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appreciation akira kurosawa
Article by Ross Otterman
The recent passing of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, at age 88, inspired memories of a fabled career and an immense body of work. Kurosawa’s motifs of survival and rescue, which influenced the styles of American film directors from Francis Ford Coppola to George Lucas, as well as his large-scale craftsmanship, have been made the trademark of his legacy. Crowned long ago as a master of the samurai epic, a distinction he earned with films such as The Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and many others, Kurosawa has long been seen by the world’s cinema community as an action director of the first order.
However, a few of Kurosawa’s less lauded works add a unique perspective to his large collection of films. These deal directly (and more serenely) with a theme relevant to much of his work: the consequences of death. Ikiru (1952) uses this theme in its depiction of the chain of events arising when Wanatabe, a weary bureaucrat, is jolted to life by the news that he has only a few months to live. In developing his point, Kurosawa takes this man through the preliminary adventures of drinking, dancing, and buying a new hat before coming to meet his true challenge: the revival of a sewage-filled public park. That Wanatabe does not live to see the park restored is significant and necessary; in the second part of the film the man has died, others he has inspired have followed him in his cause, and his photograph becomes a sign of his self-realization. Kurosawa returns to this photograph several times in the film, making it into a kind of ghost.
An eccentric, experimental work called Dodes’ka-den (or Dodesukaden) (1970), Kurosawa’s first color feature film, imagines the cumulative efforts of a village either created or left among ruins. A film which calls to mind recent progressions in the states of film coloring and computer patchwork, Dodes’ka-den relies on glowing expanses of primary color to form a junkyard of lives seeking hope and coping with the surrounding destruction. In Ikiru, Kurosawa made a man’s awareness as an individual the start of a larger betterment; in Dodes’ka-den the community is a means for rebuilding both the human self and the physical environment. In this case, the junkyard setting is like the photograph of Wanatabe, a symbol of death and its own specter. Both live on as a reminder of what once was and will no longer be, as well as what might be.
The resonant colors in the sets, costumes and backgrounds give the film an uncertain, luminous aura--a bright, sharp counterpoint to the fog. A husband and wife wear bright red clothes inside a bright red den. A friend comes over wearing an intrusive yellow jacket. A day later the two men switch wives, the yellow-wearing man going to the red house, the red-wearer going to the yellow house. In the next scene, when a homeless man covered in dirt asks his young son to help him choose a color for his vision of the ideal home, the boy answers “white.” The man says that white is too common, and that color itself makes the feeling for the entire house. As opaque as this is on paper, Dodes’ka-den might be a story that is best told by camera and shown on screen.
Dodes’ka-den starts and finishes with a deluded man making believe he is conducting a train. The train he mimics sounds the call: “dodes ka-den, dodes ka-den...” Aesthetically becoming a half-man/half-train amid a junkyard of broken machinery and red, blue, yellow and green hovels, he is our tour guide for the visit to a half-real environment of frozen time. Ikiru and Dodes’ka-den are the films of Akira Kurosawa in which humanity rises through refuse and regulation to reveal its true nature. The cinema that Kurosawa fashioned had the capacity to understand not only epic grandiosity, but the subtlety of personal and social life.
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Article by Ross Otterman
The recent passing of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, at age 88, inspired memories of a fabled career and an immense body of work. Kurosawa’s motifs of survival and rescue, which influenced the styles of American film directors from Francis Ford Coppola to George Lucas, as well as his large-scale craftsmanship, have been made the trademark of his legacy. Crowned long ago as a master of the samurai epic, a distinction he earned with films such as The Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and many others, Kurosawa has long been seen by the world’s cinema community as an action director of the first order.
However, a few of Kurosawa’s less lauded works add a unique perspective to his large collection of films. These deal directly (and more serenely) with a theme relevant to much of his work: the consequences of death. Ikiru (1952) uses this theme in its depiction of the chain of events arising when Wanatabe, a weary bureaucrat, is jolted to life by the news that he has only a few months to live. In developing his point, Kurosawa takes this man through the preliminary adventures of drinking, dancing, and buying a new hat before coming to meet his true challenge: the revival of a sewage-filled public park. That Wanatabe does not live to see the park restored is significant and necessary; in the second part of the film the man has died, others he has inspired have followed him in his cause, and his photograph becomes a sign of his self-realization. Kurosawa returns to this photograph several times in the film, making it into a kind of ghost.
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Akira Kurosawa
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The resonant colors in the sets, costumes and backgrounds give the film an uncertain, luminous aura--a bright, sharp counterpoint to the fog. A husband and wife wear bright red clothes inside a bright red den. A friend comes over wearing an intrusive yellow jacket. A day later the two men switch wives, the yellow-wearing man going to the red house, the red-wearer going to the yellow house. In the next scene, when a homeless man covered in dirt asks his young son to help him choose a color for his vision of the ideal home, the boy answers “white.” The man says that white is too common, and that color itself makes the feeling for the entire house. As opaque as this is on paper, Dodes’ka-den might be a story that is best told by camera and shown on screen.
Dodes’ka-den starts and finishes with a deluded man making believe he is conducting a train. The train he mimics sounds the call: “dodes ka-den, dodes ka-den...” Aesthetically becoming a half-man/half-train amid a junkyard of broken machinery and red, blue, yellow and green hovels, he is our tour guide for the visit to a half-real environment of frozen time. Ikiru and Dodes’ka-den are the films of Akira Kurosawa in which humanity rises through refuse and regulation to reveal its true nature. The cinema that Kurosawa fashioned had the capacity to understand not only epic grandiosity, but the subtlety of personal and social life.
back to top