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PRIVATE PROPERTY, A Gripping Noir Finally Gets Its Due

Leslie Stevens’ 1960 film noir Private Property is an incredibly tense psychosexual thriller that is years ahead of its time.

 

screen-anarchy_logoBy Josh Hurtado December 14, 2016

Stevens was probably best known as the creator of the influential science fiction TV series The Outer Limits, but before that project got off the ground in 1963 he was a writer and director of a couple of feature films that didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Private Property was his first in the director’s chair and it is definitely a bold debut, even if audiences in the US didn’t get to see it at the time.

Duke (Corey Allen) and Boots (Warren Oates) are drifters making their way down the Southern California coast when they spy a pretty young woman zooming down the freeway. After following her for miles and discovering that next to her house is an empty one, they decide to have a little fun and insinuate themselves into her life.

The young woman, Ann (Kate Manx), is a frustrated housewife left alone all too often by her salesman husband, who is at first hesitant at Duke’s attention, but before too long begins to succumb to his greasy, salt-of-the-earth charm. However, when the pair of men with ulterior motives take their admiration a step too far, things all go pear shape in a shocking way.

Private Property is a film about longing, not the romantic kind, but the lustful kind that manifests itself sometimes in very aggressive ways. There is the longing of Duke, the greasy drifter who sees Ann and can’t help but imagine himself doing horrible things with her. There is the longing of the virginal Boots, who has never been with a woman and cannot stand to be barren for much longer.

There is even, and perhaps most glaringly, the longing of Ann, a frustrated housewife who tries again and again to seduce her clueless absentee husband, but who is rebuffed at every turn. This simmering cauldron of lust has no choice but to reach a boiling point at which the whole thing bubbles over, and the climax of Private Property is astonishingly perverse in its execution.

While Private Property is notable as the first film of Warren Oates, one of Hollywood’s greatest character actors, it is really Corey Allen who drives the film and controls its atmosphere. Allen, who is probably best known as the heel in Nic Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, is a seething beast of pent up lust and aggression. His ability to morph from this carnal monster into a loquacious, charming confidant to Ann’s abandoned housewife is remarkable. He controls every situation he’s in like a conductor with a symphony, and when he tells the film to play louder, it’s almost deafening.

Oates, on the other hand, is a taciturn, frustrated man-child in his role as Boots. His inability to boast of his sexual conquests has scarred him deeply and his partnership with Duke has grown deeper over the years as Duke has sheltered and protected his friend. The relationship is quite similar to that of Lenny and George in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, though considerably more sinister in its trajectory. Boots isn’t the gentle giant, he’s a dangerously violent man, whose instability is the monster that Duke must quell. It’s not Oates’ finest performance, but he does a great job with the material he’s given.

The third member of this triangle is Kate Manx’s Ann. Manx was director Leslie Stevens’ wife at the time, and I can only imagine what that set must’ve been like as Stevens’ directed her in these scenes of increasingly volatile sexual aggression. She plays the waif to Duke’s beefcake with a certain sense of naivete mixed with the classic mid-century sense of duty care for this man who is down on his luck.

She’s no fool, but she’s also not bold enough, or perhaps she’s not entirely eager, to wave off Duke’s admirations, even if to her they are just harmless flirtations. When Duke begins to take things farther, she protests, but not too vociferously, until she’s finally reached her limit, at which point Duke’s facade crumbles and she realizes her life could be in danger.

The sexual politics in Private Property are fascinating. Duke and Boots hunt Ann as though her sex was their right. Ann establishes herself as a sexual being from the outset of the film, even though she is continually ignored by her chosen mate. The power moves back and forth between the men and Ann as she is first wary of them and later begins to enjoy Duke’s attention, if only in a flirtatious way.

America wasn’t ready for Private Property in 1960, but they are now, and it’s one of the greatest discoveries of 2016.

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From martial arts to mumbling cowboys: The best re-released and restored films of 2016

By Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
DEC 5th, 2016

Movie culture has always been sustained by rediscovery and revaluation—that infinite process of expanding and redefining canons. There are two important factors at play here. The first is that film spread and developed faster than any creative medium that preceded it, meaning that the bulk of what survives of film history is still unexplored. The second is that film has always been a business, and that its commercialization can make release patterns and availability into tricky processes. Every year, some set of rights is finally negotiated or some negative is found after decades in a closet.

