Hills of the Seasons (1990) [00MW-0005]I'll start off by saying that this video has no entertainment value whatsoever. There's no action in the usual sense, no people to speak of, hardly even any animals apart from one shot in which a horse is drawing a plough. It's not even a travelogue, just a series of mostly static shots of landscapes in a little corner of Hokkaido, the northernmost of the Home Islands of Japan. Now, does that mean it's uninteresting? Not at all!
The pictorials occupy a whole year, returning over & over again to the same spots, & the same angles. Director Shinzo Maeda uses the rhythm of the seasons to create a sort of visual music, reminiscent of the theories of John Whitney. The music by William Ackerman, a series of instrumental pieces reflecting various stylistic influences, & incorporating instruments ranging from the shakuhachi (traditional Japanese flute) to the electric guitar, has no particularly obvious or direct connexion to the images, but it seems to fit well, & is enjoyable on its own. The result is something rather like an art museum & something like a modern dance performance, if landscape paintings looked different from every angle, or choreography were taken up by trees, rivers, & volcanoes. I found it highly engaging.
Technically, the presentation is excellent. It should be noted that I am watching currently using the Sony MST-2000, which is not the best of MUSE decoders, so I do not get the best possible results, but I was struck by the attractiveness of the picture. The resolving power of the medium is demonstrated before the program even starts, with a title card containing about 15 lines of 50 characters each of Japanese text, which is quite legible, even with a wide margin around it. Scenes with vivid colour, notably the green of young grain, are reproduced very naturally & clearly, as are scenes of delicate colour such as the fall of the cherry blossoms, showing the value of the "pseudo-constant luminance" colour encoding. Shades of contrast from the variations in texture of the snowpack on the mountains to the blackness of freshly-turned earth show up well. When the snow falls, or the wind moves through the grass, any doubts you may have had about the ability of MUSE to render motion will disappear. There were some scenes which seemed as though they might be noisy, but they typically contained either mist or extremely fine detail, which could look that way in real life. Modern equipment & media would be hard-pressed to do better. On the audio side, no "Red Book" track is provided, but the embedded DANCE B-Mode, 48 kHz 16 bits, sounds very natural with what can be rather complex, challenging instrumental pieces.
I recommend this Hi-Vision LD. It is a thing of beauty, & an excellent source of quiet enjoyment.
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