You Can Play the New Samurai Video Game Ghost of Tsushima in “Kurosawa Mode:” An Homage to the Japanese Master

Video games are start­ing to look and feel like movies: even those of us who haven’t gamed seri­ous­ly in decades have tak­en notice. Nor has the con­ver­gence between the art forms — if, unlike the late Roger Ebert, you con­sid­er video games an art form in the first place — been lost on game devel­op­ers them­selves. While the most ambi­tious cre­ators in the indus­try looked for inspi­ra­tion from cin­e­ma even when they were work­ing with rel­a­tive­ly prim­i­tive dig­i­tal tools, they can now pay prac­ti­cal­ly direct homage to their aes­thet­ic sources. Take Suck­er Punch Pro­duc­tions’ Ghost of Tsushi­ma, released this week for the Playsta­tion 4, which fea­tures a selec­table audio­vi­su­al mode “inspired by the movies of leg­endary film­mak­er Aki­ra Kuro­sawa.”

An ambi­tious pro­duc­tion set on the tit­u­lar Japan­ese island dur­ing a 13th-cen­tu­ry Mon­gol inva­sion, Ghost of Tsushi­ma casts the play­er in the role of a young samu­rai named Jin Sakai. “All the aes­thet­ic and the­mat­ic con­ven­tions of samu­rai films are present and cor­rect,” writes The Guardian’s Keza Mac­Don­ald, includ­ing “a sto­ry cen­tered on hon­or and self-mas­tery; dra­mat­ic weath­er that sweeps across Japan’s spell­bind­ing land­scapes; stand­offs against back­drops of falling leaves and desert­ed towns; screen wipe and axi­al cuts; quick, lethal katana com­bat that ends with ene­mies stag­ger­ing and spurt­ing blood before top­pling like felled trees.” Kuro­sawa Mode presents the game’s hyp­not­i­cal­ly lav­ish visu­als in a “grainy black-and-white,” and its dia­logue in Eng­lish-sub­ti­tled Japan­ese — just how many of us remem­ber pic­tures like Sev­en Samu­raiThrone of Blood, and Yojim­bo.

Of course, some of us had no choice but to first encounter the work of Kuro­sawa and oth­er 20th-cen­tu­ry Japan­ese auteurs in ver­sions dubbed into Eng­lish. In an uncan­ny rever­sal of that awk­ward­ness, the Amer­i­can-made Ghost of Tsushi­ma’s Japan­ese-lan­guage dia­logue comes out of mouths clear­ly syn­chro­nized to an Eng­lish-lan­guage script. West­ern crit­ics have tak­en the devel­op­ers to task for that short­com­ing, but Japan­ese crit­ics have proven com­par­a­tive­ly unre­strained in express­ing their admi­ra­tion. Accord­ing to Kotaku’s Bri­an Ashcraft, not only did pop­u­lar gam­ing site Denge­ki Online “praise the game for its under­stand­ing of the peri­od (as well as his­tor­i­cal Japan­ese movies), it also laud­ed the game for how it brought the land­scape and scenery to life.”

While Mac­Don­ald calls pro­tag­o­nist Jin Sakai “stiff even by sto­ical samu­rai stan­dards,” Ashcraft points to a review in Japan­ese pop-cul­ture site Aki­ba Souken which calls him not “the typ­i­cal samu­rai of for­eign cre­ation, but rather, a real Japan­ese 侍 (samu­rai),” using “both the Eng­lish ‘samu­rai’ and the word’s kan­ji to high­light this dis­tinc­tion.” Any Kuro­sawa fan will have a sense of the dif­fer­ence, and of the impor­tance of one thing the game does­n’t get right. In a review head­lined “There Is No Sense Of Dis­com­fort In This For­eign-Made Japan­ese World,” gam­ing mag­a­zine Week­ly Famit­su does note the game’s lack of “paus­es in con­ver­sa­tion that are typ­i­cal of peri­od pieces. That pause and that silence are key; in Japan, what isn’t said is just as impor­tant as what is.” Suck­er Punch’s Ghost of Tsushi­ma team must already know they should retain Kuro­sawa Mode for the inevitable sequel; all they need to work on is the unspo­ken.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Sev­en Samu­rai Per­fect­ed the Cin­e­mat­ic Action Scene: A New Video Essay

