CRITERIONCAST REVIEWS EIICHI YAMAMOTO’S THE BELLADONNA OF SADNESS [THEATRICAL REVIEW]

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It’s been a banner year for the repertory cinema racket.

Be it the various arthouses that are continuing to grow their catalogue of classic films that they screen any given week (a local museum near your’s truly will be screening Hausu with a live score, even), or the top museums around this country expanding their film screenings to full on festivals, fans of classic and rarely seen cinema are finding it easier and easier to enjoy these legendary films with a live audience. However, it’s still rare to find that one film that is not only a bonafide classic film, but also one that has been nearly impossible to see here stateside. We’ve already seen Les Blank’s long awaited Leon Russell documentary A Poem Is A Naked Person hit theaters for the first time, so the film world couldn’t already be seeing a second classic from ages ago make its US debut within weeks of that great film, could it?

The answer is, simply and without hesitation, yes.

Thanks to the Japan Cuts festival, this country’s largest festival looking at Japanese Cinema, a masterpiece from underrated animation auteur Eiichi Yamamoto is finally arriving here stateside, over 40 years after it was made.

This past Friday, the festival hosted a special sneak preview screening of the just-finished 4k restoration of this long talked about but impossible to see classic, entitled The Belladonna Of Sadness. The final film in Yamamoto’s Animerama trilogy, Belladonna features Osamu Tezuka aboard as a producer, and comes from a rather wicked bit of source material. Based on and inspired by Jules Michelet’s iconic Satanism and Witchcraft, the film tells the tale of Jeanne, a young woman who upon her wedding, is raped by a local lord. In response, she makes a pact with Satan himself, who is voiced by the one and only Tatsuya Nakadai, which in turn sends her surrounding world into utter anarchy. Very much a film entirely its own, this is not only one of the best films you’ll see this year, but one of the most original bits of animation film has ever given us.

 

“Very much a film entirely its own, this is not only one of the best films you’ll see this year, but one of the most original bits of animation film has ever given us.”

 

Narratively, the film doesn’t ultimately have much on its mind. A fever dream seemingly fueled by something entirely otherworldly, this id-driven descent into absolute madness and terror is a singular work from a singular genius. Starting off ostensibly like a series of filmed tableaus, the picture hits its second act and after the drama truly begins, it becomes something that itself feels possessed by a demon obsessed with both violence and the pinku cinema that is clearly an influence on this work. Come the ‘70s, the pinku genre had become a staple in Japanese cinema, and it is clear that that erotic cinema is the deepest influence here. Tezuka himself would produce previous works from Yamamoto, including Thousand and One Nights and Cleopatra, leaving the production of this film relatively early on to head back into the world of manga, a land where he is revered as just shy of a full on deity. In turn, this film feels much more free, and far more of one mind, almost like an animation equivalent of a There Will Be Blood or Apocalypse Now. With its use of phallic imagery and its entirely anarchic energy, the film feels like a fever dream from its director, a film that is made almost out of sheer compulsion. It is truly a startling bit of work.

Aesthetically, the film is stunning. Psychedelic colors adorn each frame of the film, and as the picture progresses, it becomes a picture so lively and so hauntingly unfiltered, that it’s truly unlike any animation you’ll ever see. Despite being a relatively straight forward revenge tale, the animation here should be studied in the highest levels of film education. Almost like watching Yamamoto take animated cinema, and distill it down to its absolute base level, the opening frames here are nothing more than panning camera over still frames of animation. However, these sequences are so haunting and deeply troubling, that as the film throttles forward, and things become more and more anarchic, the kinetic nature of Yamamoto’s direction elevates each beat. It is truly a sight to behold.

As with much of the cinema from this point in world history, as revolution is bursting at the seams across the globe, this is a film that will mean something different to each viewer. The new 4k restoration screened last Friday, and be it an animation hound or a fan of taboo-breaking cinema, any cinephile in New York should make a point to seek this film out when it makes its theatrical run. It’s a deeply troubling and haunting piece of work, and one that isn’t easy to truly break down (I’ve seen it twice so far and each time I discovered new things that changed my view of the picture), but it is an aggressively original piece of work, and one that demands discussion.

