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Life is for living and enjoying; to live life meaningfully is even more rewarding. Kanji Watanabe, a bureaucrat, who died of cancer, seems to say it silently to the mourners who have gathered to pay respect to his departed soul. Watanabe is the protagonist of Ikiru (To Live) by Japanese film icon Akira Kurosawa. Watanabe remains
self-centered like his colleagues — pushing files and passing the
buck, ignoring common people’s plight; but once he knows he is
dying, he learns to value his life, discards his unproductive
work-life and helps to build a playground, a long demand of the
community. He dies happily with the lyrics of a long-forgotten song: Life
is so short, fall in love, dear maiden, while your lips are still red,
and before you are cold, for there will be no tomorrow.
Ikiru is one of the most important works among the 30 films Kurosawa has left behind on his death in 1998. At the recently concluded 16th Kolkata Film Festival (KFF), the film was screened as part of the package of eight films under the "Centenary Tribute" section dedicated to Kurosawa, a perennial favourite with Kolkata’s cinema literate audience. Madadayo (Not Yet) is another such tribute to life as portrayed by a retired teacher and his philosophy he is not yet ready to die as his old pupils gather together on his birthday every year. Kurosawa is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Though very much ‘Japanese’ in his story setting and ambience, his celluloid creations reached out to audiences beyond the Far East. He was hugely influenced by his elder brother during his adolescence, who was a silent film narrator and introduced him to Hollywood greats of the time but when he developed his skill becoming an assistant director and later an independent filmmaker, he was very much a man of the soil. Kurosawa began his illustrious career with Sanshiro Sugata (Judo Saga, 1943). But it was his Rashomon (1951), an entry at the Venice Film Festival, which went on to win the Golden Lion that introduced him — and Japanese cinema, to the western audience. Even after 60 years of its making, the film’s magic still seems to hold. After watching Rashomon, maestro Satyajit Ray found that the film posed a "challenge" to the western domination of films at that time: "Here was a film masterful in technique and adult in theme and with just the right degree of universality to prevent alienation while retaining the pull of the exotic." (Our Films, Their Films) In fact, Ray saw the film on three consecutive days and confessed "The effect of the film on me personally, was electric`85[I] wondered each time if there was another film anywhere which gave such sustained and dazzling proof of a director’s command over very aspect of filmmaking." Rashomon is a murder mystery with a difference. Set in medieval Japan, the story begins with a woodcutter’s discovery of the body of a Samurai in the wood. However, there are other angles to the story. Four persons, who testify before the judge tell different versions of the murder; the beautiful wife, who is raped by a womaniser bandit (Toshir? Mifune, Kurosawa’s favourite actor), the bandit himself, and the ‘medium’— a woman who in a spell bring in the spirit of the dead. Who is telling the truth? Using astounding outdoor camera movement and minimalist set-design, Kurosawa brings in questions of morality, suppressed sexuality, human folly, and kindness that redeems the morass of human existence. His approach — of telling the same story in different ways, has since been followed by many directors worldwide. Kurosawa adapted many famous stories but lent his own genius to make it different from other such adaptations. Throne of Blood on Macbeth, for example. Not very familiar with English language, he did not even read Shakespeare’s story of lust for power and repentance, as he said once. But his Throne`85was no less effective. Ray makes us look at the film’s "reverence for natural light" as he writes "Think of Orson Welles’s Macbeth, stumbling through eternal gloom amid simulated rocks and caves of the Republic sound stage: and of Kurosawa’s Macbeth (Throne ..) brooding on the heights of the Fujiyama. Real rain and mist and chilly wind charge the film with a conviction and poetry no studio can ever capture." It was so because Kurosawa always preferred to shoot in natural landscapes and let the camera talk. Another screening was the less known The Lower Depths (1957) adapted from a Maxim Gorky play about inmates of a hovel where serfs, travellers and farm hands live a miserable life. Kurosawa brought together an ensemble of excellent actors, Mifune included, to portray their hopeless lives, the dominating ruthless landlady and a love triangle, to bring about nuances of human character. In this hopeless existence, there is also calming influence of a pilgrim contrasted by a violence simmering beneath as the landlady would rather kill her sister than let the young man she lasts for, love her. The action is almost centered indoor, which should have caused a claustrophobic effect but Kurosawa adapts the ‘stage’ production to such effect that it becomes a riveting drama. Action is never absent because the director himself believed: "a film has to move." Indeed, action and violence are part of Kurosawa’s films. Seven Samurai, a huge hit has some of most exquisite fight scenes. Story of seven samurais or warriors and how they help a cowered village to stand against a band of sadistic outlaws, its influence is seen in subsequent Hollywood films like The Magnificent Seven and even in homegrown Sholay, an all-time hit. Ray found in him a "master of cutting" and this skill has lent the film a speed and movement in a class of its own. On the violence that runs through the film, Kurosawa is quoted in the book The Films of Kurosawa (Donald Richie): "I am the kind of person that works violently, throwing myself into it. I also like hot summers, cold winters, heavy rains and snows, and I think most of my pictures have that. I like extremes because I find them most alive..." Perhaps it is something in his Samurai gene (his forefathers were Samurais) and contrasts embedded in Japanese ethos where acceptance of death and love of poetry that come through in his films. In his lifetime Kuroswa won numerous national and international awards. In 1990, he was honoured with the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. "If I ever lost my passion for films, then I myself would be lost... Film is what I am about," said Akira Kurosawa once. Perhaps, in his own way, he also wrote his own epitaph.
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