Like Japanese fashion and pop culture, Japanese film remains in the international vanguard, blending traditional genres and classical forms with cutting-edge technology and dazzling imagery. This year’s Japanese Currents series highlights recent noteworthy Nipponese films, ranging from anime to samurai epic, documentary to family melodrama, while exploring issues important to contemporary Japanese society. Collectively, the series offers a fresh take on Japanese culture and a showcase of the wealth of creative invention at work in Japan today.

Special thanks to the Japan Foundation, Los Angeles and the Portland-Sapporo Sister City association, with additional support from Lane Powell PC, Shigezo Restaurant, the Japan America Society of Oregon, and the Consular Office of Japan in Portland.

Film Noir—a timeless genre of classic Hollywood films known for their low budgets, taut narratives, evocative cinematography, dark shadows, hard-boiled leading men, and dangerous leading ladies—remains as popular today as during its 1940s and 50s heyday. We offer some lesser-seen noir favorites, featuring ex-Nazis on the lam, escaped cons seeking revenge, crooked cops, and deceitful wives. All are pushed to their limits, and all must pay an inevitable price.

2014 marks the centennial of the beginning of “the great war,” World War I. With events being held in memoriam worldwide, and with conflicts still raging whose histories connect to that epic clash, we look back—through four landmark films—at the wake of the 20th century’s first major cataclysm. Each of the films is a masterpiece in its own right, innovative and idiosyncratic in not only its aesthetic and narrative techniques, but also its views on the struggle between nations. From studio productions to independents, silent to sound, these four films are emblematic representations of not only the major shifts of the worldwide film industry over a 30-year period, but also of the ways in which filmmakers put the seemingly untranslatable experience of war in front of those who needed to see it most: the average citizens who comprised, or were related to, those who served.

Presented in conjunction with the Portland Art Museum’s exhibition This is War! Graphic Arts from the Great War, 1914-1918, running through December 14, 2014.