How Did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Make Such Pow­er­ful & Endur­ing Films? A Wealth of Video Essays Break Down His Cin­e­mat­ic Genius

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Paint­ed the Sto­ry­boards For Scenes in His Epic Films: Com­pare Can­vas to Cel­lu­loid

The Gold­en Age of Ancient Greece Gets Faith­ful­ly Recre­at­ed in the New Video Game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mas­ter­piece Stalk­er Gets Adapt­ed into a Video Game

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Michel Gondry Creates a Burger King Ad That Touts New Research on Reducing Cow Flatulence & Climate Change

As every grade school­er knows (and delights in work­ing into con­ver­sa­tion), cows have a ten­den­cy towards flat­u­lence. At first this just deterred kids from going into ani­mal hus­bandry, but now those kids have come to asso­ciate the phe­nom­e­non of fart­ing live­stock with a larg­er issue of inter­est to them: cli­mate change. From cows’ rear ends comes methane, “one of the most harm­ful green­house gas­es and a major con­trib­u­tor to cli­mate change,” as Adam Satar­i­ano puts it in a recent New York Times arti­cle on sci­en­tif­ic research into the prob­lem. “If they were a coun­try, cows would rank as the world’s sixth-largest emit­ter, ahead of Brazil, Japan and Ger­many, accord­ing to data com­piled by Rhodi­um Group, a research firm.”

For some, such bovine dam­age to the cli­mate has pro­vid­ed a rea­son to stop eat­ing beef. But that’s hard­ly the solu­tion one wants to endorse if one runs a com­pa­ny like, say, Burg­er King. And so we have the Reduced Methane Emis­sions Beef Whop­per, the prod­uct of a part­ner­ship “with top sci­en­tists to devel­op and test a new diet for cows, which accord­ing to ini­tial study results, on aver­age reduces up to 33% of cows’ dai­ly methane emis­sions per day dur­ing the last 3 to 4 months of their lives.” The main effec­tive ingre­di­ent is lemon­grass, as any­one can find out by look­ing up the pro­jec­t’s for­mu­la online, where Burg­er King has made it pub­lic — or as the mar­ket­ing cam­paign stress­es, “open source.”

That cam­paign also has a music video, direct­ed by no less an auteur of the form than Michel Gondry. In it the Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind and Be Kind Rewind film­mak­er has eleven-year-old coun­try musi­cian Mason Ram­sey and eight oth­er West­ern-attired young­sters sing about the role of cow flat­u­lence in cli­mate change and Burg­er King’s role in address­ing it. All of this presents a nat­ur­al oppor­tu­ni­ty for Gondry to indulge his sig­na­ture hand­made aes­thet­ic, at once clum­sy and slick, child­like and refined. You may rec­og­nize Ram­sey as the boy yodel­ing “Lovesick Blues” at Wal­mart in a video that, orig­i­nal­ly post­ed two years ago, has now racked up near­ly 75 mil­lion views. Burg­er King sure­ly hopes to cap­ture some of that viral­i­ty to pro­mote its cli­mate-mind­ed­ness — and, of course, to encour­age view­ers to have a Reduced Methane Emis­sions Beef Whop­per “while sup­plies last.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michel Gondry’s Finest Music Videos for Björk, Radio­head & More: The Last of the Music Video Gods

Film­mak­er Michel Gondry Presents an Ani­mat­ed Con­ver­sa­tion with Noam Chom­sky

Direc­tor Michel Gondry Makes a Charm­ing Film on His iPhone, Prov­ing That We Could Be Mak­ing Movies, Not Tak­ing Self­ies

The Coen Broth­ers Make a TV Com­mer­cial — Ridi­cul­ing “Clean Coal”

Watch Andy Warhol Eat an Entire Burg­er King Whopper–While Wish­ing the Burg­er Came from McDonald’s (1981)

McDonald’s Opens a Tiny Restau­rant — and It’s Only for Bees

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Ennio Morricone (RIP) and Sergio Leone Pose Together in Their Primary School Year Book, 1937

Lit­tle did they know where life would take them–and how their futures would be inter­twined.

