Tag Archives: Akira Kurosawa

Blu-ray Review Round-Up: Films by Shirley Clarke, Miklós Jancsó, Akira Kurosawa & more!

December 24, 2016 Dusty Somers Leave a comment

The Magic Box: The Films of Shirley Clarke (1929-1987)
Milestone Films

Milestone’s series of Shirley Clarke releases is one of the great passion projects of the home video era. That fact is vigorously reaffirmed by the fourth volume, which collects experimental shorts, documentaries, home movies and rare material not seen in decades, and comes close to completing Clarke’s extant filmography on Blu-ray. (The one major piece missing: the Frederick Wiseman-produced The Cool World [1963], which doesn’t have a commercial release from Wiseman’s Zipporah Films.)

Like Clarke’s genre-puncturing and form-stretching The Connection (1961), Portrait of Jason (1967) and Ornette: Made in America (1985), the films in Milestone’s fourth volume reveal a filmmaker deeply comfortable with straddling worlds, whether that means embracing the fundamental elasticity of documentary or filming other artistic disciplines — here, theater and dance — in ways that complement their strengths while remaining cinematic.

This compulsively watchable three-disc Blu-ray set begins with a disc of Clarke’s experimental work, including a variety of city-symphony riffs from the ’50s and some mind-bending dispatches from the early video era. Her editing prowess gets an early showcase with Brussels Loops, a compilation of three-minute shorts created with D.A. Pennebaker for the 1957 Brussels World Fair; each bristles with energy whether showcasing feats of American architectural beauty or slyly undercutting consumerist inventions.

The surreal collage of Bridges-Go-Round, presented in several versions, is one of the great avant-garde architecture films, while Skyscraper takes a more straightforward approach to the industrial film. The newly rediscovered Butterfly, with its scratched celluloid and high-pitched soundtrack, is a brief primal scream against the Vietnam War.

Two video pieces feature acclaimed experimental playwright Joseph Chaikin’s collaborations with Sam Shepard (Tongues, Savage/Love), and Clarke’s restless special effects distort the image to fascinating ends. These are singular documents, but the most eye-opening film on the disc might be Scary Time, commissioned by the UN to promote UNICEF giving on Halloween, but banned by the UN for getting too real. Clarke’s use of close-ups and her intercutting between Halloween celebrations and images of famine are disquieting and startlingly confrontational.

Disc two revolves around Clarke’s first passion: dance. Her earliest forays into filmmaking can be seen here, including the unfinished Fear Flight with Beatrice Seckler and her first completed short, Dance in the Sun, starring Daniel Nagrin. Clarke’s continued interest in capturing movement can be seen in the lovely postcard In Paris Parks, presented alongside outtakes and footage from a second, unfinished Paris film.

This disc gets even more interesting with a turn into experimental territory, first seen in the layered imagery and unreal colors of Bullfight, with Anna Sokolow. Footage from the unfinished The Rose and the Players hints at Clarke’s desire to marry some experimental techniques with a narrative told through dance. Four collaborations with choreographer Marion Scott combine modern dance with Clarke’s film and video experimentation.

The final disc could be largely thought of as bonus material, with the bulk consisting of silent home-video footage of Clarke’s childhood, wedding, vacations and her appearance in Agnès Varda’s Lions Love (1969). There are two proper films here though, a once-lost children’s adventure short Christopher and Me and the Oscar-winning Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World, which depicts two college speaking engagements from the last year of the poet’s life. The film, which was taken away from Clarke during editing, is certainly on the conventional side, particularly with regards to its obvious narration, but a segment where Frost remarks on the artificiality of documentary-making has Clarke’s fingerprints all over it.

This Herculean feat of film scholarship and curation also looks largely remarkable. Milestone’s 1080p, 1.33:1 transfers are sourced from a variety of materials, but most of the non-video footage looks convincingly film-like, with solid levels of fine detail and clarity. Damage never surpasses expected levels of speckling and fine scratches. A few highlights: the brilliant, deeply saturated colors of the Brussels Loops and the Paris films, and the excellent grayscale reproduction in Robert Frost, restored by UCLA and the Academy Film Archive. The set is accompanied by a booklet with helpful contextual notes about the films.

Milestone Films / 1929-1987 / Color and black and white / 1.33:1 / 480 min / $119.99

Dreams (1990)
The Criterion Collection

If only because his filmography is so full of major works, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams generally feels like a minor one. Anthology films often do.

Still, this collection of eight stories, inspired by Kurosawa’s own dreams and folk legends he heard growing up, is a thoroughly enjoyable filmgoing experience, particularly viewed on Criterion’s new Blu-ray, which really allows the vivid tableaux to shine in all their colorfully transfixing glory. Even when some of the segments dip into trite sentiment or obvious polemic, Dreams is always interesting to look at.

Focusing on man’s relationship to nature, the fleeting nature of joy, the solitude of creating art, humans’ capacity for regret and their even larger capacity for destruction, Dreams reveals an artist working in a deeply contemplative mode. This is a film rooted in melancholy when it’s not given over to outright pessimism, though by its conclusion, Kurosawa seems to have reached a sense of peace by looking backward.

There’s an otherworldly quality to the early segments that make them especially dreamlike: A young boy (Toshihiko Nakano) disobeys his mother to spy on a fox wedding processional, the figures emerging from the mist in a deliberate, regimented line; an adolescent boy (Mitsunori Isaki) laments his family’s chopped-down peach-tree orchard and receives a visit from dozens of life-size dolls; a man (Akira Terao, who plays the protagonist in the rest of the segments) finds himself nearly paralyzed by a blizzard and receives a visit from the mythical Yuki-onna (Mieko Harada).

The dream logic and airy feel of the early vignettes dissipate as the film turns more overtly political in segments that are plenty surreal, but not exactly dreamlike. A soldier’s encounter with a zombie platoon full of dead men he’s responsible for is haunting and heartbreaking, with a caustic view of the long-term effects of war. Two stories about nuclear war and its aftermath are comparatively heavy-handed.

Famous faces pop up in several other stories, including Martin Scorsese as Vincent van Gogh, framed alongside Terao’s painter in brilliant fields of color, and Chishu Ryu, who rarely worked with Kurosawa, as a voice of serenity in the film’s lovely closing segment.

Even for those who might be lukewarm on the film, Criterion’s edition of Dreams has a ton to like, beginning with the 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer, sourced from a new 4K restoration. The colors in this transfer are lush and vibrant, with eye-popping reds and yellows especially standing out. In keeping with what seems to be a recent trend, blue colors do tend toward the teal side of the spectrum, but it’s not overwhelming. Grain is beautifully rendered, image clarity and sharpness is strong and the transfer looks impressively film-like throughout. The 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack is crisp and fairly dynamic.

The extras here are also formidable, beginning with a newly recorded audio commentary from Stephen Prince that is positively packed with information. The only time Prince pauses is to allow us to hear a line of dialogue in the van Gogh sequence; otherwise, he fills every available second with a wealth of information on Kurosawa’s approach, the film’s debt to Noh and Kabuki theater, the cultural and political climate it was created in and the film’s place among Kurosawa’s career.

Also on the packed disc: A 150-minute making-of, featuring tons of on-set footage, from House (1977) director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi (in SD); 2011 documentary Kurosawa’s Way, in which longtime translator Catherine Cadou interviews tons of legendary filmmakers — Abbas Kiarostami, Theo Angelopoulos, Clint Eastwood and Hayao Miyazaki among them — about Kurosawa’s legacy; new interviews with production manager Teruyo Nogami and assistant director Takashi Koizumi; and a trailer. A hefty booklet includes an essay by Bilge Ebiri and the script for an unfilmed ninth segment, “A Wonderful Dream.”

The Criterion Collection / 1990 / Color / 1.85:1 / 120 min / $39.95

Electra, My Love (Szerelmem, Elektra, 1974)
Second Run

Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Jancsó, whose work is well represented on the Second Run label, is renowned for his long takes, and that quality is especially evident in Electra, My Love, a reworking of the Greek myth that unfolds in just a dozen shots over the course of 74 minutes.

This transfixing film pushes the boundaries of the medium and emerges as a truly interdisciplinary work, almost as reliant on modes of experimental theater and dance as it is film — though it’s still foremost a cinematic work, as the glorious camera swoops and crane shots can attest to.

The Electra myth is one of the most enduring in Greek mythology, with major versions by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles and numerous adaptations since. Jancsó’s take doesn’t deviate from too many fundamental details: Electra (Mari Törőcsik), the daughter of deposed and murdered king Agamemnon is harassed and humiliated by his usurper, Aegisthus (József Madaras), but the arrival of her thought-dead brother Orestes (György Cserhalmi) presents an opportunity for revolution.

Jancsó’s fluid approach to storytelling adds a pointedly political anachronistic conclusion and reframes a familiar story in a fresh way, pushing down the importance of narrative coherence and personal identification with characters to look at the tale from a grand perspective. The film uses hundreds of extras, often in tightly choreographed movement, as Jancsó uses masses of humans to portray oppression’s effect on a population.

Shot entirely outdoors in the Hungarian steppe, Electra, My Love is populated with numerous frames that are as stunning as they are odd — bodies, often nude, huddled together or prostrate or gathered near a pool of blood, a hillside ablaze with candles, a tyrant hoisted atop a giant ball — but even more arresting is the way Jancsó’s camera navigates these scenes, each long take a miniature feat of architecture. Letting these images wash you over you makes for 74 minutes of cinematic ecstasy.

Second Run presents Electra, My Love in a 1080p, 1.66:1 transfer, sourced from the Hungarian Digital Archive and Film Institute’s new 2K restoration. The region-free disc presents an image that is very clean, with stable, if somewhat muted colors. Fine detail isn’t remarkable, as there’s a persistent slight softness to the image, but the film looks largely very good, and Second Run’s disc easily outclasses previously available home video versions. The 1.0 uncompressed mono soundtrack is just fine at handling the post-dubbed sound.

The one on-disc extra is a new interview with cinematographer János Kende, who shot a number of Jancsó’s films and talks about his working experience with him, the process of shooting long takes and Jancsó’s legacy. An included booklet features an essay from Peter Hames.

Second Run / 1974 / Color / 1.66:1 / 74 min / £19.99

Children of Divorce (1927)
Flicker Alley

Crisscrossing love lives of the wealthy and beautiful are on display in Children of Divorce, almost a perfectly pure confection of silent-film melodrama starring Clara Bow at the height of her powers. Made directly after It (1927), which features Bow’s signature role as an irresistible flapper girl, Children of Divorce is a near-shameless combination of sex appeal and lifestyle porn, hung on an impressively overwrought framework that doesn’t just tug the heartstrings; it threatens to siphon the tears out of your eyes itself.

Lest that sound like a pan, let’s be clear: Children of Divorce is an utter delight, especially if you enjoy ogling the preternaturally attractive visages of Bow and a young Gary Cooper, which come through in stunning clarity in Flicker Alley’s new Blu-ray release. Only the second Bow film to get a US Blu-ray (the other being Wings), this disc makes it incontrovertibly clear that Bow knew exactly how to deploy her impish charm for maximum appeal.

Directed by Frank Lloyd, with uncredited reshoots by Josef von Sternberg, Children of Divorce amps up the emotion with a frame story about American children sent to live in a Paris “divorce colony,” a sort of orphanage/summer camp hybrid that allowed newly single parents to go live it up for a while. Adorable moppets with quivering lips make up at least five percent of this film, and Joyce Coad, who played Pearl in Victor Sjöström’s The Scarlet Letter and stars as the younger version of Bow’s character, looks like she’s trying to crush your heart between her tiny fingers as the camera holds steady on her face.

Flash forward, and Kitty Flanders (Bow), rich heiress and best friend Jean Waddington (Esther Ralston) and wealthy playboy Teddy Larrabee (Cooper) reunite for the first time as a trio since they were kids. Jean and Teddy have a residual mutual attraction that starts to regain steam, but Kitty, egged on by her serially married mom (Hedda Hopper in a brief cameo), is determined to make Teddy her first husband.

