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6.22.06 - 7.2.06
UCLA Film & Television Archive and Los Angeles Film Critics Association Partner with the Los Angeles Film Festival
LA NOIR Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Los Angeles Film Festival
"LA Noir" offers the iconic Los Angeles of mean streets and murder plots hatched in stuccoed Spanish Colonial mansions, for us to savor and examine anew. Film noir experts Alain Silver and James Ursini will lead an armchair excursion, fortified with plenty of movie clips, to the shooting locations of this most Los Angeles-centric of genres. Completing the "LA Noir" twofer will be PITFALL, director André de Toth's astringent noir classic in which nightmare displaces the postwar American dream.
—Cheng-Sim Lim, Program Curator
To purchase tickets for this series please visit www.lafilmfest.com.
Special thanks to: Zareh Arevshatian; Azadeh Farahmand; Ray Greene; Jeffrey Goldman; Mable Ho, Hong Kong Film Archive; Teresa Huang, Taipei Chinese Film Archive; Kim Han-sang, Korean Film Archive; Robert Koehler; Bahman Maghsoudlou; Wade Major; Mona Nagai, Pacific Film Archive; Parviz Sayyad; John Shibata, Pacific Film Archive; Alissa Simon; Cecile T'ang Shu-shuen; Alain Silver; James Ursini; Tammy Chung, Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles.
 
Saturday July 1 2006, 2:00PM
LA NOIR: THE CITY AS CHARACTER
Alain Silver and James Ursini have written extensively on film noir, including the Film Noir Reader series, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, and The Noir Style. Today the authors will present a show-and-tell of Hollywood's noir imagining of Los Angeles, its geography and architecture, derived from their most recent book, L.A. Noir: The City As Character. Interspersing clips from influential films noir with photographs of key Los Angeles locations past and present, Silver and Ursini's presentation promises to be an insightful and entertaining portrait of a city as revealed through its most darkly alluring images. This one-of-a-kind lecture will be illustrated with DVD excerpts of canonical noir from the 1940s and '50s, such as DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) and TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), all the way to THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) and other neo-noirs of the '70s through '90s. An audience Q&A with Silver and Ursini will commence after the lecture, followed by a book signing of L.A. Noir: The City As Character in the theater lobby. Patrons will receive a flyer and podcast (downloadable from the Festival's website) for a self-guided tour of noirish Los Angeles.
—Cheng-Sim Lim Approx 90 min. plus book signing
In person: Alain Silver and James Ursini Saturday July 1 2006, 4:30PM
Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive
PITFALL
(1948, United States) Directed by André de Toth 
Postwar male malaise suffuses this pungent crime melodrama from émigré genre specialist André de Toth. Dick Powell stars as the dissatisfied family man sucked into an underworld quagmire after a fling with conflicted femme fatale (and Wilshire Boulevard May Co. model) Lizabeth Scott spirals out of control. Bulky newcomer Raymond Burr got his breakout part playing the sleazy private eye stalking Scott, while a pre-FATHER KNOWS BEST Jane Wyatt more than holds her own as Powell's sensible, betrayed wife.
At a time when filmmakers typically trekked to New York to capture urban grit, de Toth insisted the independent production be shot in Los Angeles. "It was a must to make this on location," he later explained. "It was a sine qua non for me to make it real." Boasting exteriors that span the area's metropolitan sprawl, from the Santa Monica docks to the suburbanized Hollywood Hills and office towers downtown, PITFALL is an exemplary LA noir, a hard-boiled tribute to what de Toth called "grey, drab Los Angeles, where the cogwheels of life grind people into yesterday's dust." A box-office hit widely admired by critics, the film was also hailed outright for de Toth's decision to shoot locally, with the Los Angeles Times heralding its release under the headline: "De Toth Makes News, Shoots Film in L.A.!"