Our coverage of the best of the year can’t overlook the “new old” movies—the ones that are finally enjoying a much needed push or have just become available to the wider public. These are eight of the essential items that saw restoration or re-release this year. A caveat: This is a personal guide, beholden to nothing except my own tastes (for one, I’m not crazy about River Of Grass, one of the year’s high-profile indie re-releases) and interests.

A psychosexual freak-out of fairy-tale subtexts and obscene imagery, Belladonna Of Sadness stands as one of the most unusual and challenging animated features of its time—no small feat, given that its contemporaries include René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet and the early films of Ralph Bakshi. Directed by Eiichi Yamamoto, a close collaborator of the Japanese comics and animation legend Osamu Tezuka, in an array of limited animation styles that draw on art nouveau and expressionism, the film draws on the French historian Jules Michelet’s theories of witchcraft as a form of rebellion to create an anti-authoritarian parable of sex magic and sexual violence in medieval France. A commercial failure in its time, the film had never played American theaters before this year’s 4K restoration; it has since been released on Blu-ray and DVD.

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Cinelicious Pics to Release 4K Restoration of Lost Noir ‘Private Property’

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 By Zack Sharf March 21, 2016

Cinelicious Pics has announced plans to distribute a new 4k restoration of the long-lost 1960’s noir “Private Property.” The movie is directed by Leslie Stevens and stars American character actor Warren Oates in his first significant screen role. The 4k restoration will have its world premiere at the 7th Annual TCM Classic Film Festival, which runs from April 28-May 1 in Hollywood.

The official synopsis reads: “‘Private Property’ begins as two homicidal Southern California drifters wander off the beach and into the seemingly-perfect Beverly Hills home of an unhappy housewife. Shimmering with sexual tension and lensed in stunning black and white by master cameraman Ted McCord, ‘Private Property’ is both an eerie, neo-Hitchcockian thriller and a savage critique of the hollowness of the Playboy-era American Dream.”

“I was completely bowled over by the film,” said David Marriott, Cinelicious Pics’ Director of Acquisitions, in an official statement. “A sort of hothouse late-period film noir, ‘Private Property’ is deeply bizarre and incredibly compelling. Considering the talent involved – director Stevens, cameraman Ted McCord, actor Warren Oates – it’s very rare to rediscover a completely lost crime film like this.”

“We’re thrilled to be showcasing a discovery of this caliber at the TCM Classic Film Festival,” added Charles Tabesh, senior vice president of programming for Turner Classic Movies (TCM). “Our mission at TCM is to bring audiences great classic films and to help them discover unknown classics, such as ‘Private Property.'”

The film had a very brief theatrical release in the 1960’s but has been lost ever since. The title joins other Cinelicious restorations, including “Belladonna of Sadness.”

 

 

This Porn-y 70s Film Is a Mind-Melting Head Trip About a Witch and a Tiny Talking Penis

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By J. W. McCormack FEB 18, 2016

The 1970s were perhaps the grossest chapter of recorded time, an era wherein the previous decade’s flower power rotted on the vine and a politically engaged, protest-minded youth culture dissolved into an atmosphere of distinctly hostile decadence. By the time The Joy of Sex, with its illustrations of hairy fornicators, arrived on shelves in ’72, sexual freedom had more or less given way to wanton Henry Miller–esque rutting. But for all its prurience, the decade that gave us Deep Throat, Hustler, and Plato’s Retreat was also the last time when widespread experimentation dominated the mainstream in every corner of the arts, from the creator-driven films of the New Hollywood and rock ‘n’ roll’s enshrinement of the drug culture in the popular imagination to the spectacle of perfectly normal people reading Gravity’s Rainbow. It was also the golden age of cartoon sexuality: Adult animator Ralph Bakshi followed the success of the X-rated Fritz the Cat with burned-out, bell-bottomed exercises in hand-drawn hallucination like Coonskin and Wizards, and the magazine Heavy Metal cornered the market for large-bosomed women riding dragons and beating the shit out of pervy robots.

But the greatest legacy of the 1970s vogue for melding Saturday morning cartoons with Saturday Night Fever was in Japan, where anime succeeded the pornographic “pink film” in marrying transgressive and—especially in the case of hentai—graphic sexual content with eye-popping psychedelic excess. The genre’s first masterpiece was Belladonna of Sadness (Kanashimi no Beradonna), a film that has a visual style so sui generis that I can only compare it to Sesame Street if Sesame Street were, as my paternal grandmother believed, a recruiting film for LSD-addled freakazoids and the Church of Satan.

