Sunday, July 12, 2009
Skip City Opens / Rashomon in 4K
As I wrote on Twitter this Friday (1, 2), the 6th annual Skip City International D-Cinema Festival is now underway but I just wanted to expand a little on the tweets.
The painstaking restoration of Kurosawa's 1950 masterpiece, unveiled last fall, was written about quite a lot last year. These articles on SciFi Japan, the AMPAS site and the Japan Times cover all the bases.
This restored version was screened in CineAlta 4K digital at the end of the closing ceremony. It was preceded by a 20-minute explanation from Skip City director Takizawa Yûji and Kadokawa representative Amano Yuniko. Still frames and clips with superimposed graphics were used to illustrate before and after results. Particularly impressive was the rectifying of splice jitter and how background softness was drastically reduced. Amano again related the anecdote mentioned in the JT piece above about the Audio Mechanics staff thinking the high-pitched buzzing of semi (cicadas) was noise that had to be removed. She said it was a cultural "bump" that had Kadokawa a little concerned at first but that it all worked out.
I was stunned by how clear Rashomon looked and sounded in 4K. I can only describe it as like looking through a giant pane of glass into the world of the film. Every tear that rolls down Kyô Machiko's cheeks, every drop of sweat on Mifune's brow and every whisker on Shimura Takashi's chin. Mifune's performance is still one of the most feral ever committed to celluloid. At the opening party Skip City competition jury head and Crows Zero producer Yamamoto Mataichiro "apologized" to Kurosawa-sensei for resurrecting the character of Tajomaru for his new film of the same name, starring Oguri Shun and directed by Nakano Hiroyuki.
Hope to get up to Kawaguchi several more times to catch both shorts and features, and of course the closing ceremony. Had a good talk with young director Kanai Jun'ichi on the way home. His film Courtship (Kyûai, 『求愛』) is one of the three we chose as selection members for the new domestic features category. You can read about the films and see clips here (bottom of the page). These three works were at the top of everyone's list but when I have time I'd like to write a bit about some of the films I championed which didn't make the cut.
Also excited to see the latest two installments in the Cinema Kabuki series, one of which is directed by Yamada Yôji (see my July 19 2008 entry on last year's The Tale Of Bunshichi).
0 comments:
Post a Comment