The Second Coming of Kurosawa

By the early 1970's, Akira Kurosawa's career quite frankly hit the doldrums. In the year 1970, at age sixty, the director would make his first color film Dodes'ka-den, the title itself a deliberate onomatopoeia to invoke the sound of a train running on its tracks. It would center on the shanty town  life of a large city and its desperate denizens, the film  is a stylized variant on 1957's The Lower Depths. A proposal that he would co-direct the American side of the Pearl Harbor story, Tora, Tora, Tora in 1970 aborted in what became an impasse between disagreeable parties. In addition, the Japanese film industry was at their lowest ebb; finance for anything outside of routine subjects were well-nigh impossible to find. These factors could have plausibly been the catalyst of the depression that led Kurosawa to attempt suicide by slashing himself with a razor, some thirty times. Kurosawa narrowly escaped self-inflicted death and would take a five-year hiatus from filmmaking.

In 1975, the phoenix did indeed rise - with a Soviet-sponsored story Kurosawa embarked on, Dersu Uzala (1975). The film was historically the first 70 mm production as well as the first non-Japanese language film the auteur ever made.  Its setting was the Ussuri region of Shkotovo in the year 1902 and once more explores a relationship between two men, this time from opposite sides of the cultural spectrum, that changes both of their lives. The eponymous hero is a hunter who is inextricably linked with his surroundings; he is at one with nature. Dersu is hired by Arseniev thus discovers through Dersu the true meaning of life.

The heart is a lonely hunter - from 1975's Dersu Uxala (pictured Maksim Munzuk)

When Kurosawa succeeded in setting up Kagemusha (Shadow Warrior,1980) a decade had already elapsed since he had worked in his native country. American directors Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, staunch supporters of Kurosawa, helped to persuade 20th Century Fox to invest in the production. Set in the latter part of the sixteenth century, the film concerns a destitute thief who is spared on the account of his resemblance to a powerful warlord. When the leader is subsequently injured in battle and dies - the thief is then ordered to impersonate him for the sake of keeping the warlord's clan intact and its enemies at bay. He grows more and more accustomed to the role of the clan leader, but is at last exposed when he is unable to ride the warlord's horse. Given his walking orders, he helplessly watches as the clan he regards as his very own - is overwhelmed by enemy forces.

Above them only sky

Kagemusha's budget was just under seven-million dollars and stands one of the most expensive Japanese films ever produced. At the Cannes Film Festival of 1980, where the film would share the Grand Prix with Bob Fosse's anthemic All That Jazz, some critics felt the battle scenes although magnificent, were protracted. The slapdash was hardly a surprise as in the rush to complete Kagemusha, Kurosawa had left himself absolutely no extra time to trim the scenes as he envisaged. Nonetheless, the film is powerful enough a testament that Kurosawa is one of the rare souls that can draw blood from a stone.

Released in Kurosawa's  hereafter and courtesy of co-creator  Kon Ichikawa - Dora-heita (2000)

In the year 2000, a posthumous script of Kurosawa's , Dora-heita (Alley-Cat)was put to screen , a samurai film that was completed two years following Kurosawa's death, and befittingly by fellow legendary auteur Kon Ichikawa Ichikawa and Kurosawa  penned the original script together during Japan's declining film industry years in 1969.