Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

March is Akira Kurosawa month at Criterion. On the twenty-third, the great Japanese filmmaker would have been one hundred years old. For this centennial celebration, we will be posting trivia questions and other contests all month, and giving away a different prize every weekday. To see yesterday’s winner, check out the update on yesterday’s post.

Today’s prompt:

Do you prefer Kurosawa’s historical or contemporary films?

Please respond by commenting below, and we’ll choose our favorite tomorrow. You must reside in the U.S. or Canada and leave a valid e-mail address to be eligible for the prize (a DVD of Stray Dog).

Categories: Contests

1. A Park—Night

A man aflame is running directly toward camera.

This image, which comes from Nicholas Ray’s initial treatment for Rebel Without a Cause, might stand at the head of almost any of Ray’s movies, since it so clearly embodies something of their central impulse: a blind urge to break away, to move, to escape a catastrophe that cannot be eluded, a burning already closer than one’s skin.

The treatment continues:

An officer and a bench sitter run toward him, taking off their coats, then begin smothering the flames. As they do, we cut to: a wide-eyed youth of fourteen or fifteen who has been staring at the scene and who now runs behind the trees and disappears.

And with that, both the burning man and the observer disappear from the script, leaving behind a hanging question: Why does the burning man burn?

Since we’re firmly in expressionist territory, there are two possible answers: either an outside force has set him ablaze or, as with Krook in Dickens’s Bleak House, some internal agent has simply unleashed the fire he has always carried inside. Is it the world or is he himself the catastrophe? Ray’s films rattle between these alternatives. The image that he finally chose to place at the start of Rebel—James Dean brought face-to-face at gutter level with the spasmodic cymbal beat of a toy monkey—leans toward the former interpretation (the world as mad mechanism), but the burning man would read rather differently if he dashed into the long, dark street at the opening of In a Lonely Place. There, his tortured trajectory might seem only the outside figuration of a fire that burns submerged in Dixon Steele’s angry, wounded eyes, reflected in the rearview mirror.

Many of Ray’s films begin with this sort of emblematic image, and the first shot following the credits of Bigger Than Life offers a smaller scale but no less dramatic variation: Ed Avery’s hand launches out to perform a habitual action, to pocket the watch that regulates his day and his life. A perfectly banal gesture become suddenly heavy and difficult, as the hand clenches midroute and retreats to his neck. Ray’s driving concerns can seem flat and abstract when summarized, and the films themselves are sometimes top-heavy with explicit statement. What saves them from toppling over is the kind of tactile immediacy evident in this shot, the way it draws on the viewer’s own, unacknowledged, processes of physical empathy to signal in a single arrested movement that this world we’ve only just entered is lined with invisible traps, and that every action is shadowed by the potential for pain. Read more

Bigger Than Life

Nicholas Ray

1956

95 min

Color

2.35:1

Categories: Film Essays

Two new retrospectives happening concurrently on different continents pay serious respect to a pair of thirties French cinema pioneers. First, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Jean Renoir is being celebrated with a four-week series (already under way and playing through April 10), which includes a selection from his early silent work (Nana) to his poetic realist classics (Grand Illusion, La bête humaine) to his Hollywood endeavors (The Southerner) and his later lavish color films, including the masterful The River, shot in India. While Renoir was later embraced as a direct, spiritual influence by the French New Wavers, his peer Julien Duvivier’s reputation hasn’t maintained the same level of respect. The Cinémathèque française’s major retrospective on Duvivier, which starts today and runs until May 15) may help remind movie lovers of his own formidable career, which, beyond the staggeringly successful poetic realist classic Pépé le moko, encompassed nearly every genre, including comedy (La fête à Henriette), sea adventure (Black Jack), literary adaptation (Anna Karenina), and even multicharacter New York melodrama (Tales of Manhattan). The Cinémathèque will show fifty-seven films by Duvivier, spanning the decades between 1919 and 1967.

Pépé le Moko

Julien Duvivier

1937

94 min

Black and White

1.33:1

La Bête humaine

Jean Renoir

1938

96 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Categories: News

Congratulations to yesterday’s winner, Caroline! Caroline’s pick for a work of Western literature she wishes Kurosawa had adapted was Oedipus Rex:

I would love to have seen Kurosawa do Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. Honestly, I think that he is the only filmmaker who could have successfully adapted the very influential Western work. His directing style and writing sensibilities could have brilliantly rendered the paranoia, alienation, and fated tragedy of the protagonist. I can just imagine the dark mood, eerie period atmosphere, and jarring music that Kurosawa would have used in depicting this story. The chorus would obviously have been done in a really original way, and the climax of Oedipus blinding himself and his final exile seems like it was written with Kurosawa in mind. And finally, Toshiro Mifune would have been fantastic in the role.