When Belladonna of Sadness was originally released in 1973, it immediately bankrupted its studio, Mushi Production. Mushi had been founded in the early 60s by manga artist Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy and Unico, and its style was largely responsible for establishing the frenetic big-eyes-small-mouth aesthetic of anime. But Belladonna actually has more in common visually with Aubrey Beardsley, Yellow Submarine, and the Tarot-card-looking output of the illustrator Kay Nielson. It’s like Bakshi at his trippiest. But here I am talking like this is not a film that features a long scene of flora and fauna—giraffes, crocodiles, orange trees, you name it—emerging from people’s orifices like something out of a Boschean Hanna Barbara, and, reader, that is precisely what I’m talking about.

The plot concerns a purple-haired witch named Jeanne and her seduction by the devil, inexplicably disguised as a little talking penis, who grants her supernatural powers. The remaining story line, if you can call it that, largely consists of Jeanne’s arcane revenge on the nobles responsible for her violent sexual assault (in a ghastly early sequence that’s made even more uncomfortable by her attacker’s striking resemblance to Hordak from the old She-Ra cartoons). The film is a Joan of Arc pastiche, a musical, an exploitation picture, and a pornographic movie—but what it really is is an excuse for a breathtaking series of montages where a singing, dancing Black Death melts faces into skulls, kaleidoscopic specters of pop-art Americana signify the consummation of Jeanne’s pact with the Evil One, and an assortment of infernal penises perform vicissitudes previously undreamt by any human penis, which is perhaps the greatest contribution an animation studio has made to creative physiology since Cab Calloway serenaded Betty Boop in Minnie the Moocher.

Read the full article at Vice.com

Belladonna of Sadness will screen on May 6 at Metrograph and Alamo Drafthouse in New York and San Francisco, respectively, and May 13 at the Cinefamily in Los Angeles. For a full listing of theater locations please visit Cinelicious Pics.

Cinelicious Pics is holding a promotional art contest in support of their release.  $1000 top prize!  Entry deadline is April 1st (no fooling!)

 

 

 

After More Than 30 Years, Ana Mendieta’s Films Are Digitized

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BY NOELLE BODICK | FEBRUARY 03, 2016

Ana Mendieta was just 36 years old when she fell from the window of a New York high-rise apartment in 1985. The Cuban-American artist’s tragic death, and the controversy surrounding its circumstances, have cast a shadow over her legacy from which, more than 30 years and 30 solo exhibitions later, it is still emerging. The obscurity has been particularly deep for one part of that legacy, the artist’s film work. But now Mendieta, best known for her body and earth art, is getting her due as film artist, after an extensive three-year project to digitize her entire filmography.

A show of fifteen of Mendieta’s works in this medium — nine of them never before seen — will debut this week at Galerie Lelong, in New York. These are a small sample of the more than 100 artist films she made between 1971, when she was a student at the University of Iowa, and 1981, when she moved on to creating sculptural objects in the studio.

“There are a lot of artists who are known for making films, and she is not usually on those lists just because we hadn’t yet discovered all of these works,” said Mendieta’s niece, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, who is the film archivist for the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection and led the restoration project.

 

“For the next three years, Raquel Cecilia digitized and restored these works at Cinelicious, a boutique lab in LA. A portion of them appear in the exhibition “Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta,”

 

Today based in Los Angeles, Raquel Cecilia was just graduating high school when news of her aunt’s death reached her and her mother, Raquelin Mendieta, who serves as the administrator of the artist’s estate. The young niece already knew that she would go into the arts, like her aunt, and indeed went on to become a filmmaker, earning an MFA from the School of Theater Film and Television at UCLA in 2005. In 2012, while shooting a feature documentary about her aunt (currently in postproduction), she began digging through the Mendieta archive and found never-before-seen filmed pieces in outdated formats: half-inch reel-to-reel video, super 8, 16mm.

For the next three years, Raquel Cecilia digitized and restored these works at Cinelicious, a boutique lab in LA. A portion of them appear in the exhibition “Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta,” which premiered at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and will travel to Fort Lauderdale’s NSU Art Museum later this month.

The Galerie Lelong show includes some of Mendieta’s earliest works. These reveal a young artist mastering her medium through playful acts and bold experimentation. In one, Mendieta scratches the emulsion of the celluloid film; in another she creates an X-ray film depicting the motion inside her skull; still in another, she increases the contrast to achieve polarized graphic colors.