The film veers quickly from jaunty comedy of flirtation to heart-rending drama as Kitty’s selfish choices have a ripple effect through the years. (On hand to assist the heart-rending: toddler cutie Mary Louise Miller, who played the baby in Mary Pickford’s Sparrows, as Kitty’s daughter.) Because of its short length and Bow’s ineffable screen appeal, the film never crumbles beneath its piled-on emotions, and in the von Sternberg-shot ending, actually becomes quite moving.

Sourced from Paramount’s 4K scan of a Library of Congress restoration, the 1080p, 1.33:1 transfer on Flicker Alley’s disc is very strong, especially considering the problematic history of the source elements, which were badly preserved. Image clarity and high levels of fine detail are pronounced immediately, with damage largely relegated to fine scratches that don’t overwhelm the image. There are some softer moments later in the film, and an insert shot of a letter being written displays extreme nitrate decomposition — a clue to how badly the film was preserved — but all in all, the film looks great. A newly recorded score from the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra is presented in LPCM 2.0 stereo, and sounds fantastic.

The major extra in Flicker Alley’s package is the 1999 TCM documentary on Bow’s tumultuous personal and professional life, which provides an excellent overview in an hour. (Despite the legion of online complaints, Courtney Love’s narration is fine.) The doc is presented in standard def. Also included is a booklet with an excerpt from David Stenn’s biography (which is not kind to Children of Divorce) and notes on the restoration, score and the TCM doc. A DVD copy is also included in this combo pack.

Flicker Alley / 1927 / Black and white / 1.33:1 / 71 min / $39.95

Private Property (1960)
Cinelicious Pics

Suburban dread oozes out of the pores of Private Property, a once lost film from director Leslie Stevens where nastiness bubbles just below the surface for nearly the entirety of this slow-burn anti-thriller. Rediscovered and restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the film is probably most notable as the first starring role for Warren Oates, whose timid impotence here is a far cry from the swaggering or subdued antiheroes he played in some of the ’70s most singular American films.

Corey Allen stars as Duke, a maniacal drifter on the road with Oates’ Boots where they’re on the hunt for a place to stay in Los Angeles and some female companionship for Boots, which Duke promises to deliver. Within minutes, they’ve hijacked a ride to stalk the alluring Ann Carlyle (Kate Manx, Stevens’ wife in her first of only two film roles) to her home in the Hollywood Hills, shared with her often absent executive husband.

After finding a vacant house to squat in next door, Duke poses as a handyman and squirms his way into Ann’s life, while Boots is often left over there, only able to watch from a top-floor window as Duke and Ann flirt poolside. Both Boots and Duke are incessant voyeurs, but only one of them is ever able to do anything about it.

The veneer of charm on Allen’s sneering performance is very thin indeed, but it’s enough to appeal to Ann; Manx’s performance has a palpable longing — both sexual and emotional — that’s accompanied by a kind of paralysis. Wealth, status and societal convention have pinned her inside her home, and a reckless decision or two might be her only chance at escape.

Private Property isn’t really a major rediscovery, especially given the expected path it eventually treads, but it’s an enjoyably acrid take on the horrors of domestic living — and worse.

Cinelicious’ 1080p, 1.66:1 transfer, sourced from UCLA’s 4K restoration, is gorgeous, presenting a detailed, sharp image full of beautiful, well-resolved grain. The noirish film has plenty of dark scenes, but shadow detail remains strong. Damage is minimal. The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 soundtrack is clean and free of noticeable defects.

Extras include a newly filmed interview with set photographer Alexander Singer, who had a long career directing television and a few films after getting his start on the set of this and several early Stanley Kubrick films. His personal remembrance is a nice addition to the disc. Film notes from historian Don Malcolm are presented in an included insert, as is a DVD copy in this combo pack.

Cinelicious Pics / 1960 / Black and white / 1.66:1 / 79 min / $34.99

Man Facing Southeast (Hombre mirando al sudeste, 1986)
Kino Lorber

A low-key Argentinian science fiction film with a modest cult following to match, Eliseo Subiela’s Man Facing Southeast probably isn’t a Blu-ray upgrade that’s been sitting on many wish lists, but Kino’s release is welcome, particularly since the film never even received a Region 1 DVD.

With a plot that will be familiar to anyone who read or watched K-PAX (2001) — similarities were noted at the time of the later film’s release, but no connection was established — Man Facing Southeast tells the story of two men whose lives become intertwined. One is a respected psychiatrist, Dr. Julio Denis (Lorenzo Quinteros), whose professional acumen and personal failings come right out of some hoary screenwriters’ manual. The other is Rantés (Hugo Soto), a mysterious man who appears in Denis’ mental hospital one day, claiming to be a messenger sent from another planet to save humanity from its own shortcomings.

Soto’s performance is generally guided by a kind of anodyne solemnity, and the movie tends to follow suit, less interested in exploiting any drama out of Rantés’ claims — which Denis reflexively rejects — than weaving philosophical conversations between the two and quietly gawking at his strange behavior, like standing outside every evening to send and receive transmissions from his home planet.

Despite his proclamations, Rantés doesn’t do much for the good of humanity in the film, and his overt acts make for some of the film’s most risible scenes, including one where he helps feed a hungry family in a diner by moving other people’s food psychokinetically to their spot at the counter. The cinematic dullness of fishing-wire gags aside, how does allowing people to get a few bites off a stolen plate before having to flee the restaurant while he creates another distraction help them at all?

The enigmas around Rantés abound, including his relationship with frequent visitor Beatriz (Inés Vernengo) — though a backwards subtitle here gives it away — but they’re moderately compelling at best. I suppose there’s an audience for a less visually and narratively experimental The Man Who Fell to Earth, but I’m not in it.

Kino’s 1080p, 1.85:1 transfer is certainly going to be an improvement over old VHS copies, but it has some issues of its own. Things begin promisingly, despite some pronounced telecine wobble, with a naturalistic, fairly detailed transfer. There are marks here and there, but nothing overwhelming, and for much of the film, color reproduction is solid. That changes at chapter 8, where suddenly, there are massive color density fluctuations that turn the image into a blobby mess. This lasts for around 10 minutes. Whether this is an elements issue or an encoding one, it’s bad.

The 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio stereo track is also problematic, featuring intermittent hiss and high-pitched background tone. The overworked saxophone-based score sounds OK, and dialogue is fine.

Kino assembles a nice slate of extras for this disc including three 20-minute-plus interviews with Subiela, Soto and DP Ricardo De Angelis. The Soto interview appears to be archival, but the other two look newly produced. A booklet features a brief director’s statement and an essay by historian Nancy J. Membrez.

Kino Lorber / 1986 / Color / 1.85:1 / 108 min / $34.95

Dusty Somers is a Seattle-based writer and editor who splits his critical ambitions between writing Blu-ray & DVD reviews and theater criticism. He’s a member of the Online Film Critics Society and Seattle Theater Writers.

Feature Articles

Sadatsugu Matsuda – The Most Successful Director of Japan’s Golden Age of Cinema

October 19, 2015 Pablo Knote Leave a comment

The reception of Japanese cinema in the West has always existed within a confined space. Neither based on domestic commercial success nor on the reception of Japanese critics, what entered the Western canon of Japanese classics was chosen solely based on its availability on international film festivals. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi were singled out as Japan’s two greatest masters of cinema.

When in the 1970s the work of Yasujiro Ozu was discovered in the West, critics began to speak of “The Big Three of Japanese Cinema”. Without a doubt, all three of them, Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, were indeed highly important directors whose oeuvre had a tremendous impact on the Japanese film industry.

“The Big Three” – Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu

However, if one had consulted the critical consensus of Japanese reviewers at that time, another artist would without a doubt have emerged as Japan’s most celebrated director: Tadashi Imai, a left-leaning director of socially critical films who not only won more Kinema Junpo Awards (Back then, Japan’s most respected cinema award) than all of “The Big Three” but whose films enjoyed immense popularity among Japanese critics.

Of course, this narrow-mindedness only applies to what we might call “Mainstream Film Criticism”. The reception of Japanese cinema in the West has always been distinguished by a few brave individuals, including Donald Richie, Stuart Galbraith IV or Alexander Jacoby, who dared to look behind the alleged exoticism of Japanese cinema. Indeed, the process of discovering the great artists of Japanese cinema has not ended yet and continues on being as relevant and important as it always has been.

Yet, while more Japanese director receive their deserved praise based on the quality of their work, the reception of Japanese films based on their commercial success is still largely neglected. Despite of the early effort by Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson whose pioneering work, “The Japanese Cinema: Arts and Industry” (1959), attempted to recount not only Japan’s greatest cinematic achievements, but also the commercial framework behind them, few scholars since then have attempted to explore the industrial aspects of Japanese cinema.

While most producers granted their directors considerably more artistic freedom than their American counterparts had ever dared to, the style of a contract director was always also shaped by a producer-enforced company style. Thus, the Japanese film industry was as much distinguished by its artistic quality as by its mass production of films. In the end, it was exactly this mass production system coupled with the individual talents of its directors leading to the “Golden Age” of Japanese cinema. Something still neglected in Western circles where commercial success is often confused with artistic quality.

In the West, for example, the myth that Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” (Shichinin no samurai, 1954) became Japan’s most successful film after its release in 1954 is still thoughtlessly adopted. It’s true that “Seven Samurai” was Japan’s most expensive film ever made. A record, however, which was broken a few years later when Kunio Watanabe’s nationalistic war epos “Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War” (Meiji tenno to nichiro daisenso, 1958) became not only Japan’s most expensive, but also highest-grossing film of all time.

“The Emporer Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War” – A Nationalistic War Epos

Furthermore, the assessment that Akira Kurosawa was Japan’s commercially most successful filmmaker appears to be based more on wishful thinking than reality. In fact, not a single Kurosawa film occupied the first place at the annual Top Ten rankings during the 1950s. “Seven Samurai”, for example, ranked third behind Tatsuo Osone’s “Chushingura” adaptation and Hideo Oba’s third part of his highly regarded “What is your name?” trilogy. With box office earnings of ¥198 million Kurosawa’s next big blockbuster, “Throne of Blood”, was the second most successful film of the year 1957.

Much more successful, however, was Sadatsugu Matsuda’s “Port of Honor”, which, grossing more than ¥353 million, was the great hit of that year. Ultimately, Kuroswa may certainly have been a successful filmmaker, but based on the commercial success of his films, it would be wrong to describe the 1950s as “The Age of Kurosawa” or that of his company, Toho. On the contrary, the 1950s belonged to the Toei jidaigeki and its leading director, Sadatsugu Matsuda.

A director as prolific as he is unknown. Before somebody took the time to translate his name properly, he was known as either Sadaji Matsuda or Teiji Matsuda in the West. During his more than 40 years as a director he made at least 167 films, only 48 of whom are listed in the Imdb, “the most complete movie database in the world”.

In addition, he had his heyday in that period, in which the Toei Company conquered the Japanese film market with their trademark Toei goraku. A genre that is passionately despised by most critics. In 1959, Donald Richie, for example, described the audience for such films as having “no idea whatever of the meaning of the words quality or intelligence (…).”

This writing marks the first attempt to deal with Matsuda’s oeuvre. While Sadatsugu Matsuda could hardly be described as an artist, his unprecedented successful career shall here be the criterion for a reassessment of his work. Matsuda was a director whose career always remained closely connected to his studio, who never developed a signature style and dutifully churned out every film assigned to him by his film studio. A classic company man, which was precisely the reason why he became the most successful filmmakers of the 1950s.

Who was Sadatsugu Matsuda? Matsuda was born in 1906 in Kyoto. An illegitimate son of Shozo Makino, often called “The Father of Japanese Film”. During the early 20th century, Makino’s kyugeki, primitive historical films who closely imitated the stylistics of the Kabuki theater, gained huge popularity with the Japanese public.

