Japan’s NHK BS2 showing most of Kurosawa’s films

Well, I had to make a really quick unwilling trip to Japan a few days ago, and I discovered on the TV that NHK’s BS2 channel just started on the 5th a Kurosawa celebration.

They are showing all the Toho films, started with Rashomon on the 5th and next week is Yojimbo. I believe they repeat the show twice before moving on, although I’m not for sure the announcer was talking to fast for me to catch everything, I’m not too good at understanding Japanese.

I never was near a TV during the showings, but I did see a rather crappy short documentary about him, as mentioned my Japanese is just barely decent but I know enough to understand most of what they said—it was hardly anything interesting, and stuff everyone on this site would already know. .

The people where just I guess NHK staff that pretend to care, it offer no interviews from anyone worth hearing.

It was your basic Japanese news show, where someone say something and everyone nods their head, like they care and say “oh yes, that interesting”

To sum up the documentary (if to go as far as to call it that), it was more or less a news segment in a tiny documentary format.

Person one: “Kurosawa is great”

4 other people: “oh yes”, “great”

Person two: “I like his movies”

4 other people : “oh yes” “great”

All while they nod their head, and pretend they are really, really interested in everything being said. Its B-movie overacting at its worse.

Seriously thats a typical Japanese news broadcast. If its bad news they just say “oh, thats bad” 😆

The commercial also list NHK website about it

http://www.nhk.or.jp/kurosawa/

I checked it out for the first time today when I got back, and the site is really slow to load, but its really well done.

All in Japanese but very easy to navigate, even if you cant read.

Thanks for the link and the information, Jeremy! For the most part, Japanese TV is certainly a world apart from pretty much anything shown in Europe.

Although I am not sure if I consider their news broadcasts any worse than the American type where two botoxed announcers tell bad scripted jokes and pretend to care. 🙄

Why is it by the way that all Kurosawa websites have grey or white on a black background, with red as the contrasting colour? Sure, black and white screenshots look better in that sort of an environment, but I can’t personally quite associate Kurosawa with those colours.

Just thought it was cool, that a station was showing a bunch of Kurosawa’s

I noticed America’s IFC showed Rashomon and Seven Samurai back to back last month for the first time in years, but I wish they would do something larger in scale. Not that I would really watch it, I got the DVDs , but I would still think its a good idea.

Thats true about American news, sometimes its so bad I feel embarrassed for them.

LOL, seriously every website is the same color, I suppose its just playing it safe, but to me its a bit depressing.

I’m no artist, but I always found based on Kurosawa painting and Dreams being more or less his paintings in motion, to sort of hang around the blues, reds,blacks and greens. Although how to make that look good for a website is something beyond me.

Although how to make that look good for a website is something beyond me.

As it is beyond me, as you people may have noticed over the years. 😉

It is indeed great that Kurosawa’s films are shown every now and then. In fact, probably the main reason why this website exists is that Canal+ happened to show around a dozen of Kurosawa’s movies at some point in the 90s, and I happened to tape them.

Of course, I taped them because I already knew about Kurosawa, for which I had my Swedish teacher to thank as it was she who introduced me to Kurosawa’s art by bringing me a tape of Seven Samurai and telling me to watch it. But had Canal+ not done their bit, it would very probably have taken me a long time to dig up more Kurosawa. In fact, considering the number of directors whose films I have been putting off “until later” for… well, most of my young life, I might not have gotten around to watching another Kurosawa film yet. Who knows.