Cine: December 2007 Archives

Pinturas de Akira Kurosawa

By David Navas on December 11, 2007 7:46 PM |

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998)
As a child, Kurosawa dreamed of becoming an artist. He was encouraged in this by his primary school teacher and, to a degree, by his father, who insisted he complement his artistic education with a course in calligraphy. On leaving school at eighteen, one of his paintings was accepted for the Nika exhibition, a prestigious annual art festival, but he failed to take his formal training any further.
In an interview towards the end of his life, Kurosawa was asked why he hadn't become a painter. He replied: 'Because I failed the exam.' Again at his father's insistence he had applied to a famous art school but had been rejected. After this he educated himself, visiting art galleries and studying individual painters. He persevered for a few more years, taking commissions from popular magazines. Then, at the age of twenty-five, having never contemplated a career in films, he answered an advertisement from Photo-Chemical Laboratories seeking trainee assistant directors. He was accepted and began an apprenticeship with the established director Kajiro Yamamoto. He directed his first film, Sanshiro Sugata, in 1943.
Kurosawa was, like his friend Satyajit Ray, fundamentally a humanist film-maker, but he was also a great visual stylist. His films are marked by a painterly quality and he had an unmatched talent for staging fights and action set-pieces. His work is marked as much by Western as by Eastern influences, so it is fitting that his films should have been reappropriated by Hollywood and European directors: his samurai movies, including Seven Samurai (1954), provided the source material for Sergio Leone's Dollars cycle and John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven, among others.
Shortly after the release of his first colour film, Dodes'Kaden (1970), Kurosawa attempted suicide. He recovered to make three further masterpieces, Dersu Uzala (1975), Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985), which was helped financially by the intervention of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. It was in the long preproduction periods on these last films that he made detailed preparatory sketches in his trademark style-which owed a clear debt to Van Gogh and the Impressionists. His passion for Van Gogh was particularly evident in his penultimate film, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990), in which the elderly director meets Vincent, played by Kurosawa-worshipper Martin Scorsese.

(extraido de la revista Granta numero 86)

Un sketch de "Dreams" (1970) en la que Martin Scorsese interpreta a Van Gogh.

Diseño para "Kagemusha" (1980).

Diseño para "Kagemusha" (1980).

Martin Scorsese storyboards

By David Navas on December 3, 2007 1:15 AM |

Martin Scorsese (b. 1942)
Scorsese's twin passions as a child and adolescent were the cinema and the Church and for many years he planned to enter the priesthood. But the movies won out and he studied film at New York University, where by the time he graduated he had made a number of short films. Through the 1960s he worked as an editor and also directed his first feature film, Who's That Knocking on My Door? (1968), a labour of love starring Harvey Keitel, who would become, along with Robert De Niro, one of Scorsese's favourite actors.
He got his big break, as did Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovitch, under Roger Corman, who assigned him to direct Boxcar Bertha (1972). The film was a modest success, but a key moment came when Scorsese screened it for his idol, John Cassavetes, who praised the style but pleaded with Scorsese to go for more personal material. Heeding that advice, Scorsese dusted off an old idea of his based around the characters who had populated his own neighbourhood of Little Italy, in downtown Manhattan, in his youth. Mean Streets, released in 1973, co-starring De Niro and Keitel, made Scorsese's reputation and established his trademark themes-men, often violent men in crisis, with religion generally in the background or foreground-and a signature directorial style, involving flashy, imaginative visual flourishes, long or otherwise complex takes, and pervasive pop music on the soundtrack.
While occasionally working on more mainstream material, Scorsese turned out a succession of great films, including Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), and Goodfellas (1990), all of which bear his personal touch. Many have been script collaborations-Scorsese and Nick Pileggi co-wrote Goodfellas and Casino (1995)-or written wholly by others, most notably Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver.
Throughout his career Scorsese has carefully story boarded his own films .. With their urgent, primitive stylelessness, these storyboards may stretch the definition of art; indeed they may look uncomfortably like extracts from (Taxi Driver's) Travis Bickle's illustrated notebooks. But they show Scorsese's innate understanding of the medium and his talent for framing shots and building sequences-in the examples featured here, sequences that have been etched forever into the minds of a generation of film-goers. (extraido de la revista Granta numero 86)