“But it is also interesting to see how quickly she moved away from that,” Raquel Cecilia said. “When you line up all the films in the filmography, you can see how quickly it progresses from ‘here we are experimenting with the medium’ to ‘here I am’ — here’s Ana’s voice.”

At the University of Iowa, Mendieta also collaborated with school children at Henry Sabin Elementary (where Raquel Cecilia went to kindergarten). One of the resulting films shows a mutating blob in a field whose exact nature is a mystery — one of Mendieta’s landscape works, perhaps? — until a student passes by, and it becomes evident that those are children’s heads bobbing up and down underneath a large tarp.

Within the context of Mendieta’s overall oeuvre, these collaborative pieces and school-day experimentations, along with the other rediscovered filmic pieces, are more illuminating than revolutionary. They do not overturn the established art historical understanding of the artist and her ritualistic works in nature. Rather, they give us a better sense of how Mendieta considered and deployed her technical tool. It’s as if we get a glimpse of a painter learning how to wield a brush and make her mark. “It wasn’t just the dirt and the trees and the landscape. It was also: ‘How are you going to record this?’ And the camera was always in the forefront of her mind,” Raquel Cecilia said. “It is just a different way of thinking about her work.”

 

 

CERTAIN WOMEN – THR Sundance Review

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By LESLIE FELPERIN JAN 24, 2016

 

Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and Kristen Stewart star in Kelly Reichardt’s latest study in northerly melancholy.

After her comparatively pacey last feature, the eco-themed thriller Night Moves, indie auteur Kelly Reichardt returns to a more typically low and slow register with the elegantly wrought Certain Women. Although her screenplay is adapted from short stories by Maile Meloy, and set in and around pokey-cozy Livingston, Montana, instead of the Pacific Northwest stomping grounds she’s favored in the past, Reichardt successfully makes the material and setting her own. Her trademark attention to landscape, to the bonds between people and animals and to how the human face can reveal so much when at rest are all present and correct.

Yet while there’s no doubt this is the work of a filmmaker entirely in command of her craft, there’s something a trifle academic and dry about the whole exercise, and slightly lacking in narrative cohesion given the nature of its origins. Unlike, say Robert Altman’s Short Cuts or other films adapted from collections, this feels like three discrete works laid alongside one another, like pictures in a gallery, not a triptych.

“Her trademark attention to landscape, to the bonds between people and animals and to how the human face can reveal so much when at rest are all present and correct.”

Still, Certain Women features Reichardt’s starriest cast, with not just her muse Michelle Williams on board but also Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart, as well as outstanding discovery Lily Gladstone. Together, these women are certain to hold the attention of viewers at further festivals and in specialist distribution.

The opening tale trips lightly along on dainty feet. After an adulterous afternoon tryst with her married lover Ryan (James Le Gros), local Livingston lawyer Laura Wells (Dern) meets with her client, a carpenter named Fuller (Jared Harris). Fuller has hired Laura to help him get compensation for a workplace accident, a case he hasn’t any chance of winning. Laura has been trying to tell Fuller this for weeks, but he only seems to accept defeat when a male lawyer in a neighboring town assures him he’ll get no “tort time.” Even so, he still insists on trying one last desperate measure to prove he’s been done wrong, and Laura wearily comes to his rescue.

In the second, spikier chapter, Ryan turns out to be married to Gina (Williams), a hard, humorless woman with a smile like a drawer full of tiny knives, who has bought a plot of land in the area and plans to build a house there. Accompanied by their sulky teenage daughter (Sara Rodier), Gina and Ryan visit Albert (the great Rene Auberjonois), a fragile old man whose mind seems to be fading, in the hopes of talking him into selling them some native sandstone that’s been heaped in front of his house for years.

“…the visuals speak volumes…shot on 16mm film, the graininess and deep focus of the cinematography suggest a living landscape that’s constantly in shimmer.”

The best comes last with an exquisite tale of inchoate longing and miscommunication. An unnamed ranch hand (luminous newcomer Gladstone) spends her days caring for horses on a remote ranch, not another single human soul in sight. Even so, she has the horses for companionship, as well as a boisterous, scene-stealing Corgi cross. (As in other Reichardt films, the dogs have strong supporting roles here, and this one is also dedicated to the director’s longtime canine companion, the co-star of Wendy and Lucy.)

