It is curious how Akira Kurosawa, the director of such wondrous Technicolored treats for the eye as
Kagemusha (1980),
Ran (1985) and
Dreams (1990) did not make his first color
film until 1970, after having spent decades in Japan making some of the world's greatest films,
including
Seven Samurai (1954). Even more incredibly, Kurosawa was a painter, so it seems
inconceivable that it took him until 1970 to actually use color in his day job. That first film to
be touched by Kurosawa's painterly eye was
Dodes'ka-den (1970), which is now available on
DVD from the Criterion Collection. The special edition features a 36-minute excerpt from the
documentary
Akira Kurosawa: It is Wonderful to Create that covers Kurosawa's career between
the release of
Red Beard in 1965 and the release of
Dodes'ka-den in 1970. Also
included with the DVD are a booklet featuring a new essay by Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince and a
new interview with Kurosawa's longtime script supervisor Teruyo Nogami.
Anyone familiar with Kurosawa's films up until
Dodes'ka-den will see immediately that it
marks a new era in Kurosawa's sensibility and style. The narration from the trailer (included on
the DVD) says, "This is a story about bizarre people in a bizarre town. But it is a story about
people you know. The sorrow, nobility and cruelty of humanity, blended with humor into a beautiful
melody." Gone is a central story, a hero or even a central protagonist with which Kurosawa builds
tales of the resilience of the samurai code in a morally corrupt world, or the simple goodness
struggling to survive in the midst of brutality and neglect. Also absent are most of the familiar
faces that Kurosawa placed in front of the cameras for years. Stock company players like Takashi
Shimura, Yushio Tsuchiya and others were left out, as was Kurosawa's most important on-screen muse,
Toshiro Mifune; Kurosawa and Mifune's famous partnership had come under severe strain during the
production of
Red Beard (1965). (They never worked together again.) Instead,
Dodes'ka-den weaves together several narrative strains, or episodes, based on short fictions
by Shugoro Yamamoto, a popular writer whose work Kurosawa had previously adapted into
Sanjuro (1962) and
Red Beard. All of these tales involve a handful of characters
living in a slum. The principle characters include two drunken day laborers and their wives; a
cuckolded husband who lovingly tends to his wife's many children (most of them from different
fathers); a beggar and his son, starving in the rusted shell of an automobile; a young girl abused
by her cruel uncle; a man traumatized by painful memories; a wise village elder who seems to act as
the moral center of the film; and finally, a mentally-challenged boy who operates an imaginary
trolley that opens and closes the film. The sound he makes, approximating what real trolleys sound
like when they go 'clickety-clack' across the tracks, is where the title of the film comes from -
dodes'ka-den...dodes'ka-den...dodes'ka-den...
Kurosawa's career at the time of
Dodes'ka-den was in awful shape. It had been five years
since
Red Beard, an extraordinary amount of time between film projects for Kurosawa. In the
lost interim, he had developed
The Runaway Train to be his first color film (in 70mm, no
less), but American producers balked at his budget and his artistic demands. They thought color
photography was a needless expense, since most of the prospective film would take place in the snow
anyway. (Kurosawa's story was finally made - in 1986 as
Runaway Train, directed by Andrei
Konchalovsky and starring Jon Voight in an Oscar®-nominated performance.) Even more disastrous
was Kurosawa's aborted participation in 20th Century-Fox's multi-national production of
Tora!
Tora! Tora! (1970). Having spent two years developing the project, the relationship between
sensei and the Hollywood studio became poisonous when it was suspected that Kurosawa was falling
behind schedule and going way over budget. Believing Kurosawa was faltering under the strain, and
quite possibly mentally ill (the most damaging slur against the director), Fox fired Kurosawa.
Meanwhile, the Japanese film industry was also in dire straits, so Kurosawa didn't have much of a
viable home base for filmmaking. It was under these circumstances that Kurosawa and three of
Japan's other preeminent directors - Masaki Kobayashi, Kon Ichikawa and Keisuke Kinoshita - formed
a production company called the Club of the Four Knights, with the hopes that the prestige of their
four names banded together would attract financing and quality projects.
Dodes'ka-den became
their first and only production.
After the acrimonious experience with Fox over
Tora! Tora! Tora!, and the subsequent damage
to his reputation, Kurosawa felt cast off and unwanted, which informed his affection for the
forgotten slum dwellers in
Dodes'ka-den. While Kurosawa doesn't focus on any one character,
as he so often did in earlier pictures, one could make the case that he was addressing his own
feelings of inadequacies and failure through the male characters in the film, most of whom are
damaged individuals - handicapped, suicidal, abused, drunk, pitiful dreamers, slaves to their lust
or lost in their grief. Stephen Prine says in the liner notes that there were shades of Kurosawa
in one particular character. "Kurosawa sympathizes and identifies with Rokuchan (the mentally
challenged boy), who, like a film director, is a purveyor of dreams; it's no coincidence that
schoolchildren call Rokuchan crazy, just as 20th Century-Fox had Kurosawa." This is echoed by
Kurosawa's longtime script supervisor Teruyo Nogami who thought that "trolley-freak," another
epithet the schoolchildren throw at Rokuchan, was a metaphor for "film-freak". (The one character
with whom neither Kurosawa nor we really have no such empathy is with the uncle who abuses and
rapes his own niece.) Clearly, Kurosawa was working through some issues, but the director did not
make
Dodes'ka-den an excuse to wallow in self-pity. Indeed, it is an often joyous film that
celebrates life and dreams, even in the midst of despair. The desolate landscape, the village slum
or the villagers aren't romanticized, but as stated before, they are shown as they are: lovably,
and sometimes tragically, real.
Kurosawa was wholly confidant behind the scenes that despite his own problems, he could make the
film in record time and on budget, an important goal since his reputation had been sullied as being
a crazed, reckless artist, unable to handle a film. Because of his need to reestablish himself,
Dodes'ka-den was shot faster (in two months) than anything he had done in years, despite the
fact that it was his first color production. Kurosawa had resisted using color film because he
didn't feel that film stock could capture what he saw and envisioned for what he was trying to
achieve. Even on
Dodes'ka-den, Kurosawa hedged his bets; according to Daisaku Kimura, his
1st assistant cameraman for the shoot, he painted everything - shadows, walls, buildings - because
"he didn't trust the film stock." It may have taken Kurosawa even more time to shoot in color had
Henri Langlois, French pioneer of the film archive movement and co-founder of the Cinémathèque
Française, not said to him, "You're the very person who should be making color film." Langlois
showed him Sergei Eisenstein's
Ivan the Terrible Part II (1945), a black and white film that
has one garishly colored dance sequence. Langlois' argument and his reference to Eisenstein's
dabbling was enough to convince Kurosawa to open up a new palette of tools.
Criterion's DVD cover is a painting that Kurosawa had made for
Dodes'ka-den's poster art, a
collage of stories that spill and swirl across the canvas. This child-like style is similar to the
hundreds of paintings we see at the beginning and end of the film on Rokuchan's walls. Teruyo
Nogami poignantly recalls in her interview included in the liner notes, "At first, all the drawings
on the walls of Rokuchan's house were ones that (Kurosawa) had done at home. But when he hung them
up and looked them over, he decided they were too grown-up. He'd tried his best to paint like a
child, but when he saw it didn't work, he got schoolchildren to paint pictures of streetcars and
used those instead. He never used the pictures that he'd stayed up all night to paint. That's the
side of Kurosawa that I admired; that's the Kurosawa I loved."
For more information about
Dodes'ka-den, visit
The
Criterion Collection. To order
Dodes'ka-den, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Scott McGee
