Four Seasons in Japan: A Cycle of Film Classics: Ran
July 3, 2009
4:00 pm
(1985, 160 min.)
Akira Kurasawa’s culminating masterpiece adapts King Lear to a mythical samurai past with pageantry and passion, mounting some of the most spectacular battle scenes ever filmed. The film garnered 25 awards and 15 nominations, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Director and a Golden Globe nomination for best Foreign Film.
While the film’s title may the Japanese translation for “chaos,” Ran is spectacularly detail-oriented and organized. Preproduction included a painstaking ten-year storyboarding process in which Kurasawa painted every shot featured in the film. Additionally, the film’s hundreds of costumes were created by hand and took more than two years to complete. Ran won an Oscar for Best Costume Design in 1986.
During the "Four Seasons in Japan: A Cycle of Film Classics" series take a turn through the years with a sampling of classic work from four Japanese masters of cinema, who made the postwar era a golden age of film in Japan. Films are shown on Fridays at 4:00 pm, in Japanese with English subtitles.