—Jesse Zigelstein
UCLA Film & Television Archive and Los Angeles Film Critics Association Partner with the Los Angeles Film Festival
LA INTERNATIONAL - 3 LOS ANGELES FILMMAKERS YOU SHOULD KNOW
Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Los Angeles Film Festival
"LA International" makes visible a Los Angeles legacy hidden to many Angelenos, highlighting a trio of émigré directors—Parviz Sayyad, the late Shin Sang-ok (sadly deceased this April) and Cecile T'ang Shu-shuen—who are quite possibly the most important Los Angeles filmmakers you may not have heard of. Pioneers who have indelibly influenced the cinemas of their places of origin—Iran, South Korea and Hong Kong respectively—they have also, by choice or necessity, led transnational and entrepreneurial careers that defy easy categorization. Perhaps their interstitial position—standing astride professional, cultural and political boundaries—accounts for their relative anonymity outside the ethnic communities of the city they now call or once called home. "LA International" pays long overdue homage to these eminent filmmakers in our midst and, regrettably in Shin's case, formerly in our midst.
—Cheng-Sim Lim, Program Curator
To purchase tickets for this series please visit www.lafilmfest.com.
Friday June 23 2006, 6:30PM
PARVIZ SAYYAD (b. 1939)
A leading director, screenwriter, actor and producer in Iran before the 1979 Revolution, Sayyad created one of the emblematic characters of the Iranian popular cinema of the 1970s: "Samad," a country bumpkin flummoxed by the ways of the big city. Sayyad himself played the character on TV and in nine feature films over ten years. His commercial success with "Samad" and other projects allowed Sayyad to produce riskier "art films" by the auteurs of the Iranian New Wave of the '60s and '70s, including such seminal titles as STILL LIFE (1974) by Sohrab Shahid Saless, and THE CYCLE (1974/1978) by Dariush Mehrjui. The last film Sayyad directed in Iran before going into exile, DEAD END (1977), has the double distinction of being banned by the Shah and the post-Revolutionary Islamic government. In exile, Sayyad wrote, directed and produced the critically lauded THE MISSION (1983) and CHECKPOINT (1987). Now based in Los Angeles, he tours internationally with the Traveling Theatrical Troupe, which he founded, while also producing and starring in his own weekly Persian-language TV show, broadcast worldwide on satellite TV. THE MISSION
(FERESTADEH)
(1983, United States) Directed by Parviz Sayyad  A political thriller shot entirely in and around New York City, THE MISSION was the first feature directed by Parviz Sayyad following his exile from post-Revolution Iran. The film stars Houshang Touzie as an Islamic revolutionary who undergoes a crisis of conscience when he is sent to assassinate an erstwhile colonel in the Shah's secret police. Sayyad himself plays the former SAVAK official, while the director's longtime collaborator Mary Apick appears as a beautiful émigré student harshly critical of the Khomeini regime.
At once gripping, thoughtful, and leavened by bits of comedy, THE MISSION combines narrative tension with a naturalistic depiction of quotidian life among Iranian exiles displaced to early-'80s America. Duly feted at international festivals and hailed by western critics, the film was widely considered an important work: "a masterpiece," raved the LA Weekly, by no less than "Iran's answer to Orson Welles and Woody Allen," while David Denby of New York Magazine called Sayyad's film "the first Gandhian thriller."
—Jesse Zigelstein Producer: Parviz Sayyad. Screenwriter: Parviz Sayyad. Cinematographer: Reza Aria. Editor: Parviz Sayyad. Cast: Houshang Touzie, Kamran Nozad, Parviz Sayyad, Mary Apick. Presented in Persian dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 107 min. Saturday June 24 2006, 7:00PM
SHIN SANG-OK (1926-2006)
He has been named one of the three pillars of South Korean cinema (along with Im Kwon-taek and Yu Hyun-mok), and The Guardian has dubbed him "South Korea's Orson Welles." In a career of over 40 years marked by spectacular highs and lows, this Korean film legend has been a consistent innovator. He was the first person to found and run an independent studio in South Korea (subsequently closed by the South Korean government in 1978). He is credited with introducing CinemaScope, the telephoto lens and synchronized sound to the Korean film industry. In the repressive social climate of the '50s-'70s, he made films that were charged with eroticism. Whether costume action epic, romantic melodrama or contemporary thriller, Shin's films fused visual lyricism with sharp social critique. In 1978 he and his wife, renowned Korean actress Choi Eun-hee, were kidnapped on orders from North Korea's cinephiliac President-in-training, Kim Jong-il. Shin made seven movies while captive in Pyongyang. The couple escaped to Vienna in 1986 and settled in Los Angeles, where they lived for more than 10 years before returning to South Korea. MY MOTHER AND HER GUEST
(SARANGBANG SONNIMGWA EOMEONI)
(1961, South Korea) Directed by Shin Sang-ok 
A classic of South Korea's Golden Age cinema of the 1950s and '60s, MY MOTHER AND HER GUEST centers on repressed female sexuality, a recurring theme in the "women's pictures" of Shin Sang-ok's early career as a director. Shin's wife and frequent filmmaking cohort Choi Eun-hee plays a young widow living with her similarly widowed mother-in-law and maid in a small provincial town during the 1920s. When a handsome artist rents a room in her house, she is torn between her growing feelings for the man and adherence to a strict code of moral conduct, which the film quietly unravels as ordained through traditional gender roles, observance of middle class decorum and Protestant conservatism.
