A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 1, 1970
Original Title:
The Black Ships
Genres:
History
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 8
Created with imagery taken from the 19th-Century Japanese woodcuts on display in the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibition “The Japanese Expedition 1852-1866 of Commodore Matthew Perry,” the film records the opening of the country to Western trade from a Japanese perspective. In Charles’ words, the film “shows something of the special and rare situations that existed when these two cultures came together…one very sophisticated, one with a highly developed technology.” The soundtrack juxtaposes the visuals, with music from the album “Banjo Kings,” an early-American fife-and-drum recording from the Smithsonian Institution archives, and traditional Japanese music from tapes provided by the Japanese embassy.
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Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
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Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.