| Video & Audio: Late Spring is presented in what's become a controversial full-frame window-boxing presentation that adds a noticeable black frame around the outer edges of the image. The purpose of this is to allow viewers using standard 4:3 televisions, especially on sets with a tendency to overscan, to see the entire frame. Critics argue that this consideration penalizes those with current widescreen TVs that don't overscan by adding these distracting and unneeded black bars while reducing the overall size of the image. (Another concern I've not seen mentioned is whether the long-term use of these black bars will eventually "burn-in" on plasma TVs.) This reviewer definitely found the framing very distracting on his 16:9 TV, though eventually got used to it.
The movie itself, transferred from a fine-grain master positive and 35mm print, looks very good for an early postwar film. It shows its age, and there are strange, diagonal shadows that appear intermittently, possibly inherent to the original release, as if someone accidentally walked into the dark room as the film was being processed. Overall though the image is sharp and clear and the blacks and contrast are very strong. The optional English subtitles are fine.
Extra Features: Included is an entire second feature, Wim Wenders' mediation on Japan and Ozu, Tokyo-ga (1985). ("Why Tokyo-ga?" my Japanese wife asked. After the film was over we still didn't know the answer.) The 92-minute film, presented in an excellent full-frame transfer.**
A great admirer of the Japanese director, Wenders' aim was to visit Japan in search of the Japan seen in Ozu's films, and includes two revealing interviews: one with actor Chishu Ryu, the other with Ozu's longtime cameraman, Yuharu Atsuta. The interviews take up only about 25% of the running time, and the rest of the picture consists of pretty aimless wandering by Wenders: watching businessmen enjoy a hanami ("cherry blossom viewing & drinking party") at a cemetery, visiting a factory manufacturing the uncannily realistic imitation food used in the display windows of Japanese restaurants, a driving range for amateur golfers unable to pay the exorbitant membership fees charged at 18-hole courses, etc.
Though it's fun in a home movie way to watch Wenders' footage of a Japan of 20 years ago, his thesis has all the subtlety of Gallagher's sledgehammer act and the originality of Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon: Japan has become a dehumanized nation with a technology fixation. Of course, why Wenders ever thought he'd find Ozu's world in a cramped, bustling Tokyo pachinko parlor or among a group of high school kids in Harajuku Hoko-ten dressed in 1950s fashions is a mystery. Wouldn't it have been better to find an old widower and his daughter in Kita-Kamamura and spend a few days with them?
The two interviews compensate for this somewhat, especially the segment with Atsuta, whose nuts and bolts conversation about Ozu's technical requirements gives way to a moving, intimate discussion about loyalty and the relationship between artist and collaborator.
Richard Pena, program director of New York's Film Society of Lincon Center, provides an informed, mostly literary Audio Commentary.
A 21-page Booklet includes useful essays by Village Voice critic Michael Atkinson ("Home with Ozu") and the great Ozu scholar Donald Richie ("Ozu and Setsuko Hara," "Ozu and Kogo Noda").
** Unlike Late Spring, it's not windowboxed, but does have one weird flaw. Wenders' film opens with the first several minutes, credits and all, of Ozu's Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari, 1953). It appears that Criterion, wanting to make the film clips look as good as possible, went back to their own master for these excerpts. Unfortunately, these include all the subtitled movie credits as well, so that as Tokyo Story unfolds, "Produced by..." "Starring," etc. all appear onscreen. |
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