– Joshua Brunsting

 

BELLADONNA OF SADNESS lands in New York (Times) Japan Cuts Film Festival

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New York Times

Japan Cuts Film Festival at Japan Society Emphasizes the Eccentric

The annual cinematic cornucopia known as Japan Cuts — the largest festival of Japanese film in the United States — has previously been presented in association with the even larger New York Asian Film Festival. This year, its ninth, Japan Cuts is going it alone as it presents 28 features and a program of experimental shorts beginning Thursday through July 19 at Japan Society in Manhattan.

Whatever the dynamics of the move to cut ties may have been, there’s a clear practical and symbolic logic: Japan’s film industry is probably the only one in East Asia with the heft, variety and quality to support an annual festival of this size. South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines turn out plenty of movies, but if you tried to showcase close to 30 mostly recent films from any of them, the results wouldn’t be so happy.

The festival’s curator, Joel Neville Anderson, doesn’t ignore the Japanese studio mainstream, a sector widely seen to be in a deep creative trough at the moment — the opening-night feature, Yu Irie’s spy drama “Joker Game,” was partly financed by one behemoth, NTV, and distributed by another, Toho. But Mr. Anderson’s interest clearly lies with the idiosyncratic, the eccentric, the experimental and the weird, a taste that Japan rewards as richly as any country, even the United States. Here are five films from this year’s festival, all independently produced, all out of the ordinary.

BELLADONNA OF SADNESS The most distinctive item on the program is this restoration of a 1973 animated feature produced by the anime legend Osamu Tezuka and directed by his colleague Eiichi Yamamoto. It’s an Age of Aquarius curio, based on a 19th-century study of witchcraft and featuring alternately flowery and surprisingly graphic depictions of sex. (No one under 18 will be admitted to the screening.) Fair warning: The story, about a peasant woman assaulted by the king on her wedding night, is both a female-empowerment fable and a rape fantasy, in which the initial attack is followed by less violent anime-style intrusions of flowering tendrils and devilish imps. But the impact of the story is secondary to the strangeness and beauty of the mostly still images (the camera moves slowly across them) done in styles resembling Klimt, O’Keeffe, Op Art, Ralph Steadman and the higher class of Playboy.

106 year old film never looked so good!

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A single frame from D.W. Griffith’s 1909 short THE SON’S RETURN, starring Mary Pickford (her 2nd film) and Mack Sennett. The image on the left is from an existing DVD, which came from the paper prints stored at the Library of Congress and is typical of the quality we’ve come to associate with early silent-era cinema. The newly restored image on the right is from the original, single-perf Biograph 35mm nitrate camera negative. Until now, no one has been able to scan camera original Biograph negative due to its bizarre one-perf structure (which can be seen in the image).

Cinelicious is happy to announce that we’ve solved this problem and have engineered a way to successfully scan and restore this important piece of cinema history at 4K.  Beyond the gorgeous 4K scan, our team of artists put in a tremendous amount of time and effort grading, stabilizing and cleaning up the over century old images.

The 4K restoration premiered at UCLA Film & Television Archive’s FESTIVAL OF PRESERVATION this past March at the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.  The restoration was funded jointly by the UCLA Film & Television Achive, the Mary Pickford Foundation, and the Museum of Modern Art.

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So Sharky!

Shark Week Promo

Shark Week Promo

We’ve done a great deal of work for Discovery Channel over the years, but these have to be the most fun spots we’ve worked on yet.  So Sharky!

Client: Discovery Channel
Production and Post Production: AV Squad
Director:  Peter McKeon
Producer:  Zach Lyall
Colorist: Lynette Duensing

 

Belladonna of Sadness 4K Restoration Invades Tumblr

Belladonna on Tumblr

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Cinelicious has launched a Tumblr page in support of their new 4K restoration of the 1973 Japanese animated feature Belladonna of Sadness. The page will feature behind-the-scenes looks at the restoration process, including many before-and-after images showing off the amazing beauty that a 4K restoration from original 35mm negative can produce. We’ve selected some of our favorite images from the film featuring the incredible artwork of Kuni Fukai and will be posting them regularly!  Be sure to follow so you don’t miss anything!