A great find by @ddoniolvalcroze.…

The Film Music of Ennio Morricone (RIP) Beautifully Performed by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra Play: “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” & Much More

What we think of as “film music” today is a cre­ation of only a few inven­tive and orig­i­nal com­posers, one few­er of whom walks the Earth as of yes­ter­day. Though Ennio Mor­ri­cone will be remem­bered first for his asso­ci­a­tion with spaghet­ti west­ern mas­ter Ser­gio Leone, his career in film scores spanned half a cen­tu­ry and encom­passed work for some of the most acclaimed direc­tors of that peri­od: his coun­try­men like Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, Bernar­do Bertoluc­ci, Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni, but also such com­mand­ing Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ers as John Hus­ton, Ter­rence Mal­ick, and Quentin Taran­ti­no. Mor­ri­cone did­n’t just write music to add to their films; he became a col­lab­o­ra­tor, with­out whose work their films would be dif­fi­cult to imag­ine.

The result, in pic­tures from L’Avven­tu­ra to Salò to Days of Heav­en to The Untouch­ables to The Hate­ful Eight, is a union of the arts that tran­scends indi­vid­ual cul­tures. It does­n’t mat­ter what coun­try you come from, what gen­er­a­tion you belong to, whether you enjoy West­erns or indeed cin­e­ma itself: you know the theme music Mor­ri­cone wrote for Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly the moment you hear it. 

Whether or not you’ve seen the movie, you’ll appre­ci­ate the espe­cial­ly rich per­for­mance by the Dan­ish Nation­al Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra at the top of the post, part of a 2018 con­cert called The Mor­ri­cone Duel, a cel­e­bra­tion of “a wide range of west­ern movies and mafia movies reflect­ing dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives on an Ital­ian-Amer­i­can movie and film music style.”

The Mor­ri­cone Duel’s Youtube playlist includes the Dan­ish Nation­al Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra’s ren­di­tions of pieces from oth­er Mor­ri­cone-Leone col­lab­o­ra­tions like A Fist­ful of Dol­lars, For a Few Dol­lars MoreOnce Upon a Time in the West, and Once Upon a Time in Amer­i­ca. Though the evening also includ­ed pieces from The Untouch­ables and Hen­ri Verneuil’s The Sicil­ian Clan, many in the audi­ence must have thrilled most when the musi­cians launched into the over­ture from The Hate­ful Eight. They could hardy be more ardent Mor­ri­cone fans than Taran­ti­no him­self, who used pieces from Mor­ri­cone’s exist­ing Spaghet­ti-west­ern sound­tracks in Kill Bill and Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds before mak­ing a west­ern of his own, which would­n’t have been com­plete with­out orig­i­nal Mor­ri­cone music. The Hate­ful Eight turned out to be Mor­ri­cone’s penul­ti­mate film score, but his influ­ence will res­onate through gen­er­a­tions of cin­e­ma to come — and out­last, no doubt, the west­ern and gang­ster gen­res them­selves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 5 Hours of Ennio Morricone’s Scores for Clas­sic West­ern Films: From Ser­gio Leone’s Spaghet­ti West­erns to Tarantino’s The Hate­ful Eight

How Ser­gio Leone Made Music an Actor in His Spaghet­ti West­erns, Cre­at­ing a Per­fect Har­mo­ny of Sound & Image

Ennio Morricone’s Icon­ic Song, “The Ecsta­sy of Gold,” Spell­bind­ing­ly Arranged for Theremin & Voice

Ukulele Orches­tra Per­forms Ennio Morricone’s Icon­ic West­ern Theme Song, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” And It’s Pret­ty Bril­liant

The Music in Quentin Tarantino’s Films: Hear a 5‑Hour, 100-Song Playlist

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Watch Vintage Footage of Tokyo, Circa 1910, Get Brought to Life with Artificial Intelligence