Shozo Makino (1878 – 1929)

The main actor of these film, Matsunosuke Onoe, was subsequently named the first great star of Japanese cinema. In the 1920s, Makino ended his collaboration with the aged Onoe. He founded his own film studio, “Makino Educational Film Studios”, and became a notable avantgarde producer, who launched the careers of major stars like Tsumasburo Bando, Chiezo Kataoka or Ryunosuke Tsukigata. In the beginning, however, Makino’s production company was poor and couldn’t even afford proper staff or equipment.

Thus, Makino’s son Masahiro and his daughter Tomoko became prime actors in the early days of “Makino Educational Film Studios”. After having graduated from junior high school, Sadatsugu Matsuda also joined his father’s production company as a camera assistant. In 1925, he was promoted to full-fledged cinematographer and shot films for Makino contract directors like Buntaro Futagawa, Mokushi Katsumi or Saichiro Matsumoto before he changed profession and became a motion picture director for his father’s company in 1928.

Shozo Makino and Tomoko Makino (1907 – 1984)

Like his father, Matsuda specialized in the helming of period features, often starring youth idol Toichiro Negishi (1899 – ?). These films were modelled on the success of the shinkokugeki (“New National Drama”), an important theater troup which had given Shozo Makino the impetus to revolutionize the period film with more cinematic techniques and lightning-quick sword fights. But Matsuda was also adept at comedy, directing films like “The Goronbo’s Story” (Muriyari Sanzengoku, 1929), said to have been an effective combination of nonsensical comedy and period drama.

Nevertheless, his work was somewhat overshadowed by that of his half-brother Masahiro Makino (1908 – 1993). Having been a noted child actor since age four, Masahiro had become a director for his father’s company in 1926. He teamed up with screenwriter Itaro Yamagami and cinematographer Minoru Miki to create many praised masterpieces of jidaigeki. Their films “Samurai Town, Story One: Beautiful Quarry” (Roningai: Daiichiwa Uusukushiki emono, 1928) and “Beheading Place” (Kubi no za, 1929) won consecutive number one spots in Kinema Junpo’s annual Top Ten ranking.

Around the same time, Matsuda met Chikueda, sometimes also credited as Tsukie, Matsuura (1907 – 1999), a talented Makino actress who had performed so viciously what could have been Japanese cinema’s the first female fight scene in Masahiro Makino’s “Sozenji Baba” (1928). Matsuura and Matsuda got engaged and, in 1932, married.

By then, Shozo Makino had succumbed to a heart failure at age 50. One year before, Makino’s company was already dwindling having experienced the walk-out of several of its biggest names, among them Chiezo Kataoka and Chozaburo Arashi (later known as Kanjuro Arashi). With Makino’s death in 1929, the company kept struggling for four more years and then promptly went out-of-business.

After having completed Makino’s last, unfinished film, “Raiden” (1928) starring his own half-brother, Masahiro, in the lead role, Matsuda left the sinking ship and became a freelancer directing films for companies such as Nikkatsu, Teikoku Cinema and Shinko Cinema. Today, most of his prewar films seem to be incomplete or lost. An 18 minutes fragment of “Raiden” remains the only extant legacy of Matsuda’s days at his father’s company.

“Raiden” – The actor to the left is Masahiro Makino.

During the war, Matsuda directed several propaganda pieces, however, his career didn’t fully flower until after the war. In 1945, Japan surrendered and fell into the hands of the American occupation forces under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur. During the years of occupation, jidaigeki were outlawed as remnants of Japanese feudalism. Period film stars had to trade the sword of a tateyuki (“heroic leading man”) for the gun of a brave private investigator or fierce detective.

Ironically, it was in this environment when Sadatsugu Matsuda made his first breakthrough as a director. In 1946, he directed the first “Tarao Bannai” film. Until 1960 no less than ten sequels should follow, eight of them directed by Matsuda, each of them a smash hit at the box-office. Indeed, during the early postwar years “Tarao Bannai” literally dominated the industry.

Starring Chiezo Kataoka, already a major jidaigeki star since the late 1920s, as heroic private investigator Tarao Bannai, the detective series centered around the adventures of the title character who fought crime with seven different disguises and superior marksmanship. While the individual films in the series may be largely forgotten, the character of Tarao Bannai itself remains popular in Japan to this day and has enjoyed countless references in comic books, animated programs or tv series.

Tarao Bannai – The Man With Seven Faces!

While being immensely successful, “Tarao Bannai” also proved itself to be crucial for the path of Matsuda’s later career. In 1950, Chiezo Kataoka, having become the greatest star of the 1940s, co-founded Toei Kabushiki-gaisha, better known under its abbreviation of Toei, soon to become Japan’s leading motion picture company. After having directed four “TaraoBannai” films for Daiei, Matsuda was invited by Kataoka to join him to his new production company.

Already being an experienced veteran journeyman director, Matsuda enjoyed a certain star status from the beginning. While directing more “Tarao Bannai” films for Toei, he emerged as studio’s leading director of Toei’s trademark jidaigeki, especially if they starred the seasoned jidaigeki giants Utaemon Ichikawa and Chiezo Kataoka. During the following decade, Matsuda should direct hit after hit seeming almost unstoppable at the box-office.

In 1955, he achieved his first number one spot at the annual box-office results. “Warriors of Ako” (Ako roshi: Ten no maki, chi no maki, 1955), a retelling of Japan’s famous legend of the 47 ronin, earned more than ¥313 million in revenues, more than ¥100 million more than Nobuo Nakamura’s “A Tale of Shuzenji” (Shuzenji monogatari, 1955), the second highest-grossing film of the year standing at “measly” ¥183 million. Until the end of the 1950s, six more films were among the highest-grossing of their respective year, among them especially his acclaimed “Jirocho” trilogy has to be mentioned.

With Kataoka portraying Jirocho, the eponymous medieval gambler and oyabun (“yakuza boss”) of the Tokaido road, all films in the series were tremendously successful. The aforementioned first part, “Port of Honor” (Ninkyo shimizu minato, 1957) was the only film to surpass “Throne of Blood” in revenues, part two, “A Chivalrous Spirit” (Ninkyo tokaido, 1958), ranked seventh at the annual Top Ten and “Road of Chivalry” (Ninkyo nakasendo, 1960) once again became the most successful Japanese film of the year.

Chiezo Kataoka as Jirochi in “Port of Honor”

At the end of the decade, Matsuda’s six Top Ten hits alone had grossed over two billion yen, at least one billion more than those of every other director. However, as Toei’s bread and butter, Matsuda was also put in charge of directing the company’s most viable film series. Thus, the director also shot four of the five film of matinee idol Ryutaro Otomo’s “Tange Sazen” series (1958 – 1962), more “Tarao Bannai” films and all eight films of the “Shingo” series (1959 – 1963) starring Hashizo Okawa as young samurai Shingo Aoi. From their respective number of sequels, one can safely assume that all of these film series were highly successful.

Furthermore, at a breakneck pace of roughly ten films each year, Matsuda emerged not only as a constant hit maker, but also as one the most productive directors of the decade. Thus, it can be claimed that it was indeed Matsuda, this forgotten and neglected company man, who was the financially most successful director of the 1950s, “The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema”.

The reason for this can be attributed to Toei’s typical company product. After having opened its gates, Toei soon specialized in producing low-budget jidaigeki. Toei jidaigeki were mass-produced on a weekly basis, mostly shot in less than two weeks and were intended as lightweight family entertainment completely lacking the grim atmosphere, violent sword play and thoughtfulness of more earnest genre colleagues.

Instead, the usual Toei jidaigeki is distinguished by rather loose plot threads, low-brow humor and borrowing its formulaic narrative from famous feudal tales of Japanese folklore. Indeed, with its reliance on clearly formulated black-and-white drawing of their central characters and a glorification of feudal concepts of honor, the Toei jidaigeki was, in the words of film scholar Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “(…) an atavistic return to kyugeki (…) a technologically advanced version of the primitive cinema exemplified by the films of kyugeki superstar Matsunosuke Onoe.”

The production method of the Toei jidaigeki is also noteworthy for abolishing the star status of the director in favor of an actor-based system. True, Toei also employed their fair share of prestige directors, most importantly Tadashi Imai and legendary pioneer Tomu Uchida, yet these filmmakers made celebrated festival favorites and rarely touched the world of the Toei jidaigeki.

Instead, the usual Toei jidaigeki director was an anonymous hack, his style strictly formulated by company policy. The actors were the true ticket sellers of Toei. This was exactly the reason for Toei’s domineering status at the box-office. With lucrative deals, the company lured in some of the most famous of all jidaigeki stars, as well as countless promising newcomers on their way to the top.

Seasoned audience members could marvel at the magnifying presence of such legends as Utaemon Ichikawa, Chiezo Kataoka, Denjiro Okochi or Ryunosuke Tsukigata, often starring together in one film to provide several all-star Toei features every month.

: Chiezo Kataoka (1903 - 1983)

: Utaemon Ichikawa (1907 - 1999)

: Ryunosuke Tsukigata (1902 - 1970)

: Denjiro Okochi (1898 - 1962)

Directed by seasoned genre directors such as Matsuda, Masahiro Makino or Yasushi Sasaki, these films usually functioned as the main feature of a weekly double or triple bill and ensured the attendance of the older generations drawn into the seats by the presence of their favorite childhood heroes.

Younger Toei aficionados stayed for the lower half of the double bill constituted by one or two one-hour long serials. These so-called Toei gorakuhen (“Toei Entertainment Edition”) served to introduce promising young matinee idols such as pop queen Hibari Misora, Kinnosuke Nakamura, Hashizo Okawa or Chiyunosuke Azuma who soon enjoyed a cult-like following by millions of teenage girls.

: Kinnosuke Nakamura (1932 - 1997)

: Hashizo Okawa (1929 - 1984)

: Chiyonosuke Azuma (1926 - 2000)

: Hibari Misora (1937 - 1989)

Even the most hackneyed of Toei’s program features usually made their money back with a large margin of profit. Thus, despite being arguably Japan’s most successful filmmaker of all-time, most of Matsuda’s films were low-budget features.

Even his more prestigious efforts usually lacked far behind in scale than comparable prestige pictures of other production companies. To underline this great irony of Matsuda’s career, being both the most important director of his studio and representing the most humble of all company man, we have to take a look at Matsuda’s probably most significant picture, Japan’s first feature-length widescreen film in color.

A pioneering production which at the same time was the background of a fierce race between two competing studios, Toei and Shintoho. A few years earlier Shintoho had begun the epochal production of “The Emporer Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War” supposed to be not only most the expensive film ever made, but also Japan’s first widescreen film.

Before the production could wrap up, however, another feature premiered on the big screen. A slight comedy about a wakasama (“young lord”) pretending to be a commoner and finding the love of his live in the process, having the unassuming title “The Lord Takes A Bride” (Otorijo no hanayome, 1957). It was the work of Sadatsugu Matsuda and Japan’s first full-color, feature-length widescreen film.

“The Lord Takes a Bride” – Japan’s most forgettable milestone.

Eventually, Shin Toho’s film should become the highest-grossing Japanese film of the 1950s, but Toei could collect all the credit for pioneering the new technique. Toei, the richest studio in Japan, had won the race against Shintoho, poorest of Japan’s “Big Six”, by producing the most forgettable milestone of cinema ever conceived.

While Hollywood’s first widescreen film had its hero come to terms with having witnessed the death of Jesus, the hero of “The Lord Takes A Bride” faces his biggest obstacle when confronted with his lovers affinity for squid, whose taste the young lord detests.

Sadatsugu Matsuda certainly was a giant of cinema, one who made mostly low-budget features. Millions saw his films, yet nobody took the time to remember his name. His style ensured certain success, yet was solely that of his studio. Had he been a producer, he would have been rich, but as a director he was determined to be all but forgotten.

Despite of these admittedly harsh words, Matsuda was anything but a bad director. Even his most forgettable films were at least entertaining and always well-crafted. Occasionally, he also made good films, sometimes even great ones. One is “Ako Roshi” (1961), yet another adaptation of Japan’s “Chushingura” and arguably Matsuda’s masterpiece.

