Kurasowa at his best

1. IKIRU by Akira
Kurosawa
Screen1: Kanji
Watanabe
listening to the
symptoms of
stomach cancer
at the clinic.
He realizes the tragedy of
shortcomings through panic and
alienation.
IRIRU (To Live) is a touching
masterwork from Akira
Kurosawa. It is his 13th film
produced in 1952.
It evolves to a social critic
through a simple film narrative.
It’s about the life of a civil
servant being part of a sickened
bureaucracy. He is silently

2. stamping laws and routing woes
from people into the one-way
spiral of government machinery.
So he is part of a systemic
disease in the initial part of the
story. But he is suffering from
stomach cancer which he comes
to know all of a sudden.
This makes him realize the null
and void of his life.
When he was ailing and craving
for solace his only son could not
heed to his shattered mind. All
he had done was to accentuate
it by demanding the Pension and
all the benefits of his 30 year old
civil service. This makes him in
no man’s land. This is a real
alienation both at the family level
and at the social dimension.
Kanji Watanabe realizes the
futility of his life with all the
shocks and tremors.

3. He becomes agitated and tries
to find resort in the company of a
drunkard half baked novelist and
a women ex-colleague. The
drive to live (AKIRU) becomes
more and more aggressive as
days passes. None of the fetish
pleasures of the commoditized
world could make him alive.
He visits casinos, hotels, parties
etc. But all made him more
alienated and confused more.
And he could not resolve his pain
and sense of lose.
Thus he decides to regain his will
by being helpful to the people
struggling in the spiders of red
tapes. It was not a trivial
decision. But it was to regain his
mummified past career of 3o
years. It was a realization
provoked by the selfishness or
utilitarian from his family
members and all the middle
class pleasures.

4. Thus he resolves his
individualistic trauma by entering
the road of hardship of a public
servant. He helps a working
class township to make a
sewage pool and to redesign a
park in that township. He unties
all the obstacles of the red tape
even at the level of the mafias
and deputy mayor.
The second part of the story
develops through the
conversation that happens
among his colleagues about his
death. Everyone accepts his
transformation though
reluctantly. This part of the
movie is full of satirist narrative
of the middle class. But the next
day the very same people
becomes part of the systemic
disease.

5. Screen 2: Kanji Watanabe
in the park he has
struggled to realize in a
working class district. He
dies here in snowy night
reciting his favorite song ‘Life is
brief’. Yet the policeman who
met him at this night recollects
that he was happy though.
Thus movie is mistaken by many
as an existentialist narrative. The
presence of death and the
fragmentation of truth all make
us to think so.
But given the Japanese society
and its hierarchical structure,
this movie is a simple narrative
full of powerful acting and
direction. Takashi Shimura
shows his acting powers to the
fullest as the protagonist ‘Kanji
Watanabe’.

6. He absorbs the traumatic yet
muted man diseased by terminal
stomach cancer.
Many people believe film as a
narrative of powerful / poetic
imagery. But I differ to say that a
film consist of a thought process
with distinct event horizon. Film
or Cinema consists of a story
enmeshed in a particular
narrative. Film is not a motion
picture even in the days of silent
classics. Its entities are
represented as images, but the
motion or the movement and its
kinesthetic makes movies more
than the sum of motion pictures.
Its aesthetics lies not in the real
or surreal dimensions of images.
It can be compared to dreams
which are remembered with
image maps in mind, but each
entity in a dream is a thought
process made conscious by the

7. act of dream. There is an act of
reflection and creation at the
other side of it.
Similarly in the act of filming
there is an element of reflection.
A thought undergoes spectral
changes in the process of movie
making. The story transforms to
a script in the language of the
writer. In this stage it is
constructed out of linguistic
aesthetics and active
production. Then it is decompiled
into the entities of acting, image
capturing and musical
compositions.
In the stage of editing again they
are compiled, linked and
integrated to a multi dimensional
condensed object. We can find
the similarities in dreams too.
The archetypes of dreams are
formed in a different context of
mind (space and time).

8. The commercial editing
suppresses many poignant
aspects of cinema like the
suppression and repression in
the conscious world. But when it
comes in the hand of a skillful,
truthful cinematician all the
components becomes self
evident and vocal. Greats of
soviet cinema lie in the next
level, at which theses
components are coalesced to
further dimensions in the
process of various montage
techniques. In the movies of
Kurosawa we cannot see the
complex systems of montage
yet it evokes all the possible
emotions out of truthful
creativeness of the auteur.
We appreciate music for its
movement of sound yet we know
that aesthetics of music is
layered much beyond the

9. movements of sound and it
stress- strain tunes.
We can see the following
thought process as a common
denominator:
The act of communication and
the valuation of aesthetics;
How does music communicate
to the mind?
The familiarity to our hearing
system is an essential quality
desired in Music. In addition to
the simple pleasure creation if it
creates a secondary sense we
appreciate music more. If it
makes us step down from
confused chaotic state to simple
state we appreciate it further.
Similarly the power of Cinema
lies in opening our mind when it
is cluttered by various
ideological systems. Various

10. space–time possibilities of
Cinema make it more powerful
and moving as compared to
other languages.
May be from an engineering
perspective we can say that
Cinema is more spectral efficient
through the process of
integration of it various
components. Kurosawa shows
this to magnificent extents in
IKIRU.