Seeing cars gathering late one night at the local school, the ranch hand investigates and finds it’s a class on education law being taught to the school teachers by recent law-school graduate Elizabeth (Stewart). She starts auditing Elizabeth’s classes each week, and they become friends of sorts, companionably sharing meals before Elizabeth makes the long drive back to Livingston. Barely able to articulate her feelings, the ranch hand seemingly develops a kind of girlish crush on the teacher, but her feelings can only find expression in longing looks, and the closest she gets to Elizabeth physically is a shared ride on a horse.

If the characters here are often sparing with their words, or even withholding, the visuals speak volumes. Shot by Reichardt’s most steadfast collaborator, d.p. Christopher Blauvelt on 16mm film, the graininess and deep focus of the cinematography suggest a living landscape that’s constantly in shimmer. The sounds we hear might be the babbling of a nearby river, the murmur of Jeff Grace’s understated soundtrack or the rustling of some invisible book’s pages. Meanwhile, characters are often seen through glass or reflected in mirrors, underscoring the lack of direct connection, the oblique angles from which they observe each other. It’s no accident that the rawest emotional moment in Certain Women is when the ranch hand and Elizabeth look directly into each other’s eyes in a car park, finally truly seeing each other for the first time.

 

 

Restoring a Lost Psychedelic Anime Classic: An Interview with the Team Reintroducing BELLADONNA OF SADNESS

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By KATIE SKELLY SEP 23, 2015

The 1973 adult animation feature film Belladonna of Sadness (Kanashimi no Beradonna) was birthed into the world by Mushi Productions, the animation production studio founded and eventually abandoned by Osamu Tezuka after the commercial failure of his own adult animation feature, Cleopatra (1970). In the 90-minute film, directed and co-written by Eiichi Yamamoto, the virginal protagonist Jeanne lives a peaceful, humble life in her feudal village until a sadistic baron violates her by rule of droit du seigneur on the eve of her wedding. The destitute Jeanne begins to experience visions of a phallic demon, who strikes a deal with her and brings her closer to power through manipulation of nature and magic.

Belladonna, like Tezuka’s Cleopatra, was a commercial failure and remained unseen by wider audiences for years after its initial release. However, its lurid themes of eroticism, explicit sexuality, and witchcraft—the film takes cues from Jules Michelet’s 1862 treatise Satanism and Witchcraft—combined with its eye-watering psychedelic stills garnered steady interest in the age of the internet. After over 40 years of obscurity (and endless low-quality versions surfacing online), Belladonna of Sadness recently received a 4K restoration by Los Angeles-based post-production company Cinelicious. Having recently seen the restoration myself after years of anticipation, I was thrilled by its slow and steady animation style, reminiscent of the language of comics, its thumping soundtrack and painterly style, which I had never seen in animation prior.

I spoke to members of the Cinelicious team (Craig Rogers, lead restoration artist; Caitlin Diaz, remastering colorist, and Dennis Bartok, executive vice president of acquisitions and distributions) about the genesis of the restoration, the challenges of the project, and their thoughts on the future life of Belladonna.

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Katie Skelly: How did you and Cinelicious come to work on the restoration of Belladonna of Sadness?

Dennis Bartok: The restoration and re-release of Belladonna of Sadness actually came out of an informal lunch in Spring of 2014 here at the Cinelicious offices with Hadrian Belove, founder and head of The Cinefamily non-profit film organization in Los Angeles. I asked Hadrian, “If you could restore any rare or unknown films which would you pick?” — and the first one he mentioned was Belladonna of Sadness. (I should add that The Cinefamily is co-presenting the re-release of the film with Cinelicious Pics here in the U.S. along with Spectrevision.) Although I’m a huge fan of Japanese cinema including anime, and had shown literally hundreds of rare and classic films while I was head of programming at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre, I’d never seen or even heard of Belladonna — which is some indication of just how far off the radar it is! I watched a pretty fuzzy, dupey version illegally posted on YouTube and was immediately blown away by the mixture of eroticism, psychedelia, and the occult, along with the phenomenal fuzz-stoked soundtrack by Masahiko Satoh. Since the film had never been released on the U.S., I started a detective search to track down the rights holder in Japan: through a colleague in Germany, Andreas Rothbauer, I was put in touch with Stephan Holl at Rapid Eyes Movies there who’d released Belladonna on DVD in Germany and France — Stephan kindly gave me contact info for Kiyo Joo at Gold View Company in Japan, who represents Mushi Productions, the original production company for the film.

