Ikiru The Movie in Kuna, ID
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Genre: Drama
Synopsis:
A rigid clerk (Takashi Shimura) resolves to do something of lasting importance after learning that he is dying of cancer.
Release Date: 10/09/1952
Running Time: 143
http://www.cowboypictures.com
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Cast:
Kanji Watanabe (Chief of Citizen's Section): Takashi Shimura,Toyo Odagiri: Miki Odagiri,Kazue Watanabe, Mitsuo's wife: Kyoko Seki
Crew:
Director: Akira Kurosawa,Producer: Sojiro Motoki,Writer (Screenplay): Akira Kurosawa,Writer (Screenplay): Shinobu Hashimoto,Writer (Screenplay): Hideo Oguni,Cinematographer: Asakazu Nakai,Art Direction: Shu Matsuyama,Lighting: Shigeru Mori,Sound: Fumio Yanoguchi,Music: Fumio Hayasaka
Distributors:
Brandon Films Inc.,Cowboy Pictures
Notes:
Production Notes -Notes provided by Cowboy Pictures- SYNOPSIS IKIRU ("To Live") is a compelling humanist fable that provokes audiences to profoundly contemplate their own mortality, and indeed their own sense of morality. Mr. Watanabe, a middle-aged government worker, suddenly finds that he has very little life left when diagnosed with terminal cancer. Moving from drunken despair to quiet resolve, he vows to make his final days meaningful. At first he throws himself into the city's nightlife, but this does not help. His attempts to communicate his anguish to his son and daughter-in-law lead only to heartbreak. Finally, inspired by an unselfish co-worker, he turns his efforts to bringing happiness to others by building a playground in a dreary slum neighborhood. When the park is finally completed, he is able to face death with peaceful acceptance. Told from both Watanabe's perspective and that of his co-workers after Watanabe's death, IKURU is a masterful and inspiring tale of redemption. ABOUT THE DIRECTOR Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), The most well-known of all Japanese directors, the great irony about Akira Kurosawa's career is that he is far more popular outside of Japan than he is in Japan. The son of an army officer, Kurosawa studied art before gravitating to film as a means of supporting himself. He served seven years as an assistant to director Kajiro Yamamoto before he began his own directorial career with Sanshiro Sugata, a film about the 19th-century struggle for supremacy between adherents of judo and ju-jitsu that so impressed the military government, he was prevailed upon to make a sequel (Sanshiro Sugata Part II). Following the end of World War II, Kurosawa's career gathered speed with a series of films that cut across all genres, from crime thrillers to period dramas -- among the latter, his Rashomon became the first postwar Japanese film to find wide favor with Western audiences, and simultaneously introduced leading man Toshiro Mifune to Western viewers. It was Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, however, that made the largest impact of any of his movies outside of Japan. Although heavily cut on its original release, this three-hour-plus medieval action drama, shot with painstaking attention to both dramatic and period detail, became one of the most popular of Japanese films of all time in the West, and every subsequent Kurosawa film has been released in the U.S. in some form, even if many -- most notably The Hidden Fortress -- were cut down in length. At the same time, American and European filmmakers began taking a serious look at Kurosawa's movies as a source of plot material for their own work -- Rashomon was remade as The Outrage, in a western setting, while Yojimbo was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars. The Seven Samurai fared best of all, serving as the basis for John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (which had been the original title of Kurosawa's movie), in 1960; the remake actually did better business in Japan than the original film did. In the early 1980s, an unfilmed screenplay of Kurosawa's also served as the basis for Runaway Train (1985), a popular action thriller. Kurosawa's movies subsequent to his period thriller Sanjuro abandoned the action format in favor of more esoteric and serious drama, including his epic length medical melodrama Red Beard. In recent years, despite ill-health and the problems getting financing for his more ambitious films, Kurosawa has remained the most prominent of Japanese filmmakers. With his Westernized style, Kurosawa has always found a wider audience and more financing opportunities in Europe and America than he has in his own country. A sensitive romantic at heart, with a sentimental streak that occasionally rises forcefully to the surface of his movies, his work probably resembles that of John Ford more closely than it does any of his fellow Japanese filmmakers. ~Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide Akira Kurosawa Filmography Judo Saga [Sugata Sanshiro] (1943, 1974 USA) The Most Beautiful [Ichiban utsukushiku] (1944, USA 1987) Sanshiro Sugata Part Two [Zoku Sugata Sanshiro] (1945, USA 1987) Men Who Tread On