ANIME NEWS NETWORK – Cinelicious Pics To Restore Belladonna of Sadness For U.S. Release

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Cinelicious Pics has signed an exclusive deal to restore and distribute the long-unavailable 1973 Japanese animated masterpiece BELLADONNA OF SADNESS, as its first major restoration and re-release. The last film in the groundbreaking Animerama trilogy produced by the godfather of Japanese anime & manga, Osamu Tezuka (METROPOLIS, ASTRO BOY) and directed by his long time collaborator Eiichi Yamamoto, BELLADONNA is a mad, swirling, psychedelic lightshow of medieval tarot-card imagery with horned demons and haunted forests. Never before released in the U.S., BELLADONNA OF SADNESS unfolds as a series of spectacular still watercolor paintings that bleed and twist together like an animated version of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée.” Cinelicious will restore the feature using the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements in anticipation of a 2015 theatrical, VOD, and home video re-release in North America.

Cinelicious Pics, which launched earlier this year, is uniquely positioned to restore film through its parent company Cinelicious. “It took months of negotiations to convince the Japanese rightsholders to entrust us with the original camera negative of the film which we’re restoring in-house,” says Cinelicious Pics’ President Paul Korver. “People will be simply blown away by the wild, hallucinatory images and soundtrack,” he adds. “BELLADONNA OF SADNESS belongs on a short list with Rene Laloux’s FANTASTIC PLANET and Ralph Bakshi’s WIZARDS as one of the trippiest animated films ever conceived,” adds Cinelicious Pics’ EVP of Acquisitions & Distribution Dennis Bartok. “This is a major rediscovery – and I have to give credit to Hadrian Belove at The Cinefamily here in L.A. for bringing the film to our attention.”

An innocent young woman, Jean (voiced by Katsutaka Ito) is savagely assaulted by the local lord on her wedding night. To take revenge, she makes a pact with the Devil himself (voiced by Tatsuya Nakadai, from Akira Kurosawa’s RAN) who appears as an erotic sprite and transforms her into a black-robed vision of madness and desire. The film is fueled by a Japanese psych rock soundtrack by Masahiko Sato. The deal was negotiated by Cinelicious Pics’ President Paul Korver, President of Business Affairs Kristine Blumensaadt and EVP Dennis Bartok with Japanese rightsholders Gold View Co. and Mushi Productions.

Cinelicious Pics brings handpicked, delicious cinema to U.S. audiences for the first time via theatrical release, VOD, Blu-Ray and 4K Television. The company’s current slate includes GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, METALHEAD, GANGS OF WASSEYPUR, and Josephine Decker’s BUTTER ON THE LATCH and THOU WAST MILD & LOVELY. Key ingredients include an eclectic mix foreign and independent features & docs plus 4K-restored art house and cult classics, lovingly brought to pristine viewing quality by sister post & digital restoration studio Cinelicious.

CINELICIOUS IS HELPING US SEE GREAT MOVIES THAT OTHERWISE WOULD BE FORGOTTEN

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LA Weekly

The most exciting new presence in Los Angeles film culture doesn’t announce itself as such. Housed within a deceptively small-looking building on the 5700 block of Melrose, the newly launchedCinelicious Pics has already loosed an impressive slate of independent cinema upon the moviegoing world, with several others on the way. This is a boon for cinephiles everywhere, yes, but an especially heartening one for L.A. partisans tired of bemoaning the status of theatrical distribution and exhibition in the ostensible center of the film world.

For the record, “newly launched” is a somewhat misleading description: Cinelicious Pics is actually the distribution wing of post-production company Cinelicious, whose recent resume includes no less a film than Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Its first release was the exceptional Giuseppe Makes a Movie, a documentary that played the Nuart this past October. Next came the Double Decker, an unofficial nickname given to Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, two stirring films by promising newcomer Josephine Decker; neither received a theatrical run in Los Angeles, though Mild and Lovelydid screen at AFI Fest and both are now available on art-house streaming site Fandor.