Craig Rogers: For Belladonna of Sadness I was the guiding hand moving the project along and did a great deal of hands on work digitally cleaning up our 4K scans (along with Michael Coronado, another restoration artist at Cinelicious). While we were lucky to be able to scan the original negative – and for the most part the negative was in very good shape – there was still a tremendous amount of work involved in getting the images looking as clean as possible. Fixing scratches, removing dirt, reducing and/or eliminating flicker and stabilizing the images – we went over each and every frame and manually cleaned up all of these issues. One thing we did not do was overly degrain or sharpen the images. Scanning at 4K from the original negative is already going to give us beautiful sharp images, there’s no good reason to sharpen them further – and film has grain. Period. A forty-plus-year-old animated film shouldn’t look like it was created digitally in 2015.

Caitlin Díaz: Knowing my love for the ultra-weird and experimental side of cinema, Dennis Bartok recommended I watch the Belladonna of Sadness screener we had in the office. After watching the film a few times, I knew it would be a fun and challenging project to take on. When news broke that we had secured the rights for a 4K restoration and a U.S. redistribution of the film, I told Paul Korver I was interested in doing the color remastering for the film. When the film elements arrived at our office, we all wanted to know what condition they were in. While prepping the film with film leader and labeling the reels, I noticed the film was in pretty good condition. However, I did see that there were some splices made throughout–little did we know we didn’t have the entire version of the film. After the film had been cleaned using our Ultra Sonic Film Cleaner, I began to scan the reels. We wanted to scan at 4K to take advantage of the high dynamic range and resolution that a 35mm camera negative offers. As I watched the film play out on the monitor, I gathered a sense of the color and textures in each scene–I couldn’t wait to start grading!

 

 

What were the unique challenges to restoring Belladonna?

Dennis Bartok: The biggest initial challenge was simply convincing Gold View Co. and Mushi Productions to send the original camera negative and sound elements to us in Los Angeles. The original negative had never traveled outside of Japan to my knowledge, and they were understandably very concerned about sending it to us. At one point they offered to make a new print off the negative and ship that to us, but we were really insistent on getting access to the 35mm negative if we were going to commit all the time, manpower and money to restore the film in 4k. It took months of alternately pleading, waiting, pleading some more until we finally convinced Gold View and Mushi to trust us with the negative and sound elements. They literally emptied their Belladonna vault out, and sent everything they had to us. We were all pretty ecstatic when we finally received the negative after so many months of back and forth. As Craig Rogers mentions, the negative itself was in fairly good condition, which was a great relief — but we were a little shocked to discover it had been cut down by approximately 8 minutes and those sections lost or destroyed.  Each reel of negative was literally peppered with white tape splices indicating footage that was missing. We’re still trying to 100% confirm why the negative was cut this way, but in an interview with director Eiichi Yamamoto recently, he recalled that that the film was cut down sometime after its initial, unsuccessful release, apparently in an attempt to produce a version with less graphic eroticism that would appeal to younger female audiences. From what we can tell this censored version was never released, since the filmmaker and producers realized after watching the edited version that the real spine and biting edge of the film had been cut out as well.

Craig Rogers: Just getting our hands on the original negative was a challenge! Another challenge became evident when we were prepping that negative for scanning. Caitlin discovered that about 8 minutes of the film had been edited out of the original negative. We had a very poor quality digibeta tape we were using as reference for conforming the project and needed to use that to figure out what exactly was missing. Sometimes it was just a few frames from a shot, but in other cases it was long sequences that had been removed.

Dennis, with the help of acquisitions director David Marriott, were able to track down what we believe is the only remaining 35mm print of the original uncut film at the Cinematek in Belgium. The folks at Cinematek were very helpful in providing us with scans of the missing sections from their print. That required a lot of effort to get the two elements to work seamlessly in the film.  French subtitles needed to be removed and we wanted to be sure there would not be an obvious jump in the picture (both physically and in quality) where we cut in the Belgium print footage. I’m very proud of our team’s work in accomplishing this. I believe a great many of these cuts will go completely unnoticed by the viewer!

Grading the film with little more than a few reference stills from the production was also a challenge, which I worked closely with Caitlin Diaz trying to get it just right. Caitlin did a stellar job. We’d love to have been able to have director Eiichi Yamamoto here with us when we did the grade, but he could unfortunately not make the trip from Japan. We’ve sent him samples of our final restoration and he’s delighted with how gorgeous his film looks.

Caitlin Díaz: You’d think that the color grading process would be pretty straight-forward since Belladonna is an animated film–this wasn’t the case at all. Our only reference for this film was a DigiBeta master which was extremely faded and had an overall blue/purple tint. Once I started working with the scans from the original camera negative, it became clear that the colors were drastically different from the reference. Luckily, Mushi Productions provided a few images of the artwork, which proved very helpful in figuring out what the colors were supposed to look like.