For more than 200 years, the rulers of Japan kept the coun­try all but closed to the out­side world. In 1854, the “Black Ships” of Amer­i­can com­man­der Matthew Per­ry arrived to demand an end to Japan­ese iso­la­tion — and a com­mence­ment of Japan­ese world trade. With­in decades, many fash­ion-for­ward Euro­peans and even Amer­i­cans could­n’t get enough things Japan­ese, espe­cial­ly the art, crafts, and cloth­ing that exem­pli­fied kinds of beau­ty they’d nev­er known before. (Vin­cent van Gogh was a par­tic­u­lar­ly avid fan.) But if Japan changed the West, the West trans­formed Japan, a process ful­ly in effect in the footage above, shot on the streets of Tokyo between 1913 and 1915.

These scenes may look famil­iar to ded­i­cat­ed Open Cul­ture read­ers, and indeed, we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured anoth­er ver­sion of this film back in 2018. With its speed cor­rect­ed to remove the herky-jerk­i­ness com­mon to old films and with back­ground noise added, these glimpses of the men, women, and many chil­dren of the Japan­ese cap­i­tal, all of them liv­ing between the inward-look­ing tra­di­tion of their coun­try as it had been and the onrush of moder­ni­ty from with­out, already felt real­is­tic.

But now you may feel you’ve been per­son­al­ly trans­port­ed to this cul­tur­al­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly heady time in the Land of the Ris­ing Sun thanks to the work of Denis Shiryaev, a Youtu­ber who spe­cial­izes in enlarg­ing and restor­ing vin­tage film clips with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

Shi­rayev is also respon­si­ble for the enhanced ver­sions of scenes from Belle Époque Paris, czarist Moscow, Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land, New York City in 1911, and even the Lumière Broth­ers’ ear­ly motion pic­ture The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion. At the begin­ning of this video he reveals the stages of the process that brought this cen­tu­ry-old footage of Tokyo to greater vivid­ness: de-nois­ing and dam­age removal, col­oriza­tion, facial restora­tion, and upscal­ing to 4K res­o­lu­tion at 60 frames per sec­ond — all assist­ed by neur­al net­works that, “trained” on rel­e­vant visu­al mate­ri­als new and old, crisp and weath­ered, to deter­mine the best ways to make it all look more con­vinc­ing. The results may make you won­der what else will soon be pos­si­ble — sure­ly not a feel­ing unknown to  these ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Toky­oites.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

1850s Japan Comes to Life in 3D, Col­or Pho­tos: See the Stereo­scop­ic Pho­tog­ra­phy of T. Ena­mi

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

A 1947 French Film Accurately Predicted Our 21st-Century Addiction to Smartphones

When we watch a movie from, say, twen­ty years ago, it strikes us that both noth­ing and every­thing has changed. Apart from their slight­ly bag­gi­er clothes, the peo­ple look the same as us. But where are their phones? Com­pared to the recent past, the look of life today has­n’t changed much, but thanks to the inter­net and even more so to smart­phones, the feel has changed enor­mous­ly. Most lit­er­ary and cin­e­mat­ic pre­dic­tions of the future got this exact­ly wrong, envi­sion­ing flam­boy­ant aes­thet­ic trans­for­ma­tions atop com­plete­ly unchanged forms of human behav­ior and soci­ety.

But more than 70 years ago, J. K. Ray­mond-Mil­let’s film Télévi­sion: Oeil de Demain (“Tele­vi­sion: Eye of Tomor­row”) seems to have scored the bulls­eye few oth­er visions of the world ahead even aimed for.  “This is one extra­or­di­nar­i­ly accu­rate pre­dic­tion in a work of sci­ence fic­tion,” wrote William Gib­son as he tweet­ed out a four-minute clip of the film that has recent­ly gone viral.

Though long regard­ed as a sci-fi prophet, Gib­son is the first to admit how lit­tle about tech­nol­o­gy he’s accu­rate­ly fore­seen: his break­out nov­el Neu­ro­mancer, for instance, fea­tures 21st-cen­tu­ry hack­ers mak­ing calls from pub­lic tele­phone booths.

