Released 1975. Russian/Japanese co-production. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Won Best Foreign Film Oscar, 1975. Dialog in Russian. IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071411/
A neglected masterpiece
The reason I’m putting this here is that I think it’s a neglected masterpiece. Even though it won an Oscar, there is really no decent version of this on DVD. Most people who’ve seen it consider it a classic, even amongst Kurosawa’s oeuvre of outstanding movies.
In fall of 2008, a film history unit of the AMPAS screened a copy of it in LA as part of a Kurosawa tribute. But I was (most tragically) unable to attend. (I’ve put the location and date below.)
Desperate times, desperate measures.
As an artist myself I am sensitive to copyright and intellectual property issues. I would be glad to pay a reasonable price (up to $40) for a good DVD of this movie, but sadly, there really isn’t any. I even considered buying an old laserdisc player in case a laser copy showed up.
After quite a bit of research, being still unable to come up with, I ended up assembling a version of my own from torrents, using Nero Vision as my authoring tool.
It took some patient tweaking and fiddling, but I finally got a version I’m pretty pleased with (not to brag).
It turns out our public library system had a copy of the Kino DVD. The quality of that version is not really quite as bad as I remember it. It’s watchable. There’s an audio dub track in English that’s actually decent, for those who don’t like subtitles. It’s interesting to compare the subtitles and dubbed dialogue.
The special 2008 screening by AMPAS
LINWOOD DUNN THEATER
Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study
1313 Vine Street
Hollywood, CA
7:30 PM – Dersu Uzala (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1975)
If anyone went to this and has any review or remarks, I’d love to read them.
Criterion website essay on Dersu Uzala (Update 12 Aug 2009)
On the Criterion Collection website, I just discovered an excellent essay about this movie, written by Donald Ritchie
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/880
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