Tokyo Melody: A Film about Ryuichi Sakamoto (1985) is an upbeat documentary that teleports viewers back to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s experimental era, during the recording sessions of his 1984 album Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia. The film unfolds via nostalgic snippets of Sakamoto as a musician in the synth-pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra and traces the progressive development of his musical compositions. Narrated by the composer-artist in his eclectic stage attire, Sakamoto shares in detail how the economic and technologic boom of Japan in the 1970s and 1980s shaped his worldview, and how he embraced the vibrant cultural phenomenon of Tokyo, which opened all kinds of creative possibilities.

Through a selection of short candid interviews, we get an understanding of Sakamoto’s introverted and humorous personality. The composer shares how his creative practice was influenced by various prominent figures, including Claude Debussy, the Beatles, and the composer and musical theorist John Cage. Raised in an artistic household as a child music prodigy, Sakamoto started playing the piano and composing at the age of four. He developed a fascination with the idea of time as non-linear and the notion of time and space as constant, a belief that is central to his process in crafting postmodern music.

Elizabeth Lennard (b. 1953, New York) is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Paris. While studying at the San Francisco Art Institute, she became interested in altering black-and-white photographs. Never confined to a particular medium, her fascination with architecture and the urban environment has inspired her to develop cross-disciplinary projects, including Tokyo Melody: A Film about Ryuichi Sakamoto (1985), a photographic book on Alexander Chemetoff’s Bamboo Garden (1997), and the performance E-1027 Design for Living: Eileen Gray & Jean Badovici (2015). Her work has been showcased in major institutions such as Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (2016), the Louvre Museum (2006), and the Centre Pompidou (2016).