain (1959) was a worthy companion to the earlier anti-war masterpiece. Depicted in visionary black and white images and a minimum of dialogue, it told of how a soldier, part of the retreating Japanese army in the Philippines, is forced to hide in the jungle, where he encounters death, disease, starvation and cannibalism.

Conflagration (1958), one of the director's own favourites, based on Yukio Mishima's novel, follows a young man who sets fire to a temple because he feels it has been contaminated by people. Beautifully photographed by Kazuo Miyagawa - for example the final shot of the burning temple as seen from the mountain - it was another typically Ichikawan study of a man pushed to extremes. Odd Obsession, which won the special jury prize at Cannes in 1960, revealed a different kind of extreme. Shot in appropriately muted colours, the film dealt with an elderly man, obsessed and frightened by his growing impotence, who encourages his daughter's fiance to have sex with his beautiful young wife in the hope that jealousy will restore his virility. Alone on the Pacific (1963) tells the true story of a young yachtsman who sailed from Osaka to San Francisco, a dangerous three-month voyage on a 19ft craft. He uses the wide screen to magnificent effect while integrating flashbacks to the sailor's life on shore.

One of Ichikawa's most fascinating, complex and ambiguous works is An Actor's Revenge (1963). The revenge is that of an actor of female roles in the kabuki theatre against three men responsible for the death of his parents. The DaieiScope screen is used to give the impression of Japanese prints, the theatre stage and comic strips, at the centre of which is the prodigious performance of Kazuo Hasegawa as the hero/heroine.

For Tokyo Olympiad, Ichikawa said that he "tried to penetrate human nature not through fiction but in the truth of the games". Not since the Berlin games of 1936 had a great film been made of the great event. Unlike Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (1938), however, Ichikawa presented the human rather than the godlike qualities of the participants, although they are no less heroic. To achieve his aims, he employed 164 cameramen who used 232 different lenses. The result was a triumph of Japanese technical wizardry and creative genius.

Alas, although Ichikawa continued to be prolific, nothing he directed in the following three decades equalled the quality of his films from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s. Perhaps he lost his idealism and, with it, his lofty ambitions, but his decline paralleled that of Japanese cinema. Some of his later films would turn up at festivals, but there was always a sense of disappointment.

One of the exceptions was The Makioka Sisters (1983), an epic and beautifully measured study of a wealthy Japanese family before the second world war. Two years later, in what seemed an act of desperation, Ichikawa remade The Burmese Harp, one of his greatest past successes. Although a pointless exercise, the story retains much of its power and has splendid colour photography by Setsuo Kobayashi.

In 2000, the chain-smoking director was awarded the Berlinale Camera award at the Berlin film festival, where he presented his latest film, Dora-Heita, an entertaining samurai drama. "If Dora...#8209;Heita contributes to a revival of the costume-drama genre, which seems to be just around the corner, I'll be very happy," he commented. "But my own project hasn't really changed. I always try to show human beings the way they really are. That's what I always hope to achieve."

His wife died in 1983. He is survived by two sons.

· Kon Ichikawa, film director, born November 20 1915; died February 13 2008