March is Akira Kurosawa month at Criterion. On the twenty-third, the great Japanese filmmaker would have been one hundred years old. For this centennial celebration, we will be posting trivia questions and other contests all month, and giving away a different prize every weekday.

Today’s prompt:

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, write a Kurosawa-related limerick.

Please respond by commenting below, and we’ll choose our favorite tomorrow. You must reside in the U.S. or Canada and leave a valid e-mail address to be eligible for the prize (a copy of Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa by Teruyo Nogami).

UPDATE: Our winner is Joren Cain:

There once was a man named Toshiro.
In film after film, he’s our hero.
And then, in Yojimbo,
A town’s future in limbo,
He reduces the bad guys to zero.

Congratulations, Joren!

Categories: Contests

Congratulations to yesterday’s winner, Matthew E. B.! Matthew’s pick for a “desert island” Kurosawa film was Ikiru, and here’s why:

If this movie is coming to a desert island with me, then I feel it shouldn’t necessarily be my favorite, but rather something that can provide me with the positive human influence that I am left without. This limits the choices, since so many of Kurosawa’s flicks are about swordplay and violence. Dreams would be a nice choice, but with so much surrealism, I’d look to something more based in everyday civilization. Therefore, I would have to select Ikiru because, while it does stand you alongside the downfalls and turmoils of the real world, it also presents you with a character so full of emotion, internal conflict, doubt, and redemption that, before I ever returned to civilization, I would have essentially GAINED experience in living.

March is Akira Kurosawa month at Criterion. On the twenty-third, the great Japanese filmmaker would have been one hundred years old. For this centennial celebration, we will be posting trivia questions and other contests all month, and giving away a different prize every weekday.

Today’s prompt:

Kurosawa was known for his adaptations of Western literature. Which novel or play do you most wish he had adapted?

Please respond by commenting below, and we’ll choose our favorite tomorrow. You must reside in the U.S. or Canada and leave a valid e-mail address to be eligible for the prize (a DVD box set of Eclipse Series 7: Postwar Kurosawa).

Categories: Contests

More than a decade after his death in 1997, the moment is right for the rediscovery of the work of Marco Ferreri. “I think he’s modern. More than modern, in fact,” frequent collaborator Marcello Mastroianni once remarked, encapsulating how far ahead of his time the controversial and innovative director was. Though he enjoyed a prolific and successful career in Europe, turning out thirty-three films over nearly four decades, Ferreri’s idiosyncratic vision was so aesthetically and philosophically radical that he never made the name for himself among American audiences that his Italian art cinema contemporaries—Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Federico Fellini—did from the late fifties to the midseventies, the heyday of intellectual European imports. As unhesitatingly aggressive in his attacks on left-wing complacency as on right-wing repression, Ferreri pushed and challenged his audience instead of conforming to what was stylistically palatable or ideologically trendy. But times often catch up with forward-thinking artists ignored or misunderstood in their own eras, and the long-overdue appearance in the United States of Ferreri’s 1969 masterpiece Dillinger Is Dead—finally released, to great acclaim, in 2009—seems to have marked that moment for one of postwar Italian cinema’s great subversives.

Born in Milan in 1928, Ferreri began his career working with some of the most important names in postwar Italian cinema. In 1951, he produced a short documentary by Luchino Visconti about the rape and murder of a young girl, and in 1953 wrote and produced “Paradise for 4 Hours,” the Dino Risi segment of Love in the City, an omnibus film also featuring contributions from Fellini, Antonioni, and Cesare Zavattini. Ferreri then moved to Spain, where he directed his first features, including The Little Apartment (1959) and The Little Coach (1960), both cowritten with the man who would be his creative partner for years to come, Rafael Azcona. In these early films, the dark humor, caustic social satire, and surreal logic that would define Ferreri’s subsequent work are already fully developed, a sign of artistic maturity and courage all the more extraordinary for flaunting iconoclastic, antiauthoritarian ideas during the reign of Franco. Read more

Dillinger Is Dead

Marco Ferreri

1969

95 min

Color

1.66:1

Categories: Film Essays

Congratulations to Friday’s winner, Rick, and thanks for calling attention to an underappreciated film in response to our question about favorite Kurosawa remakes! It’s now in the Netflix queue of many a Criterion staffer. Here’s what Rick had to say:

The Outrage, starring Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson (oh, and Shatner’s in it, too). The concept of Rashomon has been used countless times (I’m quite fond of the X Files episode “Bad Blood” and the All in the Family episode when Archie and Meathead tell conflicting versions of the same story to explain what happened to the refrigerator), but The Outrage was an intentional remake of the Kurosawa film. The characters all give conflicting reports of a rape and murder in the American West. Great stuff.