“Ako Roshi” – One of the best retellings of the old story.

Shot in the most beautiful of color photography, written by excellent screenwriters Kaneto Shindo and Hideo Oguni, elaborately mounted and beautifully acted by a simply astonishingly large all-star cast, “Ako Roshi” grossed ¥435 million, making it the second highest-grossing film of 1961. This time, however, it was Kurosawa who took the first spot at the annual box-office Top Ten.

Indeed, in 1961 and 1962 two Kurosawa films became the highest-grossing features of their respective year, while Sadatsugu Matsuda had to be satisfied with the second respectively third spot. In the end, the early 1960s marked the true beginning of the age of Kurosawa and the end of the Toei jidaigeki.

The political climate in Japan had changed. Student demonstrations resulted in violent clashes with the police, terrorist groups, both left and right, emerged and threw Japan in a state of utter confusion. Toei’s teenage audience had finally grown up and began rallying in the streets.

Witnessing the declining success of their trademark company product, Toei tried to counter the audience’s demand for fresh and controversial material with the production of several zonkoku jidaigeki. Modelled on such milestones as “Yojimbo” (1961) and “Harakiri” (1962) and shot in somber black and white, these so-called “cruel period films” tried to lure the audience with gritty and violent depictions of the injustices of feudal Japan.

Their production marked in many ways a renaissance of the Toei jidaigeki. Seeing their star status in imminent danger, actors put more effort in their work, while younger Toei directors took the opportunity to escape their fate as providers of lightweight matinee fare, which often resulted in excellent performances and well-crafted films.

But it was once again Sadatsugu Matsuda who delivered the defining work of that era. Starring Ryutaro “Tange Sazen” Otomo, he directed “Duel of Blood and Sand” (Chi to suna no ketto, 1963), which surprisingly managed to be both highly entertaining entertainment with great action scenes and clever plot twists as well as being a grim and subversive study of feudal hypocrisy, modelled on Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”.

In the end, however, Matsuda rather chose the benefits of retirement instead of becoming part of this new mode of jidaigeki production.

Sadatsugu Matsuda in his later years of life.

In 1969, he made a shortlived attempt at restarting his career directing the first two “Mekura no Oichi” films, a notorious “Zatoichi” rip-off, but then left the world of cinema forever. He died in 2003 at the venerable age of 97.

Sadatsugu Matsuda was a hack, an unsung craftsmen and nonethelessly remains a giant of Japanese cinema. By the end of the 1960s, his Top Ten entries alone had broken the 3 billion yen mark, a record which should not be broken until the 1970s.

Acclaimed directors such as Mizoguchi, Imai, Kurosawa or Ozu may have directed masterpieces, but it remains ever more important to note that their “Golden Age of Japanese Cinema” wouldn’t have been possible without the backing of the big studios, which in turn were fully dependant on the efficiency of their anonymous company men whose work was the fuel that kept the machines running and brought “The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema” to life.

I’d like to thank my friend Daniel Warland for creating the featured image of this article as well as Matsuda Film Productions for providing their wonderful “Silent Film Database” without whose impressive insights into Japanese silent cinema this article wouldn’t have been possible.

Pablo Knote is a German-based critic and researcher on Japanese cinema. In 2012, he founded www.nippon-kino.net, Germany’s largest website solely dedicated to the classic Japanese cinema. He also writes for www.easternkicks.com and www.tasteofcinema.com.

Feature Articles

Godzilla, Whitewashed: A Special Report

May 18, 2014 Steve Ryfle Leave a comment

As a new Godzilla (2014) is unleashed upon the world’s multiplexes this week, there is poetic justice in the fact that Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Japanese monster ur-text Gojira is, at the same time, quietly touring U.S. art-house cinemas in commemoration of its 60^th anniversary. The Honda film is a reminder of Godzilla’s highly politicized origins, rooted in Cold War tensions and the conflicted postwar relationship between Japan and America. As most everyone now knows, the monster became a simple and crude metaphor for Hiroshima, but GOJIRA was really a clever and restrained indictment of the doomsday scenario that Harry Truman set in motion. Without ever mentioning the United States, Honda spoke truth to superpower.

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But now that Hollywood has, for the second time, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to refashion Japan’s celebrated low-tech monster in its own image (an ironic proposition to begin with), it’s clear that America is incapable of making an honest Godzilla. Consider the ways in which the new movie contorts and distorts history in order to avoid confronting the uncomfortable facts of American culpability in the monster’s origin: It offers a vague scenario in which Godzilla is an ancient sea creature that began appearing after World War II to feed on radioactive material; in footage made to look grainy and faded, the huge beast swims ashore at the Marshall Islands just as a hydrogen bomb is gloriously detonated on a beach. We subsequently learn that the nuclear testing program at the Pacific Proving Ground (comprising 105 atmospheric nuclear explosions from 1947 to 1962, with a total yield of roughly 210 megatons, equal to thousands of Hiroshimas) wasn’t intended to prove the killing power of the world’s most deadly weapons of mass destruction, but “they were trying to kill it”: the whole operation was just a big, unsuccessful Godzilla extermination project. And what of the hundreds of tests performed by the Soviets, British, French, and Chinese during this period? Would the filmmakers have us believe they were trying to kill their own Godzillas?

Perhaps it’s debatable whether Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. have an obligation to honor Godzilla’s origins after paying untold millions for rights to the character. But given Gojira‘s basis in actual events of the war and its aftermath, the brazen mendacity of the new film’s revisionism is rather astounding. It is not only an affront to the legacy of Honda’s Gojira, but it relies on the audience’s ignorance of and apathy toward history. Its inherent function—one that the screenwriters probably never paused to consider—is to maintain the American historical narrative about the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, events that needlessly killed nearly 250,000 Japanese civilians yet continue to be falsely remembered as necessary and justified actions to hasten the end of World War II and prevent an invasion of Japan, saving untold thousands of American lives. This narrative began with the U.S. military nearly 60 years ago and has prevailed with the cooperation of the education system and the media, including motion pictures. There have been great antinuclear films such as Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe, but these assailed the madness of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine while avoiding questions about the legitimacy of Hiroshima. Hollywood’s only meaningful challenge to the narrative was the 1983 television film The Day After, which showed Americans being flash-incinerated by a Soviet nuclear attack, and used a doctored photo of the Hiroshima ruins to depict the post-World War III remains of Kansas City. The film was loudly protested by conservative groups, who feared it could endanger President Ronald Reagan’s nuclear arms buildup; the ABC network capitulated by cutting certain scenes and following the broadcast with a panel discussion of Washington right-wingers, who concluded that the film’s true message was that America needed to beef up its arsenal.

The new Godzilla is just the latest effort to negate the monster’s politics for American consumption, a whitewashing that began when Honda’s film was first imported to the U.S. in 1956. The images of death and destruction in Gojira, made nine years after the war, are harrowing references to not only the atomic bombings, but to the fire raids of Tokyo in 1945 and the Lucky Dragon incident of 1954, in which a Japanese trawler was contaminated by the worst nuclear fallout accident in U.S. history. The film shows vast swaths of Tokyo engulfed in flames, and the aftermath of the monster’s attack is a smoldering ruin, resembling photographs of the flattened Hiroshima. A makeshift hospital overflows with the wounded and dying, their skin scorched with radiation, and a doctor waves a clacking Geiger counter over a small child, the most innocent of victims. Godzilla itself was not an animal but a soulless killing machine, a manifestation of the bomb that created it; unlike King Kong or the Beast from 20,000 fathoms, it did not prowl the city looking for its mate or a place to spawn—its purpose was simply to destroy. A Hollywood distributor repackaged the film as low-budget, atomic-age science fiction film of the type so popular at the time, and Godzilla, King of the Monsters! famously included new scenes with Raymond Burr playing a journalist trapped in Godzilla’s path. By placing a bloodied and bandaged Burr in that hospital, this version portrayed America as the monster’s co-victim and thereby blurred references to Hiroshima. The movie was heavily re-edited, and most significantly, a closing speech by a disillusioned scientist (Takashi Shimura, star of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai) was cut entirely: “If we keep on conducting nuclear tests, it’s possible another Godzilla might appear, somewhere in the world, again.” Certainly the world’s biggest practitioner of such tests wasn’t about to be lectured by a country it had just conquered and turned into a client state.

Then, 30 years later, Japan’s Toho Studios rebooted the franchise in 1984 with a new film, also titled Gojira, which ignored all the sequels, none approaching the import of the original, that had come in between. Godzilla was resituated in a world of heightened Cold War tensions and Reagan’s “peace through strength” mantra; in this outing, an American diplomat pressures Japan’s Prime Minister to abandon the country’s nuclear-free principles and allow the U.S. to attack Godzilla with atomic weapons. A Hollywood distributor with right-wing leanings got hold of the film and again re-cut it, this time with the effect of portraying the Soviet Union as the nuke-happy villains. And finally, there was Hollywood’s first attempt at adapting Godzilla in 1998, a mostly forgettable big-budget film directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Matthew Broderick. This time, the legacy of Hiroshima was sidestepped entirely, as the filmmakers tied the monster’s appearance to a series of controversial French nuclear tests in Polynesia.

Legendary’s Godzilla is the most egregious of all because, intentionally or not, it manages to turn Honda’s antiwar symbol into a spokes-monster for the nuclear status quo, all the while feigning an interest in the legacy of Hiroshima. In it, the military’s plan to exterminate Godzilla and its foe, the laughably named M.U.T.O. (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism—pity the fine actor David Strathairn, who had to utter those words without chuckling) involves—wait for it—nuclear weapons. Much of the film’s run time involves an inexplicably difficult operation to transport a single warhead, one out of the U.S. arsenal of roughly 4,800, to the desired location. There follows shopworn dialogue, straight out of a 1950s sci-fi flick; actor Ken Watanabe, as a scientist who divines Godzilla’s motives (because, we must assume, he’s Japanese), urges Strathairn’s brass buttons to reconsider the nuclear option. “We tried that before!” Watanabe pleads, and Strathairn retorts emphatically, “Millions of lives are at stake!” The climax has the monsters destroying San Francisco, while the assortment of uninteresting characters face a third-act screenwriter’s device borrowed from the 1997 Nicole Kidman-George Clooney actioner (!) The Peacemaker: the nuclear bomb with a ticking timer that can’t be disabled. The hero, a handsome young soldier and family man, gets the nuke onto a boat and out of San Francisco Bay before it detonates just a few miles offshore. We’d been told earlier the bomb is a massive one (“We’re talking megatons,” a commander says), yet the next morning the city’s residents are out and about, rummaging through the wreckage of the Embarcadero, not a speck of fallout anywhere. There was a teachable moment here, but that would have spoiled the happy ending. Instead, the world’s most deadly weapon is just harmless fireworks.

“When the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, Americans felt both deep satisfaction and deep anxiety, and these responses have coexisted ever since,” write scholars Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell in the introduction to their landmark study Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial. “Americans continue to experience pride, pain, and confusion over the use of the atomic bomb against Japan … It has never been easy to reconcile dropping the bomb with a sense of ourselves as a decent people. Because this conflict remains unresolved it continues to provoke strong feelings. There is no historical event Americans are more sensitive about. Hiroshima remains a raw nerve.” In our reluctance to prick that nerve, the authors observe, we have accepted a world where thousands of nuclear warheads are aimed at us, where we live in ever-present fear of extinction yet look to those same weapons for safety and survival. The likelihood of another Hiroshima, or many of them, grows.