Hence the impres­sive­ness, here in the actu­al 21st cen­tu­ry, of this vision of a future in which peo­ple stare near-con­stant­ly down at the screens of their hand­held devices: on the train, at the café (vis­it­ed, at 0:13, by what appears to be a time-trav­el­ing Gib­son him­self), in the street, on col­li­sion cours­es with fel­low screen-watch­ers on foot and in cars alike. These hand­held tele­vi­sions remind us of our mobile phones in more ways than one, not least in their being scuffed from sheer use. As with every astute pre­dic­tion of the future, all this may at first strike us denizens of the actu­al future as mun­dane — until we remem­ber that the pre­dic­tion was made in 1947.

Pro­duced as an edu­ca­tion­al film, Télévi­sion (view­able in full here) first shows and tells how the epony­mous, still-nov­el tech­nol­o­gy works, then goes on to imag­ine the forms in which it could poten­tial­ly sat­u­rate mod­ern soci­ety. These include not just the afore­men­tioned “minia­ture-tele­vi­sion devices in pub­lic places,” as schol­ar of tele­vi­sion Anne-Katrin Weber puts it, but “pro­fes­sion­al meet­ings con­duct­ed via pic­ture-phones,” “cars equipped with tele­vi­sion screens,” and “shops pro­mot­ing their goods on tele­vi­sion.”

We also see that “the small hand­held portable devices replace news­pa­pers and air ‘the infor­ma­tion broad­cast, or the polit­i­cal com­ment, the fash­ion show, or the sports bul­letin’, while the tele­vi­sion set at the trav­el agency replaces the paper cat­a­logues and invites poten­tial clients to ‘tele­vi­su­al­ly’ vis­it vaca­tion des­ti­na­tions.” Such tech­nol­o­gy will also offer more “inti­mate sights,” as when “the young woman, step­ping out of the show­er, has for­got­ten to turn off her tele­phone-cam­era and reveals her­self naked to the caller.” Yes, of course, “for­got­ten” — but then, this approach­es aspects of the future in which we live that even the bold­est tech­no­log­i­cal prophets nev­er dared con­sid­er.

via Kot­tke/William Gib­son

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee, The Rule of Eugen­ics (1926/35)

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

In 1964, Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Dri­ving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Watch Hundreds of Free Films from Around the World: Explore Film Archives from Japan, France, and the U.S.

While the world retreat­ed indoors in March, and the cin­e­mas we knew and loved closed up shop, so many film libraries have turned around and opened up their archives to the world. This is a good thing. Don’t say you have noth­ing to watch! We have explored all the links below and can ver­i­fy that they are all indeed free to watch. Some are even free to down­load. Here’s a brief run­down of some we’ve found:

The Nation­al Film Reg­istry of the Library of Con­gress

The Library of Con­gress annu­al­ly selects films to pre­serve that it con­sid­ers “cul­tur­al­ly, his­tor­i­cal­ly or aes­thet­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant” and quite a lot of them are avail­able to screen. May we sug­gest:

Mod­es­ta, Ben­jamin Doniger’s 1955 short dra­ma about women’s rights in a rapid­ly mod­ern­iz­ing Puer­to Rico. It won the prize at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val in 1956.

St. Louis Blues, basi­cal­ly an extend­ed music video (before such a thing exist­ed) for the Queen of the Blues, Bessie Smith, from 1929.

With­in Our Gates, the astound­ing 1919 fea­ture film by Oscar Micheaux. Direct­ed by and star­ring African-Amer­i­cans, this rebut­tal to Birth of a Nation says some­thing more inci­sive about Amer­i­can racial pol­i­tics than most films cre­at­ed in the 20th cen­tu­ry.

Cin­e­math­eque Fran­caise

The phys­i­cal Cinematheque–a cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion since 1936, and cur­rent­ly housed in a Frank Gehry-designed building–might be closed, but its stream­ing plat­form, dubbed “Hen­ri” is up and show­ing some rare and restored clas­sics. On one hand, it real­ly helps if you can under­stand French, because not every­thing is sub­ti­tled. On the oth­er, there are plen­ty of silent and subbed films:

Pro­tea, Vic­torin-Hip­poly­te Jasset’s 1913 response to the Fan­tomas seri­als, fea­tures Josette Andri­ot as the slinky, sexy Mata Hari-like super-spy, a few years before Irma Vep and her sim­i­lar get-up.