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The film is full of different styles of animation all using different mediums and the grade needed to remain true to each. The watercolors needed to be vibrant, but not extremely contrasted. The oil paint needed to have the depth and texture of each brushstroke. One of the most challenging aspects of the grade would have to be matching our camera negative to the 35mm print inserts we received from the Belgium Cinematek. The print is a few generations from the original negative, which causes sharpness and color information loss. Before, when we cut from the camera negative to the print in the same shot, you’d notice a stark difference. I tried out a few different approaches when it came to these back-to-back cuts and I was able to arrive at a place where the color shift was subtle. With these color adjustments combined with Zach Roger’s amazing repositioning and conform skills, we were able to remove the distraction caused by the difference in elements and allow the viewer to remain in the realm of the film. We spent three days locked up in our DI theater finessing each scene and frame, making the cuts between each shot play together seamlessly. It was important to have extra sets of eyes during these last few sessions, especially since we couldn’t get Eiichi Yamamoto to join us. I was able to dial-in the final looks, a process with which Craig Rogers was extremely helpful. His attention to detail in his restoration work definitely carries over to the color world! I’m very pleased with how the film looks now that the all the work is complete–we pooled our various talents and resources to bring Belladonna back into the fold at a level of beauty and detail it very much deserves.

The commercial failure of Belladonna of Sadness contributed to the bankruptcy of its animation studio, Mushi Productions, in 1973. Do you think audiences are better equipped to appreciate this film today, and if so, why?

Craig Rogers: Dennis can likely speak more in depth, but it’s been my understanding that Mushi’s fate was already sealed by the time Belladonna of Sadness was in production and in fact may be why Belladonna of Sadness was able to push the boundaries of anime as far as it did. Similar to Stan Lee’s telling of how Spider-Man came about in Amazing Fantasy #15. If the ship is going down, you might as well use it as an opportunity to try something new!

A lot has changed since 1973. That said, Belladonna of Sadness still pushes things pretty far. Particularly for American audiences, some of the sexual imagery will still shock people. I think a great deal of that explicit imagery was used purely for fun and to titillate, but the tougher scenes to watch are intentionally tough. What this woman endured is a large part of the story. I know this film is often described as an “art film”, which in my experience has usually meant “weird and boring.” I was really worried that this would be the case here, but after seeing it I was blown away. It is an “art film”, but it also has a coherent and important story to tell. Along with the astounding artwork, there’s a tremendous amount going on thematically. Questions of “what is evil?,” the corrupting influence of power, and feminism.

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Dennis Bartok: Belladonna of Sadness was the third and final film in the adult-oriented “Animerama Trilogy” produced by Mushi Productions from 1969 to 1973. All three films are very different stylistically although they were all directed by Eiichi Yamamoto (Osamu Tezuka co-directed the second, and least interesting one, Cleopatra.) In an interview we conducted recently with Yamamoto for the Blu-ray release of Belladonna and a companion book we’re doing, he mentioned George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine as an inspiration for the creative team on Belladonna, and you can definitely see the influence especially in the surreal and outrageously erotic “dream sequences” towards the end of the film with humans and animals morphing into grotesque phallic forms. Ironically, the first two films in the “Animerama” series, One Thousand & One Nights and Cleopatra, did get released in the U.S. aimed at a grind house audience — but I think Belladonna of Sadness, by far the most visually spectacular and groundbreaking of the three films, was simply too far out there for distributors in America in the early 1970s. It’s a shame because if it had come out then aimed at an art-house and underground cinema crowd, I think it could have found a cult audience similar to Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet or Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards. It’s funny that we’re doing the first “official” U.S. release of the film over 40 years after it was made, so in some ways it’s a new film for American audiences. I think the pure visual splendor and overwhelming beauty of the artwork done by Kuni Fukai has remained incredibly fresh, along with the avant garde psychedelic score by Masahiko Satoh. For me, the most interesting thing about seeing audience reactions to the restored film so far is that it’s still dangerous and disturbing especially the imagery of sexual violence depicted in the movie. The source novel the film was based on was a parable about the vulnerability and powerlessness of peasants, especially women, in the Middle Ages — and director Yamamoto and artist Fukai were definitely aware of that underlying theme. Not to give anything away, but the end of the film certainly underscores that Belladonna of Sadness is a story about the abuse of women and their ultimate empowerment and rising up to overthrow the status quo.