Shortly before his death in 1993, Ishiro Honda said it had once been his hope that through the metaphor of Godzilla he might provoke a discussion about ending nuclear proliferation, but lamented that he had failed. His pessimism was understandable, and perhaps it was naive to think a monster movie featuring a man in a rubber costume trampling through miniature cities might inspire a serious debate about the dangerous precipice on which we all stand. Still, Honda—a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army, who often told of passing through a decimated Hiroshima on his way home from the China battlefront—should be remembered for his willingness to challenge the prevailing Hiroshima narrative. By contrast, Gareth Edwards, the British director of Legendary’s Godzilla, does the opposite, offering a trite moment wherein Strathairn’s general and Watanabe’s Dr. Serizawa (whose father died at Hiroshima, pegging Serizawa at 69 years old; he looks maybe 50) share a hope that it never happens again, tacitly accepting the gospel of Hiroshima as necessary evil. Edwards has claimed that his film’s disaster pornography—digitally realistic images resembling Fukushima, the Indian Ocean tsunami, Katrina, 9/11—contextualizes the story for our dangerous modern world. But his film does not comment on those images or what they might mean, and so they unspool as hollow exercises in technical prowess. Godzilla is said to be a force of nature reawakened, but by what? Without that answer, the latest Godzilla reboot is about nothing.
Steve Ryfle is author of Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star, a history of the Godzilla film franchise. His writing has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Cineaste, and other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.

Life-Changing Movies

Godzilla, Luke Skywalker, Norman Bates and Me

February 8, 2014 Gary Teetzel Leave a comment

In a lifetime of watching and loving movies, there are many films that have moved me to the degree that they influenced how I view the world. The films that went so far as to change the direction of my life are far fewer in number. Among this select group I would include the films from my childhood and teen years that first sparked my interest in cinema. All movie fans have memories of special movie-watching experiences from their youth, episodes that transformed motion pictures from a casual diversion to a hobby—or even an obsession. In my case, three films in particular would resonate with me at different ages and help shape my future passion for and appreciation of film. Aside from watching films, playing games on sites like 온라인 카지노 is also a great way to spend your free time.

The earliest of these films I saw when I was about five. While watching some children’s programming on TV, an advertisement came on for a film to be shown late that night concerning, the announcer proclaimed, a prehistoric monster attacking Tokyo. I was already crazy about dinosaurs, but had never seen a dinosaur movie. Since dinosaurs were extinct, the notion that there might be a movie showing me a living, breathing dinosaur had never entered by mind, yet now an advertisement showed me glimpses of what was clearly a dinosaur’s foot and tail. Gobsmacked as I had never been before in my young life, I ran to my parents to beg them to let me stay up and let me see the dinosaur movie—the only way to see it in those pre-DVR, pre-videocassette days. They compromised: I would have to go to bed at my regular bedtime, but they would wake me up at 11:00 PM and let me watch the movie.

The film, of course, was Godzilla, King of the Monsters s impact stayed with me: I was hooked on monster and dinosaur movies. As soon as I was old enough to read I would scour the TV listings for anything with a dinosaur, giant lizard, giant bug or giant ape. At eight I discovered Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, which taught me that there was a vast and varied treasure trove of fantastic cinema out there just waiting for me to discover. It also showed me that I was not alone: there were other boys and girls out there with the same unconventional hobby. Well before internet chat boards allowed fans to share their enthusiasm online, Famous Monsters created a sense of a fan community. Looking back, I can only wonder if my parents still would have allowed me to stay up late that Saturday night if they had known that a black-and-white Japanese monster movie would ignite a lifelong passion for movies in general and fantastic cinema in particular.

I was 11 when the next film to have a major impact on me was released. In the early spring of 1977 a Scholastic magazine mentioned an upcoming science fiction movie starring no one I had heard of save Peter Cushing, who, thanks to Famous Monsters, I knew mostly appeared in inexpensive British horror films. The accompanying photo, showing two armored figures and what looked like some pink gas, did not impress. I decided this was probably some cheap kiddie matinee fare and promptly forgot about it. A couple of weeks later, my father brought home an issue of Time saw the film with her classmates and gushed with excitement about the wondrous sites to be seen. Ordinarily, she had no interest whatsoever in fantasy or science fiction, so this really had to be something special. That settled it: I had to see this Star Wars thing, whatever it was.

Like countless children of my generation, the film struck me like a bolt of lightning; to paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, I felt as if I had “taken [my] first step into a larger world.” Its impact was multifold. First, it introduced me to the genre of the space opera and led me to explore science fiction beyond the narrow realm of the monster movie. This, in turn, led to me discovering science fiction literature. George Lucas’ frequent citing of Akira Kurosawa and specifically The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san akunin, 1958) as an influence helped spark a curiosity about foreign cinema. (An interest in Japanese cinema in particular was a natural outgrowth from my days watching Godzilla and his brethren.) The then-revolutionary special effects held a special fascination. Seeking information on how they were accomplished led me to Cinfantastique magazine and their special double issue on Star Wars. My technical understanding of film grew by leaps and bounds, and in Cinefantastique I was introduced to a far more mature level of film writing than was to be found in the pun-filled pages of Famous Monsters.

The next film experience to change my life came a couple of years later, when I was 13 or so. I found myself at home alone one Saturday night, so I decided to tune in to Canadian television to catch a classic I had never seen: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. I was well aware of the its reputation as one of the most frightening films of all time; I knew of the famous shower scene; I even knew the twist ending, thanks to having seen it on, of all things, the short-lived movie-themed game show Don Adams’ Screen Test. None of that prepared me for the 109 minutes that followed. From the moment Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane made off with $40,000 in stolen money, I was on the edge of my seat. I kept expecting commercials to give me a break from the tension, but, to my considerable frustration, the CBC had decided to air the film uninterrupted. When Janet Leigh disrobed to get into the shower, I couldn’t stand the suspense and quickly turned the dial (yes, the TV still had a dial at the time) for a break of a second or two, then turned it back. This was repeated a few times until the scene was over. By the end of the film I was both exhausted and exhilarated. This had been unlike any film I had seen before.

Star Wars and the monster films of my youth had been exciting spectacles, but Psycho was more emotionally engaging. I knew that it was more than just the writing and acting; I knew that Hitchcock’s camerawork and editing had played a large role in provoking my reactions. But how had he done it? Why had I been caught up in this film so much more than others? I felt as if I had witnessed an elegantly executed magic trick, and I wanted to know the secret.

Shortly thereafter, I discovered Francois Truffaut’s famous Hitchcock interview book in a local bookstore. Pouring through it in the middle of the store, I finally began to grasp the artistry of filmmaking. This wasn’t photographing stories, as I had naively thought as a child; this was using the technology of film for creative expression and eliciting responses from the audience. My way of looking at film was changed forever that day. When I later got a copy of the book as a gift it became, in essence, my first film textbook, and I eagerly sought out Hitchcock’s films to further my studies. Monster films and Star Wars may have made me love movies, but it was Psycho and Alfred Hitchcock that made me appreciate them as art. The Master of Suspense’s theories of filmmaking revealed a wide world of exciting creative possibilities, and it wasn’t long before I began to long to somehow be a part of that world. It seemed unlikely; in suburban Michigan, where I grew up, the dream of working in the movies seemed as remote and exotic as becoming an astronaut. Still, when it came time to declare a major at the University of Michigan, I didn’t hesitate to opt for Film & Video Studies (admittedly I made it a duel major with English; the pragmatic Midwesterner in me wanted a backup plan). I never became the next Hitchcock, or even the next Ed Wood, but I did succeed in carving out a rewarding career in the motion picture industry. I’m privileged to be able to work in the field I love, and it would not have been possible without the passion ignited by the films of my youth and brought to maturity by Alfred Hitchcock and Psycho.

Gary Teetzel lives in Los Angeles, where he has worked in motion picture publicity, film & video servicing and film remastering/restoration. He has reviewed DVDs for the Turner Classic Movies website and been a guest writer at DVD Savant and Sci-Fi Japan.

Feature Articles

Special Report: The Decline of Physical Media and the Rise of Illegal Torrents

February 4, 2014 Stephen Bowie and Stuart Galbraith IV 4 Comments

Almost one year ago Stephen Bowie and Stuart Galbraith IV, on their respective blogs, began debating the aesthetic issues of watching movies via streaming video versus physical media like DVD and Blu-ray. That conversation, which you can read HERE and HERE, happily prompted a lot of good dialogue all over the Net where how one watches film is nearly as important as what one watches.