Based on a novel by Chu Yo-sup and beautifully filtered through the perspective of the protagonist's little daughter, MY MOTHER AND HER GUEST reveals "something of Shin's childhood admiration for the films of Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir." (The Village Voice) And in its fusion of understated style and subtly subversive commentary, the film stands in counterpoint to the director's provocatively lurid explorations of female sexual-political subjugation in such prior and later films as A FLOWER IN HELL (1958) and EUNUCH (1968).
—Jesse Zigelstein Producer: Shin Sang-ok. Screenwriter: Ju Yo-seob, Lim Hee-jae. Cinematographer: Choi Su-yeong. Cast: Yang Seong-ran, Kim Jin-kyu, Choi Eun-hee, Kim Hee-gap, Do Keum-bong. Presented in Korean dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 103 min. In person guest TBA
Post-screening reception sponsored by the Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles Sunday June 25 2006, 7:00PM
CECILE T'ANG SHU-SHUEN (b. 1941)
She made only four features from 1969 to 1979 before retiring from filmmaking and becoming a restaurateur (of the now-shuttered Joss on Sunset Boulevard) in Los Angeles. But as a precursor to the Hong Kong New Wave of the late '70s and '80s, T'ang's influence belies her modest output. Raised in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Tang studied film at USC. Her debut feature THE ARCH (1969) immediately cast her as an artistic and socially conscious iconoclast in the Hong Kong film scene of the time. Her second feature CHINA BEHIND, set during the Cultural Revolution and completed in 1974, was banned in Hong Kong until 1987. Since then both works have found their way onto critics' lists of the best 100 Chinese films. In 1975 T'ang created Close-Up Film Biweekly, the first Hong Kong magazine dedicated to the discussion of film culture and film art. Close-Up proved prescient in identifying the nascent Hong Kong New Wave among young directors then working primarily in TV, and helped nurture the movement in its formative years. THE ARCH
(DONG FUREN)
(1969, Hong Kong) Directed by Shu Shuen 
Cecile T'ang Shu-shuen, working under her nom de plume Shu Shuen, launched an uncommon ten-year run as an independent filmmaker in the decidedly commercialized world of the Hong Kong film industry of the '60s and '70s with this expressively stylized period melodrama about illicit female desire. THE ARCH stars Lisa Lu as a dutiful Ming Dynasty widow forbidden by feudal custom to act on her requited attraction for the virile soldier (Roy Chiao) boarding in her home. Instead she arranges for the man to marry her daughter (Zhou Xuan), and the local townsfolk reward her by erecting an arch in honor of her supreme virtue and propriety.
Photographed in part by Subrata Mitra, Satyajit Ray's longtime cinematographer, and co-edited by the redoubtable Les Blank, THE ARCH became the first modern Chinese film to win international acclaim. It enjoyed a successful theatrical release in Paris, where France-Nouvelle declared it "a revelation thanks to its sensibility, its neo-realism and its director's discretion." While freeze-frames, jump cuts and other nouvelle vague techniques signal the film's formal experimentation, director T'ang's examination of Confucian mores is utterly unflinching.
