Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Kurosawa on TCM on Tuesday

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Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 03-07-2010, 07:41 PM:

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will show three classic films by Akira Kurosawa on Tuesday. They include IKIRU (1952), THRONE OF BLOOD (1957) and THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (1958) . Of the three I have seen IKIRU many times and is one of my favorite Kurosawa films. THRONE OF BLOOD is the master's retelling of William Shakespeare's MACBETH" and is excellent. I only saw it once during it's first theatrical run when it was first released. THE HIDDEN FORTRESS was Kurosawa's first film in TohoScope. In addition to the scope widescreen process, the film also utilized Perspecta Sound. George Lucas has credited this movie for the source of STAR WARS Episide 1V.

-Claude

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 03-09-2010, 01:26 PM:

I will try to catch Throne of Blood, the one of this trio of his classics that I have not seen. Ikiru just screened here at the Flamingo Library via the Criterion DVD. I was fortunate to catch The Hidden Fortress in glorious 35mm Tohoscope at the now long-gone Kokusai Theater (at the time recently re-located to LA's Little Tokyo) back when I lived in SoCal.

Recently I completed a project to port a transcript of Yuto Shinagawa's translation of an hour-long 1993 NTV broadcast interview between Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki. In it, Kurosawa has some great stories to tell about the making of many of his films.

One of his stories was about not being satisfied with the recorded sound of the screams during the sword fight scenes in Seven Samurai. In those days optical sound recorders were still being used on the set. He ended up drawing the optical track modulations he wanted for those screams. By hand.

An edited version of this NTV interview is available on the Japanese R2 DVD of Miyazaki's Sherlock Hound - The Movie .

The unedited broadcast version (in 10 parts complete with 1993-era TV ads) is on YouTube .

The English-language transcript of the edited version is available at GhibliWiki . One of these days I will get around to creating DVD subtitles for this interview.

Posted by Dennis Benjamin (Member # 1137) on 03-09-2010, 02:00 PM:

All of these films are masterpieces. I have them on DVD and they are superb.

I wish we still had directors like him around. No one comes close these days.