Film noise and grain are beautiful 01

Sometimes we are approached with the idea that "our company will convert MIDORI to the highest quality and sell it," but this is counterproductive.
Harada is against excessive digital remastering.
Because he believes that the texture of a work is decided by the artist.
Therefore, Harada is skeptical of large companies that are not involved in the production of the work arbitrarily performing excessive digital remastering (excessively increasing the image quality).
In the first place, excessive high image quality was promoted by large companies, not requested by the general public.
The most important thing about a movie is not clear image quality.
However, today, many movie fans are not satisfied unless the image quality is high.
Previous film directors have a long history of intentionally roughening the grain of the screen to try various expressions and experiments.
When a company converts this into a uniformly smooth, shiny, inorganic image, it is actually a violation of the artist's moral right.
Nowadays, it is difficult to even obtain the original version that has not been digitally remastered.

In this category, we would like to reaffirm how beautiful "images that are not high quality" can be.

"飢餓海峡(Hungry Straits)" (1962/Director Tomu Uchida) Credit: Toei

This film was made in the year Harada was born.
In this film, veteran director Uchida used 16mm and 36mm depending on the scene.
Invented by left-wing cameraman Yoshio Miyajimaand others, "Super 16mm" is a technique that blows up standard-sized 16mm film to 35mm Cinemascope size (widescreen).
As a result, the image, which is enlarged about four times, appears rough with grain and sweat on human skin is emphasized.
In this film, there is a shocking cut where the image changes from the original 35mm to 16mm. Therefore, even for audience members who have no knowledge of film, the difference in the image combined with the shocking acting creates a surprise.
We think that the audience will be surprised by the sudden appearance of rough images rather than clear image quality, but what do you think?
In this way, it is not right for a company to arbitrarily change the image quality of images that the director and cameraman have worked so hard to change.
However, this film has recently been digitally remastered, and the picture quality has been arbitrarily altered to produce a uniformly clear and inorganic image.
As we have previously written here, Uchida has questioned the 1971 film copyright reform, which determined that film copyright should be owned by the production company.

Veteran director Uchida Tomu writes several pages in his book "Uchida Tomu: 50 Years as a Film Director" (1999/Nihon Tosho Center) criticizing the 1971 film copyright revision.
It begins with a quote from veteran director Hiroshi Inagaki, who says, "I can receive secondary royalties for my screenplays, but I'm not allowed to have copyright for my main job, films."
Director Uchida says of the revision of the Copyright Act, "The arguments are shallow. The explanation is insufficient. The reasons are unclear. In the end, it has been replaced by a corporate protection law."
He concludes: "The director is the only person who cannot leave the set for even a minute or a second during film production, and no one else can replace him. Prime Minister, I ask that you reconsider."

8ｍｍ

16ｍｍ

In "Horizon Blue," 8mm and 16mm film are suddenly inserted. Rather than keeping the same image quality for two hours, it is more surprising to the audience if there is a change in texture, and old film does not just show old landscapes, but also reveals valuable records of the era in the scratches and fading engraved on it.
"Horizon Blue" was also screened in a small size of 640 x 426 pixels, far from today's high image quality. The grain was rough, and some audience members thought it was shot on film.

For Harada, the comment "It looked like film" makes him happier than "The image quality was beautiful."

"Zashikiro" was shot with a camera, not a scanner, to capture the texture of the air. The air particles between the subject and the camera create a unique sense of perspective, and the rough image quality seems to express the roughness of the characters' skin and even their suffering.