—Jesse Zigelstein Producer: Shu Shuen. Screenwriter: Shu Shuen. Cinematographer: Chi H'u-che, Subatra Mitra. Editor: Les Blank, C.C. See. Cast: Lisa Lu, Roy Chiao, Zhou Xuan, Li Ying. Presented in Mandarin dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 99 min. In person: Cecile T'ang Shu-shuen
THE FILMS THAT GOT AWAY - AN ONGOING SERIES OF GREAT CINEMATIC WORKS UNDISTRIBUTED IN LOS ANGELES
Presented by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Los Angeles Film Festival and the UCLA Film & Television Archive
The films selected for the latest edition of "The Films That Got Away"—being presented for the first time in a collaboration between LAFCA, the Festival and the Archive—represent only a microscopic sliver of the fine work circulating around the globe that has yet to be commercially released in Los Angeles. What makes the selection difficult isn't how few films there are, but how many. It's easily conceivable to create a program of films that have gotten away strictly from single countries, such as Argentina, South Korea, Mexico, Denmark or Thailand, just for starters; or genres, such as the upcoming "The Films That Got Away" being planned around animated films. This series isn't meant as a celebration of entry, that, finally, these worthy films are in our midst, if only briefly. Rather, its intent is frankly more polemical, to remind moviegoers in Los Angeles of how many films from around the world they are routinely denied; of how many great and developing filmmakers yet to be seen in the self-proclaimed "film capital of the world;" and how every programming selection in a film festival is a political act.
At the same time, these three films do belong together, and can be seen as part of a larger movement by younger directors (all of them living far from Hollywood) rebelling against the Hollywood model. Each plays with real time, contains sophisticated use of plan-sequence, embraces elliptical storytelling in lieu of easy explanations and is made with classical craftsmanship while investigating more radical, perhaps "poetic" forms. Each, as well, is the filmmaker's sophomore feature. Tellingly, the people in Yu Lik-wai's ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES, Lisandro Alonso's LOS MUERTOS and Abderrahmane Sissako's WAITING FOR HAPPINESS are all encountering various states of what it means to be free, with varying consequences. Can this freedom extend to the cinema itself, and the liberty of moviegoers to see—on the big screen—a wider range of human expression than the corporate system allows them? This is the primary question "The Films That Got Away" wishes to pose.
—Robert Koehler, Variety film critic
Program curated by Ray Greene, Robert Koehler and Wade Major
To purchase tickets for this series please visit www.lafilmfest.com.
Sunday June 25 2006, 5:00PM ( Free Admission )
UNSHOWN CINEMA: INSIDE THE WORLD OF "THE FILMS THAT GOT AWAY"
YOU ARE BEING DEPRIVED OF THE OPPORTUNITY TO SEE HUNDREDS OF GREAT MOVIES EACH YEAR... and you probably don't even know it! Of the over 2,000 movies produced annually, the average Los Angeles filmgoer has access to fewer than 400 titles. In a market supposedly glutted with new product, why are there still so many great films being made both in the US and abroad that you have no opportunity to see?
A distinguished panel of filmmakers, critics, indie scenesters and movie marketers will examine the hidden world of "The Films That Got Away"—daring cinematic visions both foreign and domestic which, for one reason or another, US distributors won't touch. RAISE YOUR VOICE ON THIS IMPORTANT ISSUE because it's your ability to see unconventional movies and visions that challenge the norm that is at stake. "Unshown Cinema" will be hosted by Robert Koehler of Variety. Panelists are: legendary filmmaker Monte Hellman, Greg Laemmle of Laemmle Theatres, Paul Federbush of Warner Independent Pictures, LA Weekly film critic Scott Foundas, publicist Ziggy Kozlowski of Block-Korenbrot Publicity and acquisitions consultant Marie-Thérèse Guirgis. Please note: This event will take place at the Hammer Museum in Westwood. Thursday June 29 2006, 7:00PM
WAITING FOR HAPPINESS
(HEREMAKONO)
(2002, Mauritania/France) Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako 
Before venturing away from Mauritania for the promise of a better life in Europe, teen boy Abdallah visits his mother in the port town of Nouadhibou, where he's an outsider by language but also a patient observer of the sights and sounds around him. These range from a wizened handyman and his regrets of never leaving this backwater, paradoxically off the beaten path yet also a crossroads for a globalizing world, to Chinese immigrants and a photographer. The 12th and 21st centuries mix and mingle in this strangely alluring place, and Abdallah silently tries to make sense of it all. What does it mean, the film subtly suggests, to be on the verge of moving out to the rest of the world and yet be stuck in place, as so many in this ancient-modern town seem to be?
