I miss Tokyo, and especially so after watching trailers for these two films. Firstly Tokyo! which actually has three gaijin directors (Michel Gondry, Joon-ho Bong & Leos Carax) as the film is divided into three seperate short stories… Heres the trailer:
The other film I am hanging out to see is Tokyo Sonata by Kiyoshi Kurosawa who is one of my favourite Japanese directors, ever since I saw his film Retribution at the NZ Film Festival last year. Heres the trailer for Tokyo Sonata, which is a slight change of direction for Kurosawa-san:
I was just reading an older interview with him & found his comments about sound very interesting:
Q: Something that helps in establishing atmosphere is sound effects. In Cure there was an almost constant droning sound in the background, which I hear in Charisma every now and then and in Barren Illusion as well.
“In my films I don’t like to use sound to elaborate the story. The story is the story and sound operates on a slightly different plain. As I mentioned, film to me is somewhere in between reality and fiction and I think of sound as defining the world that I’ve created in that film. Sound is what defines that place that is neither story nor reality, but in between.
Because I think when you’re telling the story in visual images you reflect the characters and they can only be that what they are. They’re two-dimensional. But in a way sound can give you a three-dimensional signal of the world.”
Also note: there is a good two part Q&A with from Kurosawa-san from the New York Film Festival at youtube here
