Tag Archives: George Lucas

Kagemusha (Akira Kurosawa, 1980)

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Kagemusha (1985)

 

The legends around this are many. Even after Kurosawa won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film for DESU UZALA (the film he’d made in 1975 in the Soviet Union) he could not get financing for KAGEMUSHA, and went five years without working. Depressed, suicidal and scratching a living from whisky commercials, he spent most of his time doing paintings of what his film would look like, over two hundred of them, very beautiful, highly detailed, and had his people take them along with the script – as a kind of visual storyboard — when shopping the film around the studios, though as Kurosawa is quick to mention, movies are MOVING pictures. The film eventually got made only with the help of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, then riding high on their 70s blockbusters, who helped obtain foreign distribution guarantees. The film also began as a troubled shoot with Shintaro Katsu, of ZATOICHI fame, who was set to play the lead, fired on the first day for wanting to film Kurosawa directing on set, and replaced with Tatsuya Nakadai, who had played the handsome gun-slinging villain in YOJIMBO (1961) and would go on to play the King Lear figure in RAN (1986)

The Criterion disk has magnificent extras; a making of, two films on the paintings themselves, a commentary by Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince and much else. My favourite bit was hearing Coppola and Lucas talk about the importance of Kurosawa, arguing that for his generation, great cinema was Bergman, Fellini and Kurosawa, with Coppola demonstrating how Kurosawa’s filming of violence can be traced from Ford and then through Kurosawa to Peckinpah, BONNIE AND CLYDE,  and his own work. Lucas talks of how Kurosawa had influenced STAR WARS and the work of others of his generation like Spielberg and Milius. Coppola and Lucas were both present at the shoot of KAGEMUSHA.

 

Images in Motion:

The story itself revolves around a drunken thief who is hired as a double for Takeda Shingen, one of a set of warlords fighting for supremacy in the 16th century, with Nakadai playing both roles. Shingen dies one evening whilst getting too close to a castle to listen to some flute-playing and his last wishes are that this be kept secret for three years whilst his generals stay put in their main castle, defend their clan, and let the others fight amongst themselves. The double fools everyone except his grandson, whose comments are dismissed as those of a child and later learns to love the man he eventually will think of as his grandfather; and finally, the warlord’s horse, who ejects him. The horse’s actions are taken as ultimate proof whereas the words of men, much less children had always been treated with suspicion. The film’s last third are motivated by the son, who has daddy issues due to being bypassed as heir by the father in favour of his own son; and who does the opposite of what his father had commanded, moving ‘the castle’ to the battle instead of keeping put, and thus ensures the downfall of the Takeda clan.

Framing, Compositions, Colour, Detail within Design:

It’s a film about identity, power and strategy, loyalty and ambition, and father-son relations. The only women one sees are the warlord’s mistresses, and not for very long. Watching the film and not well-versed in the history, I was sometimes a bit lost about the various warring factions. And yet some of the images are so astonishingly beautiful that I literally gaped AND gasped. The compositions are extraordinary from the simple ones of three figures at the beginning, to what he does with moving armies later on in the film. The use of colour has to be some of the most dazzling I’ve ever seen in cinema, sophisticated, minimalist (there’s often one or two colours that dominate), balanced. Even the kimonos the warlords wear are magnificent prints in gorgeous silks —  there’s something one can extrapolate here about the accumulation of carefully chosen detail which together expresses a balanced simplicity — that might be amplified onto the film. And then there are the battles themselves, particularly the last one with the slaying of the horses, thrilling and tragic, with the slow motion emphasizing the beauty of the destruction, the sublimity of the tragedy unfolding. It’s a gorgeous film and one can only appreciate the beauty of the restoration by comparing it to the dank, dark, pedestrian tones in the unrestored clips  utilised in the various extras. It was the release of this film that brought Kurosawa to my consciousness though I did not see it upon first release, probably put off by its three-hour length. I now aim to see it again.

 

Swift as the Wind. Quiet as a Forest. Fierce as Fire. Immoveable as a Mountain.  All that is must perish and the flow of the river is ceaseless.

Compare images above to unrestored version below:

José Arroyo

 

 

Anne Thompson, The $11 Billion Year: From Sundance to the Oscars, An Inside Look at the Changing Hollywood System

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11 billianaThe $11 Billion Year

In June 2013, at a University of Southern California event with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg predicted an implosion of the film industry: the failure at the box office of ‘tentpoles’, mega-budget movies that are designed with potential sequels in mind and anchor a studio’s release schedule, ‘are going to go crashing to the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.’