The frequently abused term "poetic cinema" rarely applies as well as it does to Abderrahmane Sissako's gently observant second feature, which respects the audience's ability to take in what cinema can best serve up: Images (and their accompanying sounds) which convey a panoply of humanity unfolding and coming to terms with what it means to be experiencing—after the title of Sissako's amusing debut film—life on earth.
—Robert Koehler Friday June 30 2006, 9:30PM
LOS MUERTOS
(2004, Argentina/Netherlands/France/Switzerland) Directed by Lisandro Alonso 
What are those dead bodies lying in the woods? And what does a wizened, fatigued-looking man, counting down his final days in prison, have to do with them? The mystery is suspended, if not cancelled out altogether, in Lisandro Alonso's astonishing second feature, which follows the man upon his release as he treks along the course of a riverbank to his daughter's island home. It's a journey forward yet also a return back in time, revealing the root of the most basic human needs and wants, primordial and never completely explicable.
Among the incisive and challenging young Argentine cineastes, none is more startling or original than Alonso, whose emergence with LA LIBERTAD in 2001 marked a turning point in Latin American cinema. That film's openness to real time, nature and a character's inner world as revealed through landscape continues in LOS MUERTOS, but with far more disturbing and unsettling implications. Here's the latest word on what it means to be an independent artist on the global cinema stage.
—Robert Koehler Producer: Lisandro Alonso. Screenwriter: Lisandro Alonso. Cinematographer: Gabi Migliora. Editor: Lisandro Alonso. Cast: Argentino Vargas. Presented in Spanish dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 82 min. Saturday July 1 2006, 7:00PM
ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES
(MINGRI TIANYA)
(2003, China/France) Directed by Liu Lik-wai 
Sometime deep into our new century, a cult with a taste for totalitarian power and post-Buddhist mysticism has taken over large swathes of China. People are herded into remote, dusty and decayed gulags with names like "Camp Prosperity," as the threat of a SARS-like disease outbreak hovers in the air. This is where brothers Xiaomian and Xiaozhuai find themselves, and where tentative romances (Xiaomian with sickly Lanlan, Xiaozhuai with Korean-born Xuelan) struggle to burst forth like weeds through concrete. When the ruling Gui Dao cult collapses and the camp suddenly opens up its gates, the challenges posed by freedom rush in, triggering a climate of emotional uncertainty.
With his first feature, LOVE WILL TEAR US APART (1999), and as the inventive and all-seeing cinematographer of the great Chinese filmmaker, Jia Zhangke, Hong Konger Yu Lik-wai has long displayed one of the most perceptive eyes for the actual world of the post-Mao generation. His second work is a major accomplishment, as Dystopian fiction, as a masterful display of contemporary plan-sequence, and as a cunning and slyly elliptical examination of the fears roiling the new China, from the old authoritarian days rearing its head and sickness running rampant, to the very meaning of what it is to be free and in love in a shifting society.
—Robert Koehler Producer: Hengameh Panahi, Li Kit-ming. Screenwriter: Liu Lik-wai. Cinematographer: Lai Yu-fai. Editor: Chow Keung. Cast: Cho Yong-won, Diao Yinan, Zhao Weiwei, Na Ren. Presented in Mandarin and Korean dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 96 min.
GUEST DIRECTOR
Presented by the Los Angeles Film Festival in association with the UCLA Film & Television Archive
George Lucas picks his all-time favorite films.
To purchase tickets for this series please visit www.lafilmfest.com.
Sunday June 25 2006, 9:30PM
DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB
(1964, United States) Directed by Stanley Kubrick 
Stanley Kubrick's satirical masterpiece stars Peter Sellers in a peerless trio of comic roles anchoring this hilariously bleak chronicle of the countdown to mutually assured destruction. When psychotic general Sterling Hayden, convinced of a Soviet plot to contaminate the country's "precious bodily fluids," orders a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia, the American President (Sellers) and his Pentagon staff—including the wheelchair-bound, Nazi-saluting scientist Dr. Strangelove (Sellers again)—ineptly attempt to stave off the catastrophic consequences.