And, now, the conversation continues with a chat focusing on the subjects of bootleg videos and illegal torrents, as well as the related but fiendishly complex issue of once copyright protected movies gradually lapsing into the public domain, and whether this is good or bad for consumers.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Let’s start with the issue of buying bootleg videos. I think we’re pretty much on opposite sides of the fence on this issue, as well as the related notion of downloading/streaming movies officially unavailable.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Well, first of all, buying a bootleg is something I’m a lot less inclined to do than possessing a bootleg.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪How do you mean?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Because that does mean there’s a middleman who isn’t a rights holder but is making a profit anyway. I’ll only fill that person’s pockets if I’m pretty desperate to see something. I couldn’t do what I do, as a TV historian, without being heavily reliant on non-commercially released copies of shows. ‪Isn’t that also true of Japanese films for you? Let’s say there’s a private torrent site that contains a whole bunch of fan-subtitled Japanese films that you can’t purchase legally. Would you or would you not avail yourself of those? Would it make a difference if it was for “work” vs. pleasure viewing?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I think needing access to movies/TV shows as a researcher is an entirely different issue. When, for instance, I was writing my Kurosawa/Mifune book, many of their films, particularly Mifune’s, weren’t available through normal channels. I ended up buying Hong Kong DVDs, for instance, Japanese DVDs sans English subtitles, and in some cases rented bootleg VHS tapes from Japanese rental stores in LA’s Little Tokyo and elsewhere. I’d rather fend for myself accessing what I’d need through rental shops here in Japan and, when necessary, going through official channels and viewing those titles I’d need to see through archives. ‪What I’d like to address is from the perspective of the ordinary consumer fed up that, for instance, Disney won’t release Song of the South, which has opened an underground market for that title.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Okay. And your response to that, from the consumer’s viewpoint, is what? “I guess I’m SOL then” and that’s the end of it?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Well, first off I believe Disney will get around to Song of the South eventually. The mighty dollar supersedes political correctness any day. Over time labels have gotten around these issues with (for my money, overly PC disclaimers and warnings), driven by legal concerns more than anything else.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪But that’s sidestepping the issue a bit. Are you arguing that someone curious about Song of the South would be wrong to avail him/herself of a pirated copy?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪From a historical and artistic perspective, it absolutely should be released. Besides, my argument with regards to that film is that Uncle Remus is smarter and wiser than all the white people in that movie. It’s no better or worse than a hundred other Hollywood movies from the 1940s, and certainly the racial stereotypes are far more offensive in Gone with the Wind.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Still doesn’t answer my question, though.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪No. I myself have a copy that was given to me as a gift. I haven’t watched it, partly because the picture quality isn’t where I want it to be. However, of the handful of bootlegs I have, all I’d gladly replace with legitimately purchased copies when and if those become available. But I don’t think that’s the case with those who rely on torrent sites for 50-100% of what they watch.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Right. That’s closer to the way I feel. My own primary concern about bootlegs is aesthetic — I’d rather wait and see if a remastered copy comes out somewhere. I even dumped TCM, finally, after deciding that even a recording straight off the air didn’t pass my quality check. Most of those were piling up unwatched in the hope of a legit release.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪With regards to your SOL comment, I think part of the problem is that many folks today want instant gratification. Old fogey me, I remember if you wanted to watch, say, Touch of Evil, what you did was buy TV Guide every week and hope, pray, that sometime over the next 6-9 months one of the 6-7 VHF and UHF channels would air it, and hopefully not at 3:00 am! For me the current state of home video is an embarrassment of riches. It’s positively amazing that so many obscure titles are easily accessible. Sure, there are a bunch I’d love to watch RIGHT NOW that are presently unavailable, but I have no doubt a good percentage of those will turn up sometime over the next year or two. I don’t mind waiting. A good measurement of that is DVD Savant’s Wish List. It was huge 10 years ago, but something like 80% of those titles are now available in some form.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪And I know collectors who yell at me for not having taped, say, The Wackiest Ship in the Army when it ran on CBN in 1984. The fact that my age was in the single digits at the time doesn’t buy me much sympathy.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Even those folks who have been complaining for years about George Lucas’s suppression of the first theatrical versions of the original Star Wars trilogy probably won’t have much longer to wait, now that he’s been bought out by Disney.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Or: I spend 20 years and a lot of money hunting down some rare TV show, and now it’s on YouTube. Any tool who wants can see it in three seconds. It’s infuriating, but that doesn’t have much bearing on the state of things now.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Another thing: I’d bet many of those loudest bellyachers probably have a huge stack of unwatched DVDs and Blu-rays stacked up, gathering dust. Why not look at those while you’re waiting?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Look, I agree with that in general: Like you, I’ve had so much stuff to watch during the DVD era that for the most part (aside from my area of specialty, which is a big exception), I haven’t needed to go outside the proper channels to find stuff to watch.But: One reason I felt like this was a natural extension of our conversation last year is that the shift from physical media to streaming changes this equation.‪ If the market is tilting away from the possibility of a consumer legally purchasing (as opposed to streaming / “renting”) a copy of a movie, does that alter the ethics of bootlegging?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I think that shift hasn’t so far stopped the flow of new and interesting releases, for one thing. Sure, if DVD and Blu-ray and all other physical media came to a full stop, that might change the rules. But that hasn’t happened. DVD and Blu-ray have been “dead” for several years, supposedly. I don’t see that now or in the immediate future. What I do think bootlegging and torrents are doing is having some, probably unmeasurable, impact on marginal titles. If everyone who wants a copy has one on their hard-drive already, what’s the point in releasing it to Blu-ray, DVD, or as a MOD?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪I’ll bet they are cannibalizing the same niche audience that small indie home video labels need. Which is a problem. Well, then, take it as a hypothetical, or look at some of the isolated instances where it’s true now. For instance, Criterion’s Hulu channel. Even if that’s not a dumping ground for films they don’t plan on releasing on disc (which it seems to be), it’ll take them 20 years to get to all of them. And while I can stream those if I want to (which I don’t), in Japan, you can’t. Don’t you feel the impulse to have someone make copies of those rare Japanese films? Would you ever feel justified in doing so?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Well, I found ways around accessing the U.S. version of Hulu while still paying for the service. But if I couldn’t, probably, no, I wouldn’t ask somebody to burn a BD-R for me just because I want to see something. For research purposes, probably yes. I suppose the bigger question is: By dumping titles they’ve licensed on Hulu, is Criterion damaging the financial incentive to eventually release those titles to DVD and/or Blu-ray?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪That’s a good question. Yes, I suspect that Criterion starting that Hulu channel was a tacit admission that most of those films wouldn’t get a disc release, and so they wouldn’t be cutting into that revenue. But I do see a lot of people on movie forums talking about streaming a film to see if they like it and then if they do, buying a copy. For me that’s backwards — I’ll always seek out the best copy possible for a first viewing, even if it means blind-buying a Blu-ray of a movie I might hate. But it may be that for others streaming and disc purchases aren’t mutually exclusive.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪As the author of a recent piece here on WCP bemoaning the lack of Jacques Rivette titles on home video, would you pay money to obtain those unreleased titles as bootlegs or torrents, and if so would you then re-purchase them should they come to DVD or Blu-ray?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪It’s true that Milestone and a few other small labels have publicly said they’ve dropped plans to release films for which they have the rights because they’ve already been heavily pirated. So that’s not completely immeasurable. It’s really frustrating but, at the same time, still sort of an isolated example. I mean, I’m not going to download a Lionel Rogosin film now because Milestone is working on his stuff, and it’s probably reasonable to wait on almost anything that could come out via Warner Archive. But a ’30s Paramount title? I wouldn’t counsel anyone to hold their breath on that. ‪Would I purchase the unavailable Rivette titles from a bootlegger now? No. But, that’s what I was getting at earlier — I wouldn’t have to. These days it happens anonymously on the Internet rather than via one-on-one contact, but I could essentially “trade” for custom-subtitled rips of French DVDs. I’m not in a huge hurry to do that, but I would also have no compunction about it. For instance: I recently borrowed a gigantic set of Portuguese DVDs of Manoel de Oliveira’s films from a friend. There were three or four Oliveiras I hadn’t that weren’t in the set or weren’t subtitled so, yes, I did indeed acquire non-commercial copies of those so that I could drop them in chronologically.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Technology-unsavvy me asks, “What exactly are you trading?” in terms of technology? And how do you make each other’s needs known?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪I don’t want to give away too many trade secrets (and I don’t know many, because I’ve only dipped a toe into this world), but essentially there are private, invitation-only websites where cinephiles upload rare stuff that others can then download as a digital file. In some cases the standards of commercial unavailability, and image quality, are quite high.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Hmm. This sounds like the 21st century version of secretive hoarders of 35mm prints in the old days! In any case I’m guessing we’re talking about numbers too tiny to have any major impact on even the niche catalog marketplace.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Exactly. Also, I believe you mentioned a kind of pool where you and some others commissioned subtitles for rare Japanese films, 20 years ago? Perhaps you can say more about that, but custom-subtitling is one of the factors that drives this underground community, and I think it’s one of the things that makes it ethically defensible.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Yes, well. Around the time I was researching and writing about Japanese fantasy films – this being something like 22 years ago – none of the original Japanese-language versions of these films were available in the U.S. officially. Local TV markets had stopped running them, and the only licensed versions were panned-and-scanned, dubbed into English, and often heavily recut from their original versions. Gradually some of the films became available on VHS by people who’d obviously obtained Japanese laserdisc versions (for the most part) and then had them subtitled privately. Eventually I learned the main dealer doing this was making so much money that he was able to fly First Class to Tokyo several times a year (a $5,000 ride) on all the dough he was making. Fans didn’t care. They just wanted to see the movies. I, however, got to know many of the original filmmakers – directors, screenwriters, composers, actors, etc. – people who’d normally be entitled to royalties from their studios had these movies been legitimately licensed. Clearly this guy was getting rich while the people who actually made those movies got nothing. There was a time before that when I was invited in to a small, private group (mostly fellow researchers) that would all chip in to have these movies privately subtitled. In that case most or all of us already purchased the Japanese laserdisc of the titles in question, so this was, to my mind, merely a self-financed supplement to that experience.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Well, I started to say that I don’t care if some douchebag gets rich if the end result is wider availability for the art; it’s incidental. Then the second part of your comment makes that seem heartless! But at the time, you have to admit, English-language licensing of those films had to seem extremely unlikely. I can only counter with my own experience, is that often people who made TV in the 50s and 60s ask me, “How did you see that?” And only one or two have then gotten annoyed that I had a copy of some never-released show that they helped to create; dozens, however, have asked me to send them one, because they didn’t have it themselves.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪That’s the thing: Back in the early 1990s it seemed very unlikely that any Japanese fantasy films would ever be released in the west in their original form, except maybe the 1954 Gojira. Nor did I think I’d ever get the chance to see any of the original Cinerama travelogues from the 1950s unless I trekked several hundred miles to John Harvey’s custom-built Cinerama theater in Dayton, Ohio. Now, of course, virtually everything is available, on its way, or under consideration.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Dave Kehr would kick you out of Movieland for writing that! There was more available on 16mm in 1975 than there is on DVD now! Don’t you know that?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I do think Kehr may be right about classical Hollywood films on 16mm in the ’70s, but that gap, if true, is certainly narrowing. Also, to rent (not buy) a 16mm print from a distributor was comparatively expensive, anywhere from, say, $40-$200, just to rent a print for a couple of days. ‪I do want to address a related issue, the fact that we may be entering a new age in which classic films from the 1930s may fall into public domain, most famously Disney’s early cartoon shorts, but also everything from King Kong and All Quiet on the Western Front to Warner Bros. gangster movies and Fred Astaire musicals, etc. Some argue this is a good thing, that it will free-up long unreleased titles. What do you think?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪First off, I think you’ll see new legislation that extends corporate copyrights before huge swaths of sound films start going PD. That’s one reason why I’m provisionally pro-piracy in some circumstances: because big corporations (not the artists who work for them) have been writing US copyright law in recent years. But, generally, no, I think we’ve seen that public domain status does no favors for a medium as technically complex as cinema (or television). ‪I don’t pretend to have all the details figured out, but I’ve always said that the only way to pry the gems loose from the studio vaults is to create some kind of tax incentive for making that stuff commercially available. Obviously a non-starter in the current anti-NEA, anti-arts political climate (although who knows, maybe the corporate handout aspect would have some traction).

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Exactly. As someone who’s worked with home video departments in various capacities, I’m aware of exactly how expensive it is to store and maintain film elements, to create a new video master, etc. If, say, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs suddenly became available from any and every PD outfit for five bucks, Disney would have zero incentive to ever remaster it again. I’d hate to live in a 2040 world where everyone was watching movies all mastered before 2014. As for private funding, to some extent that’s been happening for years. Hugh Hefner has facilitated the restoration of many films through his projects at the UCLA Film & Television Archive and elsewhere. And as much as people gripe about DVD-R programs, it’s an avenue in which studios have found a way (well, some have, MGM’s is DOA) to make obscure, extremely niche titles that probably sell a couple hundred units cost-effective.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪There are a lot of Universal TV shows trapped in that kind of limbo now: The existing tape masters burned in the vault fire a few years ago, and no licensee is ever going to be able to afford to retransfer from the negatives. So your only shot at seeing BJ and the Bear at this point is old syndicated broadcasts posted on YouTube, basically. No, I’m very schizoid when it comes to the studios: If they’re taking good care of stuff and releasing it commercially, I’m their best friend. If they’re neglecting it, fuck ‘em: I’ll “steal” it.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Of course, with TV there’s the problem of volume. It’s easier for Warner Bros. or Sony to remaster an hour-long Buck Jones Western and market it to hard-core B-Western fans with a $19.98 SRP than it is to take a chance on a 30-year-old TV show with 150 50-minute episodes.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Yes. Although many distributors have found a way to do that on DVD, and in fact I think Time-Life and Shout! may have realized that “complete series” box sets are in some cases more marketable than a slow trickle of the same series. However, that may also explain how you and I are coming from different places here. As a TV guy, it’s always been up to me to acquire what I want to see, either by recording reruns or from collectors. Only in the last 10 years has it been possible to buy more than a handful of old TV shows.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Clearly, also, emerging computer technologies are making previously prohibitive projects, like the reconstruction of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World possible. Twenty years ago the same work might easily have cost ten times what they were able to bring that title in for.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪There, you see the kind of thing this demon technology can spawn? Shudder.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Yes, and also content-starved media like Hulu I’m sure is driving TV (and film) availability like never before. The damnedest TV shows seem to be turning up on Hulu.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Actually, I’m mildly surprised that streaming hasn’t liberated more old shows. Researching my David E. Kelley piece, for instance, I found that only early seasons of The Practice, Picket Fences, and Chicago Hope were on Hulu; presumably, only what had been remastered for potential DVD releases (most of which didn’t materialize). Warner streams a few shows (e.g., Hawaiian Eye) where they can’t clear music rights for whole season disc releases, and some recent shows that didn’t get a disc release (like Rubicon) will show up on Amazon or Netflix. But I’ve yet to see a motherlode that didn’t also appear on DVD.‪ I don’t think, in other words, that streaming is really driving that side of the home video business … which may be a good thing. I don’t know.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪As a resident of Manhattan, I want to ask you about the bootleg scene in NYC and how that’s changed, and also if you ever checked “specialty” dealers in, say, Spanish or Chinese neighborhoods.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪I’ve done a little bit of that, but because ethnic video stores are targeting native speakers, there’s a limit on how much I can infiltrate them. I used to live in a neighborhood with some Indian video stores, but couldn’t make heads or tails of the DVDs in there. You may remember that I came to you for help when I found a cheap, very well-stocked Japanese video store in midtown. ‪In that case, I ended up printing out box art from Amazon Japan and other websites in order to find some of the few Japanese DVDs that had English subtitles. And I did find most of the Juzo Itami and Hiroshi Shimizu films that aren’t available here. But … once I started renting, I realized that most (though not all) of the rental copies had been replaced with bootlegged copies! So, even though Japan is not one of the countries we generally associate with video piracy, there you have it.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I find places like that fascinating. In Los Angeles I used to frequent Hong Kong and Chinese places recommended by Hong Kong cinephile Jeff Briggs, partly for those movies but also because they sometimes sold LDs or VCDs (and, later, DVDs) of obscure Japanese movies. There was a time, for instance, where the only way to see some of Kurosawa’s early films with English subtitles was via Hong Kong DVDs and VCDs.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Well, at one point I counted, and I have directly ordered DVDs from over 15 different countries!