Cinelicious then opted to skip December lest any potential titles get boxed out of a typically crowded award season, but returned to theaters on Friday with its most ambitious release yet: Anurag Kashyap’sGangs of Wasseypur.

You may not have heard of the film, which is most easily (albeit reductively) described as the Indian answer to Goodfellas, but its release is no small thing. The two part, five-hour-long crime epic first made the festival rounds in 2012, acquiring a small-but-vocal following despite not landing a stateside distribution deal. Cinelicious acquired it at the end of the timeframe during which it could still be considered a “new” movie, as explained to me by three Cinelicious higher-ups before an in-house screening of Part 1 last month. That troika consists of Paul Korver (founder and CEO), Dennis Bartok (executive vice president, acquisitions & distribution) and David Marriott (acquisitions director).

The first part of Wasseypur is at the AMC Burbank 8 this week, with the second half following it this Friday. It’s easily Cinelicious’ most high-profile offering yet, and potentially its breakthrough.

Not that they necessarily need it to be. Cinelicious had already been involved in independent film and film restoration for years before Korver realized how much economic and creative sense it made to expand into distribution. “I knew I wanted someone who was more knowledgeable about film history than I was” in order to do so, Korver tells me during our meeting, and so he spent several months looking for such a candidate before being referred to Bartok in December of 2013.

Paul Korver and Dennis Bartok

“I had no idea you could know so much about film and film history,” Korver says of the former American Cinematheque programmer whose love of Indian cinema seems at least partially responsible for the decision to snatch up Wasseypur. The two later discovered Marriott, then a student at UCLA’s archival program, who started as an intern and came on full-time last summer. One of the many reasons the trio is optimistic is that their parent company allows them to create DCPs, DVDs, Blu-rays and all manner of other materials themselves rather than outsourcing to a third party.

As noted by Bartok, there’s also still a paucity of independent film distributors with genuinely bold programming strategies. L.A. has Strand Releasing, Austin has Drafthouse Films, Chicago has Music Box, and New York leads the way with the likes of Cinema Guild, Kino Lorber, A24 and others.

Cinelicious makes for a welcome addition to that group and has no plans to slow its momentum. The excellent Metalhead and a restoration/re-release of Japanese animated curio Belladonna of Sadness are two forthcoming titles to look forward to, with more to be announced in the coming months.

The trio can’t entirely answer the question on many L.A. cinephiles’ minds, however: Why is it so much harder to open an independent movie here than elsewhere? Marriott mentions that “New York is very well-served by its density, and Los Angeles obviously sprawls more,” while Bartok feels that, “in some ways, festivals have actually made it harder for films to get a theatrical run.” That’s a void Cinelicious is eager to fill, which should come as welcome news to underserved audiences in L.A. and beyond.

 

POST MAGAZINE: Lady Gaga’s “G.U.Y” Colored by Cinelicious

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HOLLYWOOD — Cinelicious provided 35mm film scanning, dailies, and final color services for Lady Gaga’s new 11-minute G.U.Y. video. Directed by the pop star, the project was captured on 35mm film and marks one of the few productions to be shot at Hearst Castle. The G.U.Y. video portrays Lady Gaga as a wounded, winged creature, who finds support and healing from her stylized army of dancers. The shoot extends throughout the Castle’s grounds, pool and garden. In addition to the star and her dancers, the video features the cast from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills series.
*Full Credit List – Please See End Credits in Video*

Cinelicious Puts Film First For Three Sundance Premiere Projects

Cinelicious is excited to have contributed post services for three Sundance 2014 premiere films, Michael Tully’s Ping Pong Summer, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, and Jeff Preiss’ Low Down, all shot on 16mm and 35mm film.

“Film is alive and well even at the independent level, and we are excited to have worked three films included in this year’s Sundance line-up, including the US Dramatic Cinematography Award winner Low Down” says Cinelicious’ Paul Korver. “If you look at the award winning films each year, overwhelmingly they are shot on film. It’s a great validation of the enduring beauty of celluloid.”

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