Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa Ebook
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WAITING ON THE WEATHER: MAKING MOVIES WITH AKIRA KUROSAWA PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Teruyo Nogami,Donald Richie | 296 pages | 30 Dec 2006 | Stone Bridge Press | 9781933330099 | English | Berkeley CA, United States Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa - Teruyo Nogami - Google книги The Itami family anecdotes were an unexpected bonus to the wide variety of stories about making movies with Akira Kurosawa. In a recent e-mail exchange with me, Yonesho added the names of Taku Furukawa, Kihachiro Kawamoto and Clive Walley to the list of filmmakers whose work has inspired her. Her work is identifiable by her use of cheerful watercolours and her mixing of media. Wiener Wuast , for instance features a hand holding up a card of paper against various outdoor Viennese locations with watercolour animation dancing across the paper synchronized to music by Norbert Trummer. Many contemporary animation artists come to Europe in order to immerse themselves in unique animation traditions such as the Czech school, the Estonian school, the Aardman school in the UK, among many others. Kihachiro Kawamoto was the forerunner of this trend when he studied under Jiri Trnka in Prague in the s. Fusako Yusaki , whom I wrote about last September, has been a central figure in the Italian animation community since the success of her Fernet Branca commercials in the s. The relationship between European and Japanese animators has strengthened in recent decades through artists sharing work at animation festivals in Utrecht, Oberhausen, Hiroshima, and elsewhere. She has also studied in England and did a research project in Estonia in This has led to a long creative relationship with the city of Vienna. Yonesho currently divides her time mainly between Vienna and Kyoto. In Vienna, she teaches workshops, makes films, and does exhibitions of her art. In the autumn term she lectures at Kyoto Seika University. Thanks to modern technology, Yonesho finds that she is quite flexible to be able to work anywhere in the world using a scanner, laptop, and he International Express Mail service to send her short animation work to the NHK the Japanese public broadcaster. The theme always develops from something that has been on my mind, but rather than create a story and address the theme explicitly, I prefer to express abstractly, through sound and music, a mood or atmosphere that cannot be expressed in words. Naturally, it pleases me when a viewer can perceive and empathize with the idea I had in mind when I created the piece, but I like for each viewer to interpret it in her or his own way. One of the aspects of animation I love is simply the fact that it moves. In my work I emphasize this aspect of movement and also rhythm, so I try to keep the shapes as simple as possible, and have them move to the rhythm in pleasing ways. I was also reminded of an interview I once read with Sayako Kinoshita, who founded the Hiroshima International Animation Festival in the s with her husband Renzo Kinoshita. The Kinoshitas, after enjoying a positive reception at animation festivals abroad in the s decided to start a similar festival in Japan with the ideal of striving towards world peace through visual communication. Hence the decision to host the event in Hiroshima. He also provides several high resolution stills from the film and a link to a tiny video of the film. Check out her website for more photographs of her work and her CV. Renku Animation "Fuyu no Hi". Midnight Eye has published an article I wrote about the career of Tomoyasu Murata. It includes a filmography of his work. Check it out here. I have written reviews of some of his films elsewhere on this blog. I first discovered his work when he had an exhibition at a small gallery on Hongo Dori near my home in Nishikata and I wrote about the discovery. Since then, I have been to other exhibitions of his work and have been collecting DVDs, books and other items published by Tomoyasu Murata Company. I would love to buy one of his paintings as well, but that is way out of my budget. I meant to write a review of White Road last year, but while still mulling it over I got distracted by other things. I really should watch it again and see if I can attack it from a new angle. I am also hoping to get a hold of some of his more recent films soon. When he follows Red Beard around he sees that the doctor is often selfless, thinking more for the patients than anything else. He bends rules and sacrifices whatever he can for the sake of his patients. It is these transformations through real-world observation and action that Kurosawa often shows us in his films. Like Watanabe in Ikiru , Yasumoto sees the world differently when he devotes himself to a good cause. In Red Beard we find that kindness is a sort of contagious disease, in a good way. Otoyo, the young girl who has known nothing but pain and hatred her entire life must, according to Red Beard, be cured in both body and mind. It is through her rehabilitation that Yasumoto learns still more lessons. When Otoyo refuses to take her medicine by shoving it back at Yasumoto, Red Beard comes in to make an attempt of his own. When Red Beard tries Otoyo comes back with the same reaction, so he tries again and again and again once more until she finally takes her medicine. Here Yasumoto has learned patience and perseverance. Otoyo, seeing that there are in fact good people in the world, begins to reciprocate with kindness of her own. When she breaks a dish that Yasumoto was holding, she sneaks out of the hospital to beg on the streets for money to replace it. When she looks after Yasumoto when he becomes ill, she learns even more about how empathy works. Finally, in her greatest show of kindness and the greatest affirmation of her recovery, she helps Chobo by giving him food. In Red Beard Kurosawa shows us that even those thought to be the most far gone can come back and learn how to be a kind person. Kurosawa also slips in another indictment of government in the film. Red Beard tells Yasumoto that it is because of the government cutbacks of his budget that he cannot treat his patients. Because of this Red Beard must seek other means to care for his patients. Throughout his filmmaking career Kurosawa has held government and authority with some disdain. The one character who remains constant throughout the film is Red Beard himself. Almost always calm and collected, Red Beard is a saintly figure among the community. The fault that one of the writers had with Mifune's performance was that he did not give the audience the feeling that Red Beard was a deeply troubled individual, and indeed this does not necessarily come through in Mifune's acting. He shows very little emotion whatsoever throughout the film. Only twice in the film does he become emotional. Once when discussing the government's cuts of his budget and once in his only show of violence as he fights back a mob of men trying to prevent him from taking Otoyo. Even after he fights the men he tells Yasumoto to tend to them, telling him that such violence is a bad thing. Not even Red Beard is capable of maliciousness on that level. The film is the culmination of Kurosawa's visual style. His use of multiple cameras, long lenses and long takes had been well established by this time and are used to great effect in this film. The three elements just mentioned all help to free the acting to enhance the film's realism. This film also presents one of the most realistic Kurosawa sets in his long career. At the Daiei Kyoto Studios. Remembering Dersu Uzala. Kurosawa and Animals. Kurosawa and Music. Sentimental Recollections. Observing the Kurosawa Group. Akira Kurosawa and World Filmmakers. Nishikata Film Review: May With such heavyweights as Stephen Prince and Donald Richie, to name but two, having written quite magnificently about his life and work, I feel there simply isn't much for me to add. If his lifetime and artistic output have been generously chronicled, his legacy, however, is something that could certainly do with more critical attention. The efforts of his collaborators, relatives, and former employers to keep his memory alive don't always smell of noble intent. From Toho twisting and turning its interpretations of copyright law and public domain in order to keep making a buck out of the director's early work, via the production of some of the scripts the great man never got around to filming in his lifetime - rendered dull and pedestrian by overly reverential former assistants, to the failure to get a Kurosawa Film Academy off the ground - a misconceived venture apparently based on idea that one can turn any young filmmaker into a little Kurosawa by infusing him or her with a certain reading of the director's "humanist" ideals as if these were some kind of ideology. Then there are those who think that that they can infuse their own films with a bit of the Kurosawa spirit through a form of association, like Hirokazu Kore-eda working with his costume designer daughter Kazuko on his first jidai geki Hana, or Yoji Yamada getting his mitts on a property penned by one of Kurosawa's closest collaborators, his script supervisor and personal assistant Teruyo Nogami - so desperate is the Twilight Samurai director's ongoing quest for master status that he believes he can acquire it at two degrees of separation from a geniune genius.