the Tiger's Tail [Tora no o wo fumu otokotachi] (1945, 1960 USA) Those Who Make Tomorrow [Asu o tsukuru hitobito] (1946) No Regrets for Our Youth [Waga seishun ni kuinashi] (1946, 1980 USA) One Wonderful Sunday [Subarashiki nichiyobi] (1947, 1982 USA) Drunken Angel [Yoidore tenshi] (1948, 1960 USA) The Quiet Duel [Shizukanaru ketto] (1949, 1979 USA) Stray Dog [Nora inu] (1949, 1963 USA) Scandal [Shubun] (1950, 1964 USA) Rashomon (1950, 1951 USA) The Idiot [Hakuchi] (1951, 1963 USA) Ikiru (1952, 1962 USA) Seven Samurai [Shichinin no samurai] (1954, 1969 USA) I Live in Fear [Ikimono no kiroku] (1955, 1967 USA) Throne of Blood [Kumonosu jo] (1957, 1961 USA) The Lower Depths [Donzoko] (1957, 1962 USA) The Hidden Fortress [Kakushi toride no san akunin] (1958, 1960 USA) The Bad Sleep Well [Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru] (1960, 1963 USA) Yojimbo (1961, 1961 USA) Sanjuro [Tsubaki Sanjuro] (1962, 1962 USA) Sanjuro Tsubaki High and Low [Tengoku to jigoku] (1963, 1963 USA) Red Beard [Akahige] (1965, 1966 USA) Clickety-Clack [Dodesukaden](1070, 1971 USA) Dersu Uzala (1974) The Shadow Warrior [Kagemusha] (1980, 1980 USA) Ran (1985, 1985 USA) Akira Kurosawa's Dreams [Yume] (1990, 1990 USA) Rhapsody in August [Hachigatsu no kyoshikyoku] (1991, 1991 USA) Not Yet [Madadayo] (1993) ABOUT TAKASHI SHIMURA Takashi Shimura (1905-1982) Whenever asked to name his favorite actors, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa would cite, with reservations, the unpredictable Toshiro Mifune--then would lavish unqualified praise upon Takashi Shimura. After a long stage career, Shimura made his first film in 1935. Eight years later, he worked for Kurosawa for the first time in Sanshiro Sugata, going on to appear in virtually all of the director's films until 1965. Shimura was seen as the firewood peddler in Rashomon, the dying civil-servant protagonist in Ikiru, samurai leader Kambei in Seven Samurai, the old general in The Hidden Fortress, and in equally weighty roles in Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well, Yojimbo and Red Beard. Curiously, Shimura was never under contract to Kurosawa; instead, the actor was a "hired hand" at Japan's Toho Studios, accepting whatever role he was ordered to play. This explains why, in the midst of so many Kurosawa classics, Takashi Shimura was just as frequently seen in Japanese horror pictures, most famously as the kindly Dr. Yamana in Godzilla. ~Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide Selected Takashi Shimura Filmography Samurai Banners (1969) Director: Hiroshi Inagaki Red Beard (1965) Director: Akira Kurosawa Ghidrah-The 3-Headed Monster (1964) Director: Inoshiro Honda Kwaidan (1964) Director: Masaki Kobayashi High and Low (1963) Director: Akira Kurosawa Sanjuro (1962) Director: Akira Kurosawa Yojimbo (1961) Director: Akira Kurosawa Mothra (1961) Director: Inoshiro Honda Afraid to Die (1960) Director: Yasuzo Masumura The Bad Sleep Well (1960) Director: Akira Kurosawa The Hidden Fortress (1958) Director: Akira Kurosawa The Mysterians (1958) Director: Inoshiro Honda Throne of Blood (1957) Director: Akira Kurosawa Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956) Director: Inoshiro Honda Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1956) Director: Hiroshi Inagaki I Live In Fear (1955) Director: Akira Kurosawa Seven Samurai (1954) Director: Akira Kurosawa Ikiru (1952) Director: Akira Kurosawa The Idiot (1951) Director: Akira Kurosawa Rashomon (1950) Director: Akira Kurosawa Scandal (1950) Director: Akira Kurosawa Stray Dog (1949) Director: Akira Kurosawa The "Takashi Shimura" Duel (1949) Director: Akira Kurosawa Drunken Angel (1948) Director: Akira Kurosawa No Regrets For Our Youth (1946) Director: Akira Kurosawa Those Who Make Tomorrow (1946) Director: Akira Kurosawa They Who Step on the Tiger's Tale (1945) Director: Akira Kurosawa The Most Beautiful (1944) Director: Akira Kurosawa Sanshiro Sugata (1943) Director: Akira Kurosawa Osaka Elegy (1936) Director: Kenji Mizoguchi THE TRANSLATION Translator Linda Hoaglund Linda Hoaglund was born in Japan, the daughter of American missionary parents, and was raised in rural Japan where she attended Japanese public schools. A graduate of Yale University, she worked as a bilingual news producer for Japanese television between 1981 and 1987. In 1987 she joined Alternate Current, an independent, American film production company, as a producer. She currently subtitles Japanese films, represents Japanese directors and artists and serves as an international liaison for film producers. Some of her clients include Shiseido (Tokyo), Japanese Embassy (Washington, DC), Japan Society (New York), and Roth/Horowitz Gallery (New York). Directors whose films she has subtitled include: Akira KUROSAWA Nagisa OSHIMA Hayao MIYAZAKI Kinji FUKASAKU Hirokazu KORE-EDA Kiyoshi KUROSAWA Shinobu YAGUCHI Junji SAKAMOTO Ryosuke HASHIGUCHI Shinji AOYAMA Makoto SHINOZAKI SABU Authors whose works she has translated include: Koki MITANI - playwright Sogil YAN novelist Daido MORIYAMA - photographer