silver nitrate notes

Kurosawa's Ikiru and the Bureaucrat's Coat

9 nov 2016

Akira Kurosawa made Ikiru (1952) between Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai (1954). It is the quietest film of his career, the one that sits most easily in a room with an Ozu picture rather than with the period epics for which he is better known. The protagonist is not a samurai or a detective. He is a section chief in the public works department of Tokyo, seven months from retirement, dying of stomach cancer, and trying to work out whether his life has been a waste.

The actor is Takashi Shimura (1905-1982), who had been Kurosawa's most reliable supporting player since Drunken Angel (1948) and who would play Kambei in Seven Samurai two years later. The cinematographer is Asakazu Nakai, whom we have met on Seven Samurai. What Nakai does with Shimura's face in Ikiru is the best photography of a single actor in any of Kurosawa's films.

Watanabe, the bureaucrat, wears the same heavy black overcoat in almost every scene of the first half of the film. Nakai photographs him in this coat so that the coat is often the only solid black shape in the frame. He is lit from above or behind, with minimal fill, so that his face picks up a secondary highlight from a window or a lamp and then falls away into shadow against the black of the coat. The effect, over the course of the first hour, is to make Watanabe visually continuous with the offices he works in: a dark shape against pale walls, barely distinct from the furniture.

The film's emotional centre is a scene in the second half where Watanabe, having resigned to his fate, sits on a swing in a children's playground at night, snow falling, singing an old song (Gondola no Uta) to himself. Nakai shoots this in a single long take. The swing moves gently. The snow falls in and out of the light from a single overhead lamp. Watanabe's face is at the edge of the light for most of the shot; his voice, cracked with disease, carries in available audio. The shot lasts nearly two minutes. In it, a man facing death makes the decision to have built, in the time he has left, a public park for children. The argument of the film is made in the hat and the snow and the voice, before the building of the park begins.

Shimura won no major awards for the role. He was not nominated. Kurosawa was not nominated for directing. The film opened in Japan to middling business and grew over the following decade. The people who had seen it told the people who had not to see it, and that was how it survived.

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sources
[1] Richie, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. University of California Press, 3rd ed. 1998.
[2] Prince, Stephen. The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Princeton UP, rev. ed. 1999.
[3] Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Duke UP, 2000.
[4] Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Knopf, 1982.