The Fall of the House of Ush­er: Jean Epstein’s sur­re­al adap­ta­tion of the Poe clas­sic fea­tures bril­liant pho­tog­ra­phy and an expres­sion­ist style. Fans of The Light­house will appre­ci­ate its luna­cy.

Paris qui dort: Rene Clair’s *oth­er* sur­re­al film made in 1924 (the bet­ter known is Entr’acte), this glo­ri­ous 4K restora­tion looks like it was shot yes­ter­day as a group of friends wake up to find that all peo­ple in Paris have been frozen in place. Play time com­mences and there is some footage of climb­ing the Eif­fel Tow­er that might give you the willies. Watch it above.

Japan­ese Ani­mat­ed Film Clas­sics

With works that go back as far as 1917, this is a deep dive into the world of Japan­ese ani­ma­tion curat­ed by the Nobuo Ofu­ji Memo­r­i­al Muse­um. There’s tra­di­tion­al cell ani­ma­tion, but also a sur­pris­ing amount of cut-out ani­ma­tion

The Dull Sword, Junichi Kuichi’s short film from 1917, is a tale of a hap­less samu­rai with an end­ing told in shad­ow pup­pets.

Prop­a­gate is a 1935 film from Shige­ji Ogi­no, show­ing the cycle of plant life through a mod­ernist dance of black and white shapes, close to Oskar Fischinger in style.

Ari-chan the Ant is more what we expect from ani­ma­tion in 1941–a copy of the Disney/Merrie Melodies house style, pleas­ant enough, but under Mit­suyo Seo’s direc­tion also a cri­tique of impe­ri­al­ism, how­ev­er sub­tle. Seo would go on to direct Japan’s first fea­ture-length ani­mat­ed film, Momotaro’s Divine Sea War­riors.

Nation­al Film Preser­va­tion Foun­da­tion

Bring­ing us full cir­cle, the NFPF is a non-prof­it cre­at­ed by Con­gress in 1997 to save films that oth­er­wise would dis­ap­pear, and that includes many ear­ly ani­mat­ed films, avant-garde works, and films that were once thought lost but have since been dis­cov­ered in Aus­tralia and New Zealand, around 2,500 works.

Too Much John­son is the long-thought-destroyed film direct­ed by Orson Welles that was to be part of his 1938 mul­ti­me­dia pro­duc­tion for his Mer­cury The­ater. The archive presents both the 66 minute work print and a 34 minute reimag­ined cut.

The Fall of the House of Ush­er…wait, didn’t we already men­tion this? In fact, just like the year that brought us Armaged­don and Deep Impact, anoth­er Poe adap­ta­tion hit the screens in 1928. This one is short­er, and even more sur­re­al, and direct­ed by James Sib­ley Wat­son and Melville Web­ber.

At first this silent footage of the Negro Leagues seems a bit too comical–a base­ball ver­sion of the Harlem Globetrotters–but it’s actu­al­ly a por­trait of an era in flux, two years before seg­re­ga­tion was about to end in base­ball. Shot at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, the star of this footage is Reece “Goose” Tatum of the Cincin­nati Clowns. As the film notes point out, just because they were goof­ing off for the cam­era doesn’t mean these play­ers weren’t athletes–Hank Aaron was their short­stop before sign­ing to the Braves, and the Clowns’ rival team, the Kansas City Mon­archs, boast­ed Jack­ie Robin­son also as a short­stop.

