Naruse

[Bodo Sch=%ISO-8859-1?Q?=f6nfelder?=]

I just came back from the San Sebastian film festival. The real 
achievement there was the biggest Naruse retrospective world wide till 
today. 40 films were screened, some English subtitled, Spanish subtitled 
seperately projected by slides, some with both languages projected by 
slides. I don't speak Japanese, but after some days I could notice, that 
the English subtitles, obviously done in Japan, were done not very well. 
Audie Bock flew in from USA to see some films she didn't know. Even from 
Japan some people were there. The retrospective will be repeated in 
Madrid in November/December. The Spanish film archive, the Cineteca 
Espagnol, published a very nice bilingual book. Does anybody know of 
videoprints of films by Naruse with English, French, Italian, Spanish, 
Dutch or German subtitles? Likewise I would like to know whether some 
writings by Hayashi Fumiko were translated into one of the mentioned 
languages. In San Sebastian also screened were Afterlife and "Fishes in 
August". Does somebody know the original Japanese titles? The Spanish and 
Basque catalogue didn't mention them. In Madrid there will be held a big 
retrospective on Mizoguchi in the next months. A profile on this director 
will be held during the film festival in Vienna in Austria in October. In 
the same month there will be a complete or rather complete Ozu 
retrospective in Berlin, which goes to Vienna the following month. I am 
not sure, but may be it will be shown in one or two other European cities.

In my notes on Ran, Bara no Soretsu ist listed in 1979. I think Chris 
Marker's A.K. is a remarkable portrait of Kurosawa. He doesn't try to go 
in psychology etc. but concentrates on the the director and the web of 
relations of work and artistic creation. Maybe I missed something in the 
last weeks, but somehow I am happy that there wasn't much like making him 
a monument In France there are some programmes comemmorating this master 
of the cinema. the best hommage would be to bring real good prints of his 
films into circulations. And not only the international or localized 
versions. I have seen three different versions of the Seben Samurai till 
know, two of Yojimbo, two of Sanjuro and so forth. Kagemusha and Ran only 
in  the international version edited by Donald Richie.

Bodo Schoenfelder