I saw this in a theater about fourty years ago. the colors were astonishing. greens unlike anything have have seen before or since.
im curious if if is possible to see it as it once was now. are there any prints left that have not faded? is the blu ray good? I suspect that many of the colors in the print are out of the blu ray/monitor color gamut.
I don't have the blu-ray, but everything I've heard about it, about the recent restoration, I would say yes.
Check this out: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2727-gate-of-hell-a-colorful-hi story
"The restoration of Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell (1953) is an occasion for celebration, the reclamation of a great cinematic treasure from the dustbin of history, where it languished for many decades. Viewers can now see the movie as it has not been seen for half a century. Hailing from Japan’s golden age of cinema, when now classic films by the country’s leading directors were embraced by overseas markets and commanded attention and excitement at international festivals, Kinugasa’s film won the top honor, then the Grand Prix, at the Cannes festival in 1954, and earned the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and another Oscar for best costume design. But after attracting all this recognition, Gate of Hell went on to become a virtually lost film; the fragile photochemical process used to make it caused its colors to fade, and viewers could no longer see the spectacular designs Kinugasa and his team had created. [...]
History seems to have winked at Kinugasa—both A Page of Madness and Gate of Hell were “lost” and then found. In the case of Gate of Hell, although it never physically vanished, it certainly disappeared artistically. Eastman Kodak’s new film stock (5248) offered revolutionary cost savings, but unlike those of three-strip Technicolor, its colors did not prove to be long-lasting, a problem not corrected until the 1980s. During this interval, cinema’s heritage of color filmmaking was imperiled, as numerous films suffered the same harsh fate as Gate of Hell.
Fortunately, because of the film’s international success, Daiei had made separation masters—black-and-white films that contain a record of all the color information—in order to put more copies of the film into release. Because they are printed on black-and-white stock, the separations do not fade, and they can be used to create a full-color duplicate negative of the film. Separation masters provide a vital means of recovering the color information in films whose negatives and positive prints have faded (they also enabled the restoration of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). For Gate of Hell, they were used, in combination with passages taken from a duplicate negative and several master positives, to reproduce the film’s original Eastmancolor look, which was bright, vibrant, and highly saturated.
Viewers seeing the restored Gate of Hell will be astonished by its pictorial beauty and sensuousness. Eastman 5248 was relatively slow stock, meaning that it required a lot of light to shoot with. As a result, it produced fine-grained, extremely sharp images that showcase the film’s lavish pictorialism wonderfully. [...]"
The blu-rays have also gotten perfect scores for picture quality, on blu-ray review sites.
I just watched the film for the first time on Criterion's Hulu channel, which isn't the ideal way to fully appreciate this film's visual beauty, but it was nonetheless stunning, and certainly colourful.
--- grethiwha -------- My Favourite Films:
http://www.imdb.com/list/Bw65XZIpkH8/
I finished watching Criterion's new blu-ray a few minutes ago. It's gorgeous in every way, including rich and vibrant color. A wonderful film, which I'd never seen before.
shareI just now watched the movie and the color really impressed me. It was like a painting come to life. I really love these kinds of early color movies.
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