Kitano's honor

[Jason Gray]

--- Mark Nornes <amnornes at umich.edu> からのメッセージ：
> 
> On Aug 28, 2004, at 9:30 PM, Jason Gray wrote:
> 
> > an amazing sub-segment showing examples of old
> > Korean seishun eiga that were copied shot-for-shot
> from
> > Ishihara Yujiro movies etc.
> 
> Could you write a little about this?
> 
> m
> 

I was watching the show while doing some work, so forgive
the lack of finer details. The overall theme of the Korean
segment was that now, Korean film is hot, creatively and
financially -- Korean people love their own cinema. Need
it be said that, aside from the occasional hit, the
opposite situation exists in Japan. 

But once upon a time, Korea was bankrupt of ideas and
turned to Japan's seishun eiga boom in the 1960s for
material: stories, plots, shots, clothes, even the titles
(which were more often in kanji back then as opposed to
Hangol (is this correct?)). The show used one pair of
films to illustrate the wholesale scene-for-scene "theft"
that went on. Unfortunately I didn't catch the title of
the film (!), but they intercut scenes from the Japanese
production with the Korean one, including a rooftop scene
between some gang members, a street scene, and the lead
female swigging booze from the bottle. All the shots were
almost identical. While the Japanese production was full
colour and widescreen as per the era, the Korean version
was b&w and academy aspect ratio (judging by the framing).
Kitano's show invited the lead female from the Korean
version to sit down in front of an editing suite and watch
both side by side. She was of course amazed how exact they
were, right down to the lead actor's jacket collar. She
also had no idea this type of copying ever went on...

That's basically it. If I can find out the title, I'll
post it. It's surely a topic worthy of a 30-60m
documentary, a book chapter..

jg