March is Akira Kurosawa month at Criterion. On the twenty-third, the great Japanese filmmaker would have been one hundred years old. For this centennial celebration, we will be posting trivia questions and other contests all month, and giving away a different prize every weekday.

Today’s prompt:

What would you pick as your “desert island” Kurosawa movie?

Please respond by commenting below, and we’ll choose our favorite tomorrow. You must reside in the U.S. or Canada and leave a valid e-mail address to be eligible for the prize (a Dodes’ka-den DVD).

Categories: Contests

Congratulations to yesterday’s winner, Franciscus Rebro! Franciscus wrote this response to our question about favorite behind-the-scenes facts from the making of Kurosawa films:

My favorite behind-the-scenes anecdote about Kurosawa’s film involves the director’s relationship with the peerless Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who scored several Kurosawa films and hundreds of movies by less famous composers. While working on the score for Ran, Akira and Toru couldn’t agree over the music to use during the first incredible battle scene. Takemitsu wanted the music in this scene to be composed entirely from battle sound effects, like the cries of men and horses, explosions and gunshots, and other sounds not playable on traditional instruments. On the other hand, Kurosawa at the time was deeply inspired by the orchestral works of Mahler, and in the end the director would not budge on his position to use a heavy, emotionally moving string score in this battle. At the climax of the piece, all musical sounds suddenly cut out to silence, and a single fatal bullet is fired, killing one of Lord Hidetora’s sons in one of the most impacting moments of the film and arguably Kurosawa’s entire oeuvre.

As effective as the score ended up being, Takemitsu always lamented not being given full artistic control over that scene, and it would be fascinating to hear his original plan for it, which very likely would have sounded pretty radical, perhaps along the lines of his early experimental tape piece Sky, Horse and Death. Nevertheless, it’s a credit to Kurosawa that he was so unyielding in his artistic vision, and that the results are exquisite.

March is Akira Kurosawa month at Criterion. On the twenty-third, the great Japanese filmmaker would have been one hundred years old. For this centennial celebration, we will be posting trivia questions and other contests all month, and giving away a different prize every weekday.

Today’s prompt:

What’s your favorite remake of a Kurosawa film?

Please respond by commenting below, and we’ll choose a winner on Monday. You must leave a valid e-mail address to be eligible for the prize (an Ikiru DVD).

Categories: Contests

The monthlong Akira Kurosawa centennial celebrations continue with the release this week of Rizzoli’s gorgeously illustrated hardcover book Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema, written by frequent Criterion contributor Peter Cowie. Combining biography and analyses of the individual films, and containing more than two hundred images, this impressive tome is a fitting tribute to one of the defining film artists of the twentieth century. In anticipation of the book’s release, we asked Cowie to share his thoughts on the project and Kurosawa, whose imprint on international filmmaking remains indelible.

Why Kurosawa today? What makes him relevant on his hundredth anniversary?

Unlike Bergman, unlike Fellini, Kurosawa’s influence is perceptible in so much of contemporary cinema. For example, he pioneered those racing tracking shots that are now a staple of Hollywood and Asian cinema. Where would Ang Lee, John Woo, or Zhang Yimou be without the heritage of Kurosawa? Just as, in earlier decades, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone learned from this master. Perhaps the most precious gift bestowed on the movies by Kurosawa, however, is his profound humanism—his understanding of human frailty, his compassion for that frailty. His work has a nobility, a heartfelt humility at man’s inability to live happily with his fellows, that’s sorely lacking in most new-millennium cinema. Read more

Ikiru

Akira Kurosawa

1952

143 min

Black and White

1.33:1

Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa

1954

207 min

1.33:1

Categories: Interviews

We were so impressed with the thoughtful, articulate answers supplied by so many Criterion fans in response to yesterday’s giveaway question that we felt we couldn’t pick just one favorite. We decided on seven winners (reproduced below). Congratulations to all of them! Read more

Categories: Contests