You can find more free films in the Relat­eds below…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

60 Free Film Noir Movies

Watch 3,000+ Films Free Online from the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Watch More Than 400 Clas­sic Kore­an Films Free Online Thanks to the Kore­an Film Archive

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

How One Simple Cut Reveals the Cinematic Genius of Yasujirō Ozu

Since his death 56 years ago, Yasu­jirō Ozu has only become more and more often ref­er­enced as a locus of great­ness in Japan­ese cin­e­ma. Almost with­out excep­tion, his exegetes explain the pow­er of his films first through their decep­tive sim­plic­i­ty. His movies may look and play like sim­ple mid­cen­tu­ry domes­tic dra­mas, each bear­ing a strong resem­blance to the one before, but with­in these rigid the­mat­ic and aes­thet­ic stric­tures, Ozu achieves tran­scen­dence. In fact, before becom­ing a film­mak­er in his own right Paul Schrad­er ele­vat­ed Ozu into a trin­i­ty along­side Robert Bres­son and Carl Theodor Drey­er in his 1972 book Tran­scen­den­tal Style in Film.

“Per­haps the finest image of sta­sis in Ozu’s films is the lengthy shot of the vase in a dark­ened room near the end of Late Spring,” Schrad­er writes, cit­ing the 1949 pic­ture usu­al­ly count­ed among Ozu’s best. “The father and daugh­ter are prepar­ing to spend their last night under the same roof; she will soon be mar­ried. They calm­ly talk about what a nice day they had, as if it were any oth­er day. The room is dark; the daugh­ter asks a ques­tion of the father, but gets no answer. There is a shot of the father asleep, a shot of the daugh­ter look­ing at him, a shot of the vase in the alcove and over it the sound of the father snor­ing. Then there is a shot of the daugh­ter half-smil­ing, then a lengthy, ten-sec­ond shot of the vase again, and a return to the daugh­ter now almost in tears, and a final return to the vase.”

Some view­ers see the vase as an inex­plic­a­ble inclu­sion, espe­cial­ly at such a charged moment. Schrad­er sees it as sta­sis itself, “a form which can accept deep, con­tra­dic­to­ry emo­tion and trans­form it into an expres­sion of some­thing uni­fied, per­ma­nent, tran­scen­dent.” In the video essay at the top of the post, Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, exam­ines for him­self the place of the vase in Late Spring, in Ozu’s style more broad­ly, and in the body of crit­i­cal work sur­round­ing Ozu’s oeu­vre.

To Puschak’s mind, the var­i­ous read­ings of the vase by Schrad­er and oth­ers “speak to the unique pow­er that Ozu has, that he devel­oped over his long career. His style may appear sim­ple, but is in fact so fine-tuned, so care­ful­ly cal­i­brat­ed, that he has the pow­er to over­whelm the view­er, to launch a thou­sand inter­pre­ta­tions with a sin­gle cut.”

Late Spring fea­tures per­for­mances by Ozu reg­u­lars Chishū Ryū and Set­suko Hara, both of them inhab­it­ing the kind of char­ac­ters for which the direc­tor relied on them: Ryū the good-natured but firm father, Hara the by turns melan­cholic and opti­mistic but ulti­mate­ly duti­ful daugh­ter. These are arche­typ­al Ozu peo­ple, and the vase is an arche­typ­al Ozu object, as much so as the recur­ring red tea ket­tle Ozu enthu­si­asts delight in spot­ting. Those fans will under­stand the appear­ance of the vase as a kind of “pil­low shot,” the term used to describe those visu­al moments in all of Ozu’s pic­tures that have noth­ing to do with plot or char­ac­ter and every­thing to do with rhythm and reflec­tion. They depict ket­tles and vas­es, but also pago­das, clothes­line, street signs, smoke­stacks — things, not peo­ple, but things that, in their con­text, under­score Ozu’s pow­er­ful human­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Yasu­jiro Ozu, “the Most Japan­ese of All Film Direc­tors”

What Makes Yasu­jirō Ozu a Great Film­mak­er? New Video Essay Explains His Long-Admired Cin­e­mat­ic Style

Video Essay­ist Kog­o­na­da Makes His Own Acclaimed Fea­ture Film: Watch His Trib­utes to Its Inspi­ra­tions Like Ozu, Lin­klater & Mal­ick

How David Lynch Manip­u­lates You: A Close Read­ing of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve

How Ser­gio Leone Made Music an Actor in His Spaghet­ti West­erns, Cre­at­ing a Per­fect Har­mo­ny of Sound & Image

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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