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I think generally immigrant neighborhoods of all nationalities tend to do this, less so classic films and more often tapes of ordinary network prime time shows shipped to the States for homesick emigrants.‪

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪That’s interesting. That Japanese store did have a lot of JP (and Korean) TV shows, and many US films & TV shows, which would’ve been cheaper for me to rent there than from a regular video store … if they’d been the real thing! And understand, my objection to those bootlegs was aesthetic as well as moral, because they’d been compressed from dual to single layer in most cases. Fortunately the Itami discs were the originals, for some reason.

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ There was a time when in, say, Times Square, you could openly buy bootleg copies of the very latest movies, as in within a day of their theatrical premiere and even before, usually taped by a guy sitting in a theater with a camcorder. (Seinfeld did an episode all about this.) Does that sort of thing still exist today?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪I was thinking about that — yes, I still see the guys on the sidewalk with the blankets full of $5 pirated DVDs, though not as often. And I’m assuming they’re downloading those off the internet, not infiltrating a theater with a camcorder. Backing up one medium: When 35mm gave way to DCP, it took out the key ingredient in the experience of going to movie theaters for me. Yes, you still have the size and the shared audience experience … but I realized that what mattered most to me was that photochemical quality of celluloid. Without that, I lost the motivation to go to the cinema, and shifted most of that viewing to my home theater….

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪Same here….‎ ‪So, onto my last point: What’s the scene going to be like five years from now? Will torrents and downloads, legal and illegal, kill DVD and Blu-ray for good?

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪It’s not quite as dire, but in the same way, I feel like I would at least partially reject streaming video if it were to supplant physical media as the dominant delivery mode for home video. And what follows from that, naturally, is what do I do next? That has caused me to adjust my thinking about piracy somewhat.‪ Not because I feel entitled to free stuff (which is why many people download movies illegally) but because I do feel entitled to keep a movie in perpetuity if I purchase it, and to own a physical copy. Or am I not entitled to that, ethically? What do you think?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪So then, almost bringing this full circle, yours is predominately cautious measure while I see no immediate end to this party, content that new DVD and Blu-ray titles will continue to flow in the foreseeable future, maybe not in exactly the way we’d like it all the time, but with enough new interesting stuff to keep me more than busy for the time being.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪I don’t think I really have a prediction as to how fast things will change, but I think it’s clear that (1) there’s less demand for physical media, and that DVD & Blu-ray are evolving into a boutique market (like vinyl); and that (2) the rental market was a “bubble” that’s almost gone, and the future of consuming movies will mainly be a choice between buying or stealing. So, again, I ask it directly: If the choices are between streaming legally and acquiring a superior copy of it extralegally, what would you choose? In that future, would you censure cinephiles for congregating around private torrent sites?

Stuart Galbraith IV:‎ ‪I think I’ve always been pretty clear on this point: As long as physical media exists for me that trumps even legal streaming, let alone poor quality bootlegs. I think where we disagree is about the speed and certainty about it going away for the most part or completely. Should it go away completely then, I suppose, all bets are off. It may come to that eventually but not, I don’t believe, anytime in the next five or six years.

Stephen Bowie:‎ ‪Yes, I think that’s true in terms of the time frame. It’s even possible that I should be more worried about being able to buy another plasma TV when the time comes than about finding discs to watch on it.

We at World Cinema Paradise value your opinion. What do you think? Join in on this discussion by leaving your comments below….

Reviews

DVD Review: “Admiral Yamamoto” (1968)

January 17, 2014 Stuart Galbraith IV Leave a comment

Admiral Yamamoto (Rengo kantai shirei chokan – Yamamoto Isoroku, or “Combined Fleet Admiral – Isoroku Yamamoto,” 1968) is one of a long line of war epics produced by Japan’s Toho Studios featuring elaborate miniature special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, the man behind Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, et. al. This one, directed by Seiji Maruyama, is a bit different, functioning partially as a biopic of one of the few Japanese “heroes” of the Pacific War, a man whose reputation, at least among the Japanese, remains unimpeachable. Yamamoto, played in the film by the great Toshiro Mifune, vehemently opposed Japan waging war against the United States and the other Allies, recognizing America’s vastly superior industrial might against a Japan notably lacking in natural resources. Nonetheless, he was one of the architects behind the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and Japan’s early victories in late 1941 and early ’42.

Postwar Japanese movies about World War II generally fall into one of four categories. A tiny number, mostly confined to a handful of movies produced by Shintoho in the late 1950s and into 1960, whitewash Japan’s militarists and their culpability. Others, such as Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (1959-61) trilogy, uncompromisingly depict the war as it truly was, a great tragedy during which Japan inflicted unimaginable harm on both foreign peoples and its own citizenry. A third type, exemplified by Kihachi Okamoto’s Desperado Outpost (1959) and The Human Bullet (1968), are grimly comical and cynical.

Toho specialized in the fourth type, large-scale epics full of romanticized action and spectacle similar to concurrent American-made war movies like The Longest Day (1962) and Battle of the Bulge (1965). However, these films temper iconography recognizable to western viewers with equal sobering doses of bitter reality, through protagonists recognizing the great folly that ultimately leaves Japan in ruins and a generation of men wiped out for nothing.

That particular sub-genre peaked with Shue Matsubayashi’s marvelous Storm Over the Pacific (also known as I Bombed Pearl Harbor, 1960), the biggest of these big-scale productions, and which co-starred Mifune. In that film he played a real-life admiral named Tamon Yamaguchi, though Mifune’s characterization was virtually indistinguishable from his later portrayal of Isoroku Yamamoto, a role he’d go on to play twice more (in Toho’s The Militarists, 1970, and the American film Midway, 1976). Matsubayashi had himself been an officer in the Japanese Imperial Navy, and brought to Storm Over the Pacific and his other war movies a verisimilitude lacking in almost all other films of this type. He’d been there, even aboard a ship sunk by Allied fighter planes. He saw these films as sad memorials to his fallen comrades.

By 1968, when Admiral Yamamoto was made, domestic box-office figures were plummeting fast industry-wide, mainly due to the growing popularity of television, in virtually every household since tuning in for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Undoubtedly Admiral Yamamoto was prompted partly by Akira Kurosawa’s widely publicized deal to co-direct the 20th Century-Fox financed Tora! Tora! Tora!, a long-in-gestation multi-million-dollar epic from which Kurosawa was notoriously fired shortly after filming began, and which, unfortunately for Kurosawa, brought the controversial production even more press.

Toho’s decision to make Admiral Yamamoto amidst all this couldn’t have pleased Kurosawa, especially with longtime muse Mifune in the title role, to say nothing of the myriad other actors (Yoshio Tsuchiya, Masayuki Mori), writers (Shinobu Hashimoto) and others (composer Masaru Sato) with which Kurosawa was so closely associated.

Dramatically, Admiral Yamamoto is a mixed bag. It’s so damn reverential Mifune has little opportunity to be anything more than a God-like pillar of stoic and savant-like wisdom, but there are many nice moments throughout. The picture opens well, in 1939 Japan where Yamamoto, back in his hometown of Nagaoka, enjoys a leisurely boat ride along the local river at the height of cherry blossom season. He challenges the skilled boatman (Ryutaro Tatsumi) punting him downriver to bring him to shore while Yamamoto stands on his head. This attracts a lot of attention and the two men eventually end up in the drink, much to Yamamoto’s delight. This is neatly bookended late in the film when Yamamoto encounters the boatman’s son on the battlefield.

The movie integrates facets of the historical Yamamoto’s personality well: his love of gambling, his passion for (Japanese) calligraphy, in addition to his various successful and (mostly) unsuccessful naval strategies. What it does not show or ever even vaguely allude to is any aspect of Yamamoto’s private life. His wife and four children are never mentioned once, nor the Geisha mistress he reportedly kept (according to the wife). Quite possibly this was a deliberate decision for legal or other reasons (the film, after all, was made barely 25 years after Yamamoto’s death) but their absence hinders Mifune’s and the screenwriters’ efforts to humanize the character.

In other respects the movie soft-pedals Yamamoto’s personal contributions to Japan’s militarism. In one fascinating scene, it is Staff Officer Kuroshima (Yoshio Tsuchiya), one of Yamamoto’s adjuncts, who delivers and makes the case for Yamamoto’s proposal to attack Pearl Harbor rather than the admiral himself. This might be historically accurate, but it also seems a deliberate attempt to downplay Yamamoto’s culpability for what was a tremendously successful sneak attack with disastrous long-term consequences for Japan.

As with virtually all other Toho war movies of this type, a significant amount of screen time is allotted to a younger supporting character, always played by a rising Toho star. In Storm Over the Pacific the role of the idealistic young pilot was played by Yosuke Natsuki; in Matsubayashi’s Wings Over the Pacific (also known as Attack Squadron!, 1963), also starring Mifune, it was Yuzo Kayama; and here it’s fresh face Toshio Kurosawa as 1st Lt. Kimura, a poor farm boy Yamamoto helped get into the Naval Academy. Here, with the focus squarely on Yamamoto, more than ever this subordinate character seems to exist solely because there had always been one like it in Toho’s past successes, and that the studio was loathe to tamper with a proven formula.

And, as in past Toho war films, virtually every male actor under contract to the studio, along with a few big independent names, appear in Admiral Yamamoto: Daisuke Kato, Yoshio Inaba, Seiji Miyaguchi (that’s three of Mifune’s Seven Samurai co-stars), Yuzo Kayama, Makoto Sato, Masayuki Mori, and Susumu Fujita, as well as talent familiar to kaiju eiga fans, including Akihiko Hirata, Akira Kubo, Kenji Sahara, and Yoshio Tsuchiya. Yoko Tsukasa and beautiful Wakako Sakai turn up in token female roles, and Tatsuya Nakadai narrates.

Declining attendance figures seems to have impacted the film’s budget. This may be the first Toho special effects feature to utilize extensive stock footage from earlier successes. Toho was already doing this to a lesser extent in its giant monster movies, but never to this extent. For Admiral Yamamoto, nearly all of the attack on Pearl Harbor and much of the Battle of Midway are special effects lifted from Storm Over the Pacific while footage from Wings Over the Pacific turns up elsewhere.

However, Eiji Tsuburaya and his Toho Special Effects Group team still came up with several impressive effects sequences. The first is involves an effort to drop barrels containing food, presumably rice, off the coast of Guadalcanal, hoping it will reach the starving Japanese soldiers marooned there. As the stranded men desperately swim toward the dropped barrels, enemy fighters arrive and begin strafing and bombing the light cruiser transporting the food, eventually sinking it while the doomed men frantically try to swim back to shore and the relative safety of the jungle. The effects shots are a complex mix of miniatures and well-executed mattes and represent some of the department’s best-ever work in a Toho war movie.

(Spoilers) For the film’s climax, Tsuburaya’s team recreated the downing of the bomber carrying Yamamoto over Bougainville. The sequence matches historical records of Yamamoto’s death pretty closely, and yet the miniature effects are almost poetic in the way they are photographed. Indeed, they’re more stylized and cinematic than all but a few of the live-action scenes.

