Linwood Dunn Theater
Pickford Center, 1313 Vine Street
Hollywood, CA 90028
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Cinema has endured for decades in the face of competing visual storytelling mediums. In connection with our event The New Audience: Moviegoing in the Connected World, discover how studios and filmmakers – long before tablets, smartphones and the Internet – responded as audiences began trading regular visits to the movies for the ease and affordability of the first small screen: television. In response, numerous widescreen cinematic formats were rolled out around the world and capitalized on the breathtaking width of the projected image, not to mention the heightened fidelity of stereophonic sound, to achieve effects far beyond the reach of TV sets. This Is Widescreen offers a colorful assortment of films that demonstrate how filmmakers found new means of engaging the flexibility of the cinema and the key larger-than-life film formats employed over a 15-year period in Hollywood – from the launch of Cinerama in 1952 and the subsequent widescreen boom that included CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO and others – plus highlights from the first wave of 'Scope filmmaking from around the globe.
Thursday, JUNE 11 | 7:30 P.M.
Introduced by John Bailey. Four Japanese folk tales were adapted for this anthology horror film from director Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri), still the only horror film to receive an Academy Award nomination for Foreign Language Film. In the tradition of classic multi-story horror films like Dead of Night and Creepshow, Kwaidan tells four ghost stories (including one cut from the original U.S. release but later restored), with Kobayashi using Eastmancolor Tohoscope, elaborately stylized sets and the eerie, electronic-flecked music of Toru Takemitsu to create a visually and aurally imaginative work of fantasy that called upon Kobayashi’s painterly roots. Decades before “J-horror” became an influential movement in international genre cinema, Kwaidan chilled audiences around the world.
1964, 161 minutes, color, 35mm | Directed by Masaki Kobayashi; written by Yoko Mizuki, based on stories from the books Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, Shadowings and Kotto by Lafcadio Hearn; with Michiyo Aratama, Misako Watanabe, Keiko Kishi, Tatsuya Nakadai, Katzuo Nakamura, Takashi Shimura, Ganemon Nakamura, Noboru Nakaya.