Budo: The Art of Killing his native Japan until he came across Arthur Davis, an American film exhibitor who ran a distribution company in Tokyo. Davis stated he funded the film out of the respect and gratitude he felt towards Japan. "The Art of Killing" won first prize at the 1978 Miami International Film Festival, but did not find an American distribution deal until 1981, when it was acquired by Crown International Pictures and received a limited release in 1982 under the title "Budo". The film eventually got a VHS release through Prism Entertainment which helped build its cult status among Japanese martial arts practitioners
What is a Masterpiece? confluence of memories and emotions forming a single idea", that it has "a power of recreating traditional forms so that they become expressive of an artist's own epoch and yet keep a relationship to the past". The highest masterpieces are said to be "illustrations of great themes." Clark also implicitly excluded the erotic from considerations of what constituted a masterpiece, based on his perspective that a necessary condition is the balance between sense and form (works that are too sensual are, therefore, unbalanced and not to be categorised at masterpiece level). What is a Masterpiece? What is a Masterpiece? is