Admiral Yamamoto arrives on DVD from an unexpected source: Spain’s Tema label, which also released Storm Over the Pacific, Wings Over the Pacific and a few others simultaneously. The DVD is a real deal, just 8,25 Euros (USD $11.23) versus the usual $50-$65 Toho Video typically charges for its own domestic DVDs, and those are without English subtitles. Here, Admiral Yamamoto is presented in 2.0 Dolby Digital mono in both Japanese and Castilian Spanish, supported by Castilian Spanish and English subtitles. The English subtitles aren’t great, with their share of typos (e.g., “Scared War Unit” instead of “Sacred War Unit.” “Ensing Kimura” instead of “Ensign Kimura”) and a few lines of dialogue here and there aren’t subtitled at all, but overall it’s a decent job.

The region 2/PAL video transfer, 16:9 enhanced and thus preserving the original CinemaScope aspect ratio of 2.35:1, is surprisingly good. Extras include a photo gallery and original trailer.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
Admiral Yamamoto rates:

Movie: Very Good

Video: Very Good

Sound: Good

Supplements: Photo gallery, trailer.

Deaf and Hearing Impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English and Spanish

Tema Distribuuciones

1968 / Color / 2.35:1 CinemaScope / 130 min. / Street Date April 9, 2013 / Euro 8,25

Starring Toshiro Mifune, Yuzo Kayama, Yoko Tsukasa, Toshio Kurosawa, Makoto Sato, Daisuke Kato, Masayuki Mori, Wakako Sakai, Koshiro Matsumoto..

Cinematography Kazuo Yamada

Art Director Takeo Kita

Music Masaru Sato

Written by Shinobu Hashimoto, Seiji Maruyama, and Katsuya Susaki

Produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka

Special Effects Director Eiji Tsuburaya

Directed by Seiji Maruyama

Memories

“Best Print Available” Days at the AFI National Film Theater

December 11, 2013 Michael Jeck 3 Comments

People noticed the car parts first. Body parts from a ’73 Chevy Impala, painted a flat blue, seemed to float against the left-side wall of the American Film Institute National Film Theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The answer? – acoustics, the walls being sound-eating, unpainted cinder block.

But then the whole theater was an afterthought. The Kennedy Center had already been open for a year, and it was only after that opening that someone actually noticed no provision had been made for film in what was after all, a Center for the Performing Arts. The nether regions of the backstage of the Eisenhower, the ‘legitimate’ stage at the KC complex, were cut off laterally and the AFI Theater opened on April 3, 1973 with D.W.Griffith’s1919 silent Broken Blossoms – and under a cloud of controversy over censorship.

Costa-Gavras’ State of Siege (État de Siège, 1972) had been pulled from the opening week because it was about political assassination a decade after Kennedy’s own assassination – gee, why didn’t anybody think of that in the first place? – and a number of filmmakers pulled their films in protest.

And so nobody seemed to notice the then-cutting edge – and probably unique to this day – design of the venue in the first place. The seats and projection booth rested on a raised island within the rectangular space, with a small stage before the screen on its own island, and a powerful theater organ in between. The 224 seats, rather sharply raked via steps from the first four rows back, were stadium seating before the term had been invented, rising from about 4-5 feet above the floor at the front to between 20 to 30 feet at the back, and conformed to the rectangle shape of the space. Entry was via very abrupt stairs under a balcony at the back and very short ones at the corner of the front. Thus, a very short throw (only 68 feet from screen to projector), no fan shape, no bad seats, no bad sight lines (hardened buffs avoided rows 2-4 because, unraked, there could be head problems with subtitles.)

Not that I was noticing these fine points during my first viewing there when I was part of an SRO opening week crowd for Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon – one of the greatest viewing experiences of my life. Just the film itself would be enough, of course, but with three projectors in the booth, the transition to Cinemascope was both breathtaking and perfectly smooth (not always the case subsequently) with the curtains parting from the original academy shape to the triple screen right on cue. And throughout the finale, the organ thundered variations on ‘La Marseillaise’, with the base notes of the simulated small arms and cannon fire vibrating up through the island to the soles of your feet.

Where do you go from there? Easy, I lived there, and so did a lot of other people, in a time before cassettes; DVDs; screenings at the National Gallery or the Freer; a Late, Late Show or a Late, Late Show Part II (DC closed down early in those days). Such now-chestnuts as Singin’ in the Rain would attract turn away crowds, and after a while, you started to recognize people. The beginning of ‘The Gang’ began when a tall, slender, balding man with whom I contended for Row 5, Seat 7 nearly every night (late comer got Seat 8) introduced himself, adding, to this then-unemployed film bum’s stupefaction, that he was employed … in a serious job (as legislative staffer for Senator William Proxmire he came up with the name for the ‘Golden Fleece Awards’) … happily married … and had kids! (I’m still not sure how he did it.) After a while a 10- to 12-member “ Fifth Row Society” emerged, and when you arrived at “the Clubhouse” you routinely asked the ticket-taker “Who’s here tonight?” A disparate group, it ranged from the Congressional staffer, to a still-in-uniform undergrad, to a construction worker, to a phone sales rep, to a nuclear site troubleshooter, to a Peruvian cultural attaché, to several just unemployed. For the first couple of years screenings were always at 6:30 and 9:00, and with a short first film there was plenty of time in between for vehement discussion — and afterwards as well. One night the recapping went on so long we were kicked out of the KC and ended up in the lobby of the Howard Johnson’s opposite the Watergate.

Not that everything was perfect. These were the bad old days of the “best print available,” and with the Kennedy Center being the most prestigious venue in town and so attracting the most senior – and thus oldest and crustiest projectionists – shouts of “Focus!” were not unusual. On one occasion, focus maintenance was so dreadful for Kozintsev and Trauberg’s The New Babylon (Novyy Vavilon, 1929) that I, as Regular Patron, stalked off to the booth and exchanged views with the projectionist, so vehemently apparent that distraught ushers thought I was going to punch out the 70-year-old (I thought I was holding back.) Later a midnight screening of Michael Reeves’ 1968 Witchfinder General with Vincent Price proceeded with the reels in this order: 1, 4, 3, 2, 5 – making for a unique, Memento-like viewing experience. The projectionist manfully apologized sheepishly as we shuffled out.

In such an intimate venue, and with everyone knowing each other, there was the occasional audience participation. As the bathos mounted in John Cromwell’s 1939 Made for Each Other, and James Stewart paused as he ran in with the child-saving serum, the cry rang out, “It’s dead!” During a house-lights-up equipment breakdown at the two-hour mark of Ivan Perestiani’s interminable Three Lives (Sami sitsotskhle, 1924), somebody suggested “Let’s make a break for it.” And as Fred C. Brannon’s immortal 12-part 1952 serial Zombies of the Stratosphere (Leonard Nimoy billed ninth) unreeled with credits for each episode still intact, I amused myself by trying to memorize the entire cast list, making it by the finale as the sparse crowd egged me on.

And then there was the nitrate fire. It was 1979 and things were just getting a little bit more complicated in the final reel or two of Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947) when the screen suddenly went dark. I immediately looked over my shoulder and saw flames shooting up behind the windows to the booth. Presumably right after that the chords holding up the metal shutters for the windows incinerated and they closed down but I wasn’t still looking. Since the fumes are toxic, the ushers rolled back the immense, floor-to-ceiling side doors (originally used for moving in scenery) and rushed us out to the patio. As we milled about, waiting to see what would happen next, a young couple approached my pal and me, who had obviously seen the film before (we had come to see the nitrate print), and asked us to tell them how the film ended. Summarize the last act of Lady from Shanghai!? Well, we started to disagree right away and as the argument got noisy, the couple started to nervously edge away from two obvious nut jobs, although we did manage to gasp out – spoiler alert! – “they finally shoot it out in the fun house.” A month later the AFI brought back a safety print and my buddy and I realized we both had been wrong.

Well, it’s always easier to remember the misadventures. Over the years the question wasn’t whether I had seen a thousand films in the AFI; it was whether I had see two thousand. How many memorable and unique viewing experiences; but then, when after twenty years of patronage I was asked to become the programmer of the theater (the guy who picks and schedules all the films, writes the notes for the printed calendars, hosts all the guests, and can hurtle into the booth and order the sound level for The Guns of Navarone to be maxed – yes, it’s a dream job) I learned two things about the theater for the first time.

For years I had realized it was the best venue in town for viewing widescreen. Now I could try and figure out why. Now I could stand on the stage and tell the projectionist to pull the masking to ‘scope’ and as I looked back at the house I realized I was looking at … the side aisles. The screen was wider than the seats! All the seats, since the AFI was strictly rectangular. I realized I couldn’t think of another theater like that – since 99% of all theaters are fan-shaped, no matter how big the screen is, it’s never wider than the audience. And what’s important is not the absolute size of the screen; it’s the size in relation to the audience. Of course, sitting at the back of the house – which because of the steep rake was still not that far from the screen – instead of my fifth row, the screen would appear smaller, but it would still have that subtle psychological effect. Subtle, because I had never realized it in twenty years of viewing. I have no clue as to whose idea it was but I’ve never seen it done anywhere else.

And now, as the on-stage host, the one who has to get on stage as the credits are ending and before the lights go up and keep the audience from leaving so he can say, “And now here’s the director/star/writer/etc. of tonight’s film,” I realized that the theater was perfectly designed for that as well. In other venues the host and guest may have to enter: down the aisles in full view of the audience; from the back of the stage where you can’t see the film ending on the screen; or from wings which should never be in a film theater anyway. But at the AFI, where, since the island was not flush with the walls there was a wood-topped wall on the outside of the side aisles that was about head-high at the lower end, guest and host could lurk two steps from the stage completely out of the audience’s sight lines and be on stage in time to catch viewers before they could reach for their coats. Well that’s getting in to host anecdotes and not about the theater itself.

That the Kennedy Center, with its high arts tone, always regarded the film theater as a stepchild/orphan and clearly implied that they’d love it to be anywhere else is probably not surprising. (In 2001, the then-incoming head of the KC Michael Kaiser stated in print, “I simply do not enjoy movies.”) But the American Film Institute generally regarded it that way too, certainly after its headquarters moved from Washington to Los Angeles. But then there had always been an anomaly: as a visiting Uruguayan director said to me, “You mean this is the only AFI theater? I thought there were lots of little ones all across the country.” Sounds like that would have been a good idea.

Of course, as we learned, there are things worse than being ignored and neglected. In March 1998, the director of the AFI, Jean Firstenberg, while still in negotiations with Montgomery County, Maryland to restore/reopen the Silver Theater in suburban Silver Spring, announced the closing of the theater, stating, “With video, pay per view, and satellite technologies, there’s just not a need to show repertory on a regular basis.” In the wake of the resulting furor, the theater stayed open, but on a part-time basis, sharing with the Kennedy Center, and, with the stage extended, with a local theater group, sometimes out for a month, other times sneaking in three weeks of screening out of four.

And yet, despite the irregular programming, the last few years showed good-to-great box office, always with the yearly Latin American and European Union festivals; and in the last year a gigantic smash hit with a Kurosawa/Mifune festival, and an almost completely sold-out extended run of Russian Ark, probably the all-time house record.

But with the long-delayed opening of the triplex Silver Theater in 2003, the handwriting was on the wall; all the emphasis, all the publicity, etc., shifted to the new kid. And when the Kennedy Center made its move the next year the AFI said, Oh, Ok, it’s their building – they just didn’t care.

The end came without announcement and without publicity on Halloween night in 2004. The last show was just a regular screening in that year’s European Union Film Showcase, Pupi Avati’s 2004 Christmas Rematch (La rivincita di Natale), and the audience only found out it was the finale when I announced it at the start of the show. I brought bottles of champagne myself – well, it was on sale – and our usher, Jackie, and two distinguished local film programming colleagues helped me pass it out.

I still think it was the best viewing venue for film I’ve seen – and I thought that before I was employed there.

And now it’s a children’s theater but this movie seat cover absolutely does the difference when taking about comfort.

Michael Jeck is adjunct professor of film history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and writer of the text for the quarterly programs of Film Forum 2, New York since 1988. And he has been: an independent film distributor; programmer of the American Film Institute Theater; on-air host of international movies at Mhz-TV; and audio commentator on the DVDs and Blu-rays of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood.

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