 

According to Anne Thompson in her interesting and illuminating new book, The $11 Billion Year: From Sundance to the Oscars, An Inside Look at the Changing Hollywood System, the prediction came true. White House Down, After Earth, The Lone Ranger, Turbo and R.I.P.D. tanked at the box-office and the whole cinematic apparatus — the paradigm of production, distribution, exhibition — and the technological, economic and political structures that underpin it, did indeed change.

 

‘In 2012 US domestic movie box-office delivered a record-breaking $11 billion, up 8.4 % on the previous years’ Thompson writes. ‘If record foreign box office added to total it would have been a $35 billion year’. But as Thompson goes on to show, ‘despite appearances, the movie business isn’t thriving. The seeds of the industry’s destruction were present in 2012’.

Film in 2012

Inspired by William Goldman’s, The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, an examination of the state of Broadway and its theatre through following the 1967-68 Season, Thompson follows, in chronological order, the developments in film in 2012: The discoveries of the Sundance Film Festival in January (Searching for the Sugar Man, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Your Sister’s Sister); the backgrounds to two potential franchises released in the Spring and why one worked (The Hunger Games) and one didn’t (John Carter); and how in 2012 the word “film” officially became an anachronism because by then the changeover to digital was pretty much complete.

 

Thompson also demonstrates how in May, the Cannes International Film Festival launched Cannes veteran Michael Haneke’s Amour and Cannes newbie Paul Thomas Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. ‘The studios use Cannes as a massive marketing opportunity to launch their pictures in the all-important global market, which has outstripped North America and now represents more than 50 per cent of the film industry’s annual grosses.’

 

Comi-Con in July underlined the importance of the comic-book movie and how the competition between those superheroes based on Marvel and those on DC carries over from the comic-book fan-base onto the film adaptations. According to Thompson: ‘Warner Bros, which acquired DC Comic in 1969 and therefore movie and television rights to the jewels in the DC crown, Superman and Batman, discovered in the early eighties that many fans of the comics were attending Comic-Con – and would come to see their movies. Soon the promotion of movies inspired by comic books expanded to genre films, and eventually just about anything aimed at the studio’s sweet spot, the young male demo’.

 

Thompson offers interesting insights into how the Fall film festivals (Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York) helped launch Argo, Silver Linings Playbook, Life of Pi and Lincoln; how female representation in popular movies hit its lowest in five years (only 28% of speaking parts in the highest grossing US movies were women) and how gender politics affected the reception of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty; and lastly, she gives a sharp and entertaining account of ten things that changed the Oscar race that year (One of them is that on the opening day of Zero Dark Thirty, three US Senators accuse the filmmakers of inaccuracy).

The Whole System Has Changed

What becomes clear in the book is that the whole system has changed, at least as it pertains to the ‘Global’ film industry with a primary base in the United States (Bollywood, Nollywood, Chinese Cinema etc. are all bypassed in this account). The overall structure of the industry is still oligopolistic with six majors who are signatories to the Motion Picture Association of America: News Corp-owned Fox, Sony, Warner Bros (which owns HBO), Viacom owned Paramount (which also owns CBS and Nickelodeon), Comcast owned NBC Universal (which owns USA and the Sci-Fi Channel) and Disney (which owns ABC and ESPN). Lionsgate, who is not a signatory to the MPAA, is now also considered a major. These companies control the film industry. But what that industry is has now changed.

 

Movies are now made on digital. On one hand, this permits all kinds of additional special effects, which can potentially make them very expensive; on the other hand, more personal dramas that don’t require much post-production can now be made on a micro-budget. As a result, in 2012 Sundance logged more than 4000 feature submissions.

 

Screen conversions from 35mm to digital expanded globally from 16, 000 in 2009 to 36,000 in 2010 and by 2012 the changeover was complete. Studios benefitted economically but even filmmakers are wary of digital. They ‘try to sock away a 35mm print of their films for safe-keeping as digital formats demand constant, expensive upgrading to the latest system’.

