DODES'KA-DEN
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Akira Kurosawa and Hideo Oguni
Released in 1970
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Akira Kurosawa and Hideo Oguni
Released in 1970
Akira Kurosawa grew so depressed at the commercial and critical failure of his 1970 film Dodes'ka-den that he slit himself thirty times with a razor. The movie is nothing to kill yourself over. On the contrary, the colors of this motion picture--the first color picture the director ever made--make life more than worth living. Of course, colors come in all kinds of hues and Kurosawa colors his garbage dump with some fascinating characters: a businessman with terrible tic and a wife thin on manners but who stands by her husband; a mentally challenged boy who drives an imaginary trolley car; a man and his son who build a mansion out of their own imaginations; a despondent old man who looks like he could kick the shit if he had half a mind; another old man wise beyond his many years; a pair of drunks who aggravate their wives so much that the two women swap husbands; and none of these or any of the other characters in this beautiful film let their stories get in the way of the plot, an element that is nonexistent here and rightly so. Ultimately the movie is about adaptation and forgiveness. You cannot earn one without enduring the other.
Filmed and printed in 35 mm, Dodes'ka-den uses light and separation techniques so advanced at the time that other filmmakers still have not caught up. High Definition, Blue-Ray, (chuckle) 3-D: these are for fools. However Kurosawa did it (I know a little about lighting and I have no clue how the director pulled this off), the real beauty is in how we come to care for these fascinating and deprived people. Even a despicable and drunken "uncle" who does something pretty rotten gains our sympathy, if not quite our compassion.
The comic elements to the movie are real and touching, as when the kid who drives the invisible trolley nearly runs over a painter and his easel or when the same boy prays that Buddha will make his mother smarter. There is also real tragedy here: a starving boy contracts diarrhea, a raped and pregnant girl murders her only ally, a man objects when his genuinely abusive wife is criticized by his friends. Throughout the movie, the director slaps us in the face with the colors and figure definitions that insist that both the joys and travails of a ghetto life are every bit as real as the people staggering through them.
Filmed and printed in 35 mm, Dodes'ka-den uses light and separation techniques so advanced at the time that other filmmakers still have not caught up. High Definition, Blue-Ray, (chuckle) 3-D: these are for fools. However Kurosawa did it (I know a little about lighting and I have no clue how the director pulled this off), the real beauty is in how we come to care for these fascinating and deprived people. Even a despicable and drunken "uncle" who does something pretty rotten gains our sympathy, if not quite our compassion.
The comic elements to the movie are real and touching, as when the kid who drives the invisible trolley nearly runs over a painter and his easel or when the same boy prays that Buddha will make his mother smarter. There is also real tragedy here: a starving boy contracts diarrhea, a raped and pregnant girl murders her only ally, a man objects when his genuinely abusive wife is criticized by his friends. Throughout the movie, the director slaps us in the face with the colors and figure definitions that insist that both the joys and travails of a ghetto life are every bit as real as the people staggering through them.