George C. Scott as the jingoistic General "Buck" Turgidson and Slim Pickens as a gung-ho dive bomber head the sensational supporting cast that fills out Kubrick's absurdist theater of rampaging military paranoia, macho posturing and phallo-operatic sight-gags. The caustic screenplay by Terry Southern and Peter George, wickedly adapted from George's cautionary novel Red Alert, crackles with unforgettable dialogue and gleefully skewers every target within range.
Stunningly original and courageous for its time, DR. STRANGELOVE proved a huge commercial success, earned multiple Oscar nominations and was cheered by critics on its initial release. In years since, Kubrick's slapstick thriller has influenced any number of leading directors—George Lucas, Michael Mann and Oliver Stone all count the film among their personal favorites—and has achieved iconic status as the funniest and most devastating critique of Cold War politics in American cinema.
—Jesse Zigelstein Thursday June 29 2006, 9:45PM
MASCULINE FEMININE
(MASCULIN-FÉMININ)
(1966, France) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard 
Jean-Luc Godard's dazzling time capsule of mid-'60s Paris stars Jean-Pierre Léaud and Chantal Goya as urban twentysomethings swept up in a ferment of youth, sex, politics and Americanized pop culture. On a break from embodying François Truffaut's alter ego, Léaud plays a budding and frequently obnoxious leftist intellectual opposite the gamine Goya's clueless and self-absorbed aspiring yé-yé singer. Godard strings out their joint coming-of-age and fragmented love story over 15 chapters set against an evocative vérité background of dingy cafés, discotheques, bowling alleys and, of course, Left Bank movie houses. These "children of Marx and Coca-Cola," as they're dubbed by the film's most famous intertitle, must also grapple with their formative experiences and emotions from within a seemingly all-enveloping modern mass media environment.
The tenth feature in Godard's remarkable run of '60s masterworks, MASCULINE FEMININE may in fact be the most subtle, compassionate and accessible film from this rich period before his radical "Dziga Vertov" turn. Here the discontinuous, multivalent style, detached sociological observation and scattershot cultural critique are all firmly allied with warm curiosity and abiding affection toward the film's naïve yet world-weary characters, and the uncertain, dynamic historical moment they represent. "More acute, and more prophetic, than ever... Godard's insight into the moods and idioms of coming-of-age in the metropolitan West remains unsurpassed."—A.O. Scott, New York Times.
—Jesse Zigelstein Producer: Anatole Dauman. Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematographer: Willy Kurant. Editor: Agnès Guillemot. Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya, Marlène Jobert, Michel Debord, Brigitte Bardot. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 103 min. Sunday July 2 2006, 6:00PM
THE SEVEN SAMURAI
(SHICHININ NO SAMURAI)
(1954, Japan) Directed by Akira Kurosawa  This boldly elaborate chambara film revolutionized action movie aesthetics and confirmed the international reputation of Japanese master Akira Kurosawa after the success of his breakthrough masterpiece RASHOMON (1950). A period epic set during the civil strife roiling 16th-century Japan, THE SEVEN SAMURAI tells the tale of an impoverished farming village that hires a group of wandering swordsmen (or ronin) as protection against a horde of marauding bandits.
Kurosawa mainstays Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune lead a cast of regulars drawn from the director's reliable troupe. Reteaming with Kurosawa after his defining performance in IKIRU (1952), Shimura plays the stoic senior member of the masterless samurai crew while Mifune fairly devours the scenery in an inspired and subversive performance as a farmer's son turned wannabe warrior. Famed for its vigorous editing, dynamic compositions and spectacular battle sequences, THE SEVEN SAMURAI also speaks eloquently about feudal mores, class politics and questions of national identity facing postwar Japan.
A great admirer of Hollywood genre films (and of John Ford in particular), Kurosawa readily acknowledged his debt to the classical American cinema. THE SEVEN SAMURAI effectively reversed the flow of influence, inspiring countless modern-day admirers—not least, Sergio Leone, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas—to develop exciting, kinetic action movies on a solid foundation of humanistic sentiment.
—Jesse Zigelstein Producer: Sojiro Motoki. Screenwriter: Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni, Akira Kurosawa. Cinematographer: Azakazu Nakai. Cast: Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, Yoshio Inaba, Seji Miyaguchi. Presented in Japanese dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 207 min. |