 

Thompson vividly demonstrates how the whole distribution system has changed. It used to be that movies played in theatres, then the film was made available after three or four months at a premium cost by Video on Demand (VOD), then sell and rent on DVD’s, then show it on pay cable, and then make it available on broadcast television all over the world. Now there’s a rush to get everything to Video on Demand (VOD) as quickly as possible and some films were available on VOD before they screened in theatres or bypassed theatres altogether. According to Thompson, ‘‘close to a quarter of the 2012 Sundance releases were made available concurrent with or before their theatrical openings on VOD outlets – cable iTunes, Hulu or filmmakers’ own website’ Recently, Josh Whedon’s In Your Eyes is an example of a film that bypassed traditional distribution structures and went right to VOD on the very same day it was premiered at the Tribeca film festival, the type of distribution theatre owners most fear because it renders them obsolete.

A Four Quadrant Movie

In 1982 Spielberg’s E.T. was the biggest box office success of its year. It was based on an original story and it stayed on screen for over a year in America. It was the ‘four quadrant movie’’, films that are equally appealing to young, old, male or female that studios constantly chase after. But of the top 26 films of 2012,’ nineteen were based on some other property, eight were sequels, four were comic-book franchises, two were remakes, two were prequels, and seven were originals’. Moreover, the biggest market is now China. it grew 36% in 2012, outstripping Japan as American’s biggest foreign market. American studios are so eager to curry favour there that they went so far as to re-edit Django Unchained an Iron Man 3 in order to get it through the censors and into that now lucrative market.

 

 

According to Thompson, in their University of California talk ‘Spielberg and Lucas were basically calling attention to the end of the movie business in which they grew up’. Spielberg, as powerful a director as there is in Hollywood, had struggled to get Lincoln made. It was a serious drama with no sequel potential. It wasn’t based on a comic book, and getting the money to make it had been so difficult he considered turning to HBO.

 

Steven Soderbergh did indeed go to HBO to make the Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra. As a studio movie it would have cost $70 million to make and the studios didn’t want to risk it, even with Matt Damon and Michael Douglas attached to star. It was made instead at HBO for $23 million, won the Emmy, and was released theatrically outside the US. Oliver Smith, Martin Scorcese, Michael Mann, Neil Jordan, and Spielberg himself now all routinely work in television. That’s where serious drama and comedy that isn’t aimed at adolescents are being made.

Aesthetic Consequences

What Thompson doesn’t explore are the aesthetic consequences of this. What might it mean to cut off romance, interiority, complex character psychology and so on from big screen presentation. Many might ask whether it would matter if the bigger and smaller screens carve up different genres or different themes amongst themselves, with spectacle relegated to the big screen, and more personal dramas to the smaller screen. But I think it matters a huge amount. In a now famous ‘Memo to Hollywood’ Manohla Dargis in The New York Times tells filmmakers the following:

‘ You know that moody shot that you and your director of photography anguished over for hours and hours? It may look beautiful, but there are critics who will never know, which certainly encourages them to pay more attention to the plot than the visuals. Viewers who bypass the theatrical experience and prefer watching movies on their televisions and tablets may not mind. Some directors, especially those whose talking heads and two shots look better on small screens, also won’t care; others just want their work seen however, wherever. But I bet there are directors who would freak if they knew how some critics were watching their movies’.

 

So should anyone interested in the art of movies since, perhaps even more fundamentally, sometimes even basic plot is not optimally decipherable on a tablet or phone. What one sees and how one is shown it is essential to how we experience and evaluate entertainment and art. Of course it does not always follow that bigger is better. But there should be some correlation between how a movie is designed to be seen and how it is in fact seen; at least as concerns evaluation of all kinds, but particularly that by professional critics.

Thompson’s Got Great Sources

If Thompson doesn’t answer this type of question she does touch on many others I have not addressed here. Thompson is a journalist who is there at all the events and festivals she’s writing about. She’s got great sources, and she seems to be writing in the heat of thought as it sparks to life and in the midst of events as they unfold. We get to follow, in chronological order, the developments in film in 2012 from Sundance to the Academy Awards (ultimately awarded in February 2013). Thompson thus affords herself and us an eye-witness and critical look at the state of the industry and the state of the art. And as her vividly entertaining and informative book makes clear in so many different ways, the prognosis is not good.

 

 

José Arroyo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anne Thompson, The $11 Billion Year: From Sundance to the Oscars, An Inside Look at the Changing Hollywood System

Anne Thompson is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Thompson on Hollywood

Newmarket Press for IT Books, UK: Harper Collins, 2014

Available from Kindle Amazon and other outlets.

A shorter version of this review was published in The Conversation.