Chapters 20

Gary Tooze

***

Firstly, thank to Masters of Cinema for their screener and Gary for allowing me to review it here at DVDBeaver. I am quite honored.

This is single-layered one-disc offering but the image quality was nonetheless impressive. As Japanese film are a notorious weaker standard of storage for vintage original and prints my expectations were tempered for this visual quality of Kokoro. I found sharpness and contrast both at a high standard. The image quality was as one might expect from a Masters of Cinema release - stated as 'restored HD transfer from original negative'. It does certainly appear to have been restored and there is no damage to speak of. Accentuating the fine transfer is are some powerful and beautiful compositions. The DVD is in the NTSC standard and represents Ichikawa's film with strong conviction. There are optional English subtitles and original mono Japanese audio.

I received  the 40-page liner notes booklet, as a lo-res pdf (with my pressed 'checkdisc') and found it to be a typical MoC offering - ie. it is of excellent quality containing archival publicity stills, a newly written essay by Tony Rayns (critic and curator of East Asian cinemas,) and an extended interview with Kon Ichikawa by Yuki Mori (author of The Films of Kon Ichikawa - which, I regret, is not part of my film book library) on the "Beginnings" of the director's involvement in cinema.

It's a interesting film, and I'm incredibly grateful to MoC for continuously concentrating on this kind hard-to-find work. I did a quick rehash of Kon Ichikawa's work that I have seen and its a mere drop-in-the-bucket compared to his diverse oeuvre of almost 90 films over 7 decades. On DVD I own Fires on the Plain, Olympiad Tokyo, the 94' version of 47 Ronin, An Actor's Revenge and The Burmese Harp. These films are all meticulously constructed with confident pacing. I can find no modern director to compare Ichikawa to and his death last year, in February 2008, marks the end of another era of important cinema with his efforts specifically covering an incredibly wide spectrum. Kokoro is another Masters of Cinema DVD that has a valued place in my collection. I'm getting on in years and can't be traveling to retrospectives and festivals across the globe anymore so this makes me appreciate Masters of Cinema's commitments to film fans like myself even more essential.

Henry Kedger