Caitlin Díaz: While Belladonna may have gotten lost in the mix of psychedelic cinema of the ’70s, I feel that its rerelease will not only capture the interest of animation aficionados, but also find a new audience in those who seek films that go beyond the norm of our era. Our restoration really breathes new life into this lost film. By celebrating Kuni Fukai’s intricately hand-drawn artwork and Masahiko Satoh’s brilliant original score, we are sharing a film that is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also layered with themes of power, gender politics, and history. I’m very much looking forward to hearing what people think ofBelladonna forty-plus years after its original release!

Screenings begin this week.

 

This interview was originally published at The Comics Journal.

 

 

BELLADONNA OF SADNESS to Screen at Prestigious Film Fests

Anime Classic to Screen at Film Fests Prior to Wider Release

Cinelicious is excited to announce that our exhaustive 4K restoration of Belladonna of Sadness will be screening at two of the biggest fantasy film festivals in the world!  First at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX (24 Septetmber – 1 October).  Then right on the heels of that Belladonna will be featured at this year’s Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival (9 October – 18 October).  Specific screening dates and times have not yet been announced.  Be sure to check each festival’s schedule for updates.

Fantastic Fest is the largest genre film festival in the U.S., specializing in horror, fantasy, sci-fi, action and just plain fantastic movies from all around the world. In years past we have presented the world premieres of major motion pictures such as THERE WILL BE BLOOD, APOCALYPTO, FRANKENWEENIE and ZOMBIELAND. Our guest roster has included such talent as Mel Gibson, Bill Murray, Dolph Lundgren, Jemaine Clement, Paul Rudd, Bill Pullman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kevin Smith, Jon Favreau, George Romero, Jess Franco, Darren Aronofsky, Mike Judge, Roger Corman, Elijah Wood, Eli Roth, Nicolas Lopez and Tim Burton. We also feature world, national and regional premieres of new, up-and-coming genre films.

Fantastic Fest is held each year at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas. The Alamo Drafthouse was named the best cinema in America by Entertainment Weekly and features food and drink served to your seat without any disruption of the movie experience.

During his Keynote Address at the International film Festival Summit in Las Vegas, Variety president and publisher Charlie Koones listed Fantastic Fest in a list of “10 Film Festivals We Love,” a list which included industry heavy-hitters such as Cannes, Toronto and Telluride. We’ve also been named as one of the “25 coolest film festivals” and the “25 film festivals worth the entry fee” by Moviemaker Magazine.

 

Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia is the number one fantasy film festival in the world and represents, at the same time, the cultural expression with the most media impact in Catalonia. With a solid experience, the Sitges Festival is a stimulating universe of encounters, exhibitions, presentations and screenings of fantasy films from all over the world.

Born in 1968 as the 1st International Week of Fantasy and Horror Movies, today the Festival is an essential rendezvous for movie lovers and audiences eager to come into contact with new tendencies and technologies applied to film and the audiovisual world.
Sitges’ status as the number one fantasy film festival in the world allows it to receive visits from top-level movie stars, directors and producers like Quentin Tarantino, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Paul Verhoeven, Ralph Fiennes, George A. Romero, Cameron Diaz, Viggo Mortensen, Terry Gilliam, Rutger Hauer, Sarah Michelle Gellar, John Landis, Joe Dante, Zoë Bell, Dino de Laurentii, Takashi Miike, Wim Wenders, Tony Curtis, David Cronenberg, Vanessa Redgrave, Darren Aronofsky, Brad Dourif, John McNaughton, Peter Greenaway, John Woo, Park Chan-Wook, Johnnie To, Paul Naschy, Ray Liotta, Jon Voight, Sam Raimi, Robert Englund, Tarsem Singh, Roger Corman, Mira Sorvino, Santiago Segura, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Guillermo del Toro, Kim Ki Duk, Álex de la Iglesia, Aitana Sánchez Gijón, among others from the long list of people who, year after year, are a media attraction. The Festival is governed by a Foundation, made up of representatives from the Sitges Town Council, the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalonia’s autonomous government) and other institutions, associations and public and private companies.

Most of its resources come from the sponsors, companies and collaborating institutions that consider their alliance to the Festival to be an excellent platform for widening their scope and branding.

The Sitges – International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia is a part of the E.F.F.F.F, as well as the venue chosen year after year for the presentation of the Méliès d’Argent Award, granted by the Federation.