LINDA HOAGLUND ON TRANSLATING As languages, Japanese and English could not be more disparate. English speakers find Japanese expressions vague, while to the Japanese, English is literal and unforgiving. Often in Japanese, the subject is omitted and tense is irrelevant. A subject's gender may go unmentioned for whole chapters and contradictory tenses share single paragraphs. Social interactions are assumed to be so transparent as to obviate fundamental Western literary conventions. Sentences can be terse if one always knows how another person thinks. In Japanese, the infinitive form of the verb "to Go" constitutes a complete sentence, variously meaning in English : "I'll go," "We'll go," "They'll go," "Will I go? "Will you go?" and "Will they go?" I grew up inhabiting these two languages. Raised in rural Japan as the daughter of liberal American missionary parents, I attended local Japanese schools. Intent that we grow up bilingual, our parents taught us English at the crack of dawn. The events of our Japanese school day were recounted in our other language each night at the dinner table and every slip into Japanese word cost us one yen from our piggy banks. For the little TV we were allowed to watch, we chose Japanese samurai and detective shows. My unusual childhood seems to have fostered two separate but parallel minds, which now enable me to listen in one language and understand in the other. In subtitling Japanese films, I break down cultural barriers to Japanese interactions, to highlight their universally appreciable human elements. I do this by focusing on the essence of characters and their verbal interactions and "re-writing" these into English. First, language shapes character. Individual characters have unique linguistic habits and traits. In subtitling, I use language to reflect characters' age, class, gender, sexual preference, attitudes and idiosyncrasies. The doctor in DRUNKEN ANGEL is a deeply romantic soul whose crusty exterior belies his mordant wit: "You've got it all wrong, mister. Times have changed since you went in the cooler. Your feudalistic ways don't fly now. Want me to spell it out for you? It doesn't matter what you call her. She's got to want you. Ever heard of equality?" For clarity, except when a director has misled the audience or obscured the meaning of an interaction, I choose to make subject and tense explicit in a way impossible in the original Japanese. Tone and period are also critical. Whether conveying a sense of time the 1950s or the Middle Ages or place urban slums or hardscrabble villages it's essential that I grasp and convey each film's overall tone. Overtly contemporary language has no place in THRONE OF BLOOD, but neither do explicitly Shakespearean locutions. Lady Washizu's deep treachery is all the more alarming for her silky eloquence, and the film is sufficiently rich with references to Shakespeare's "Scottish" play to justify evoking, without plagiarizing, the original: "Great Lord is a fox. With easy words, he cheats you out of the North Garrison, sends his trusted Miki out of danger to guard Spider's Web Castle, and casts you, his most hated adversary, into danger. From the heights of the castle keep, Miki will laugh as he watches you take your last gullible breath." To catch the perfect tone, I often watch parts of comparable American films, steeping myself in their specific language "dame," "nabbed," "rigged bidding," "pull off a stunt" - absorbing how contemporaneous Hollywood screenwriters used language to establish tone. In order to create characters and set tone, to say nothing of conveying humor and jokes, I brazenly stray from literal translations. My goal is to faithfully reproduce the human experience of the film for an English-speaking audience, not to bog them down in unfamiliar cultural minutia. In getting at the essence of characters, I follow their words, plunging into their experience to find a visceral understanding of what their language conveys within their cultural framework. I render this into English within the scope of each character's vocabulary. I remain constantly grateful to my editor, Judith Aley, who takes my drafts, often still redolent of Japanese or laced with comically confused English aphorisms, and polishes them. Our goal is to put the Western audience at ease with familiar and comfortable expressions. To instill in viewers here the confidence and curiosity to abandon themselves to the film and forge emotional connections with the characters. After all, isn't that why we love the movies? NOTES ON IKIRU by SATO Tadao IKIRU is one of the greatest films of postwar Japan. Among Kurosawa's films, it represents a culmination of his work through 1952. By then, Kurosawa's skills as a filmmaker had matured exquisitely and his zeal for delivering moral messages through his films was most robust. Kurosawa, the ingenious storyteller and showman, was supremely confident of his own ability to excite and entrance his audience. On the other hand, Kurosawa, the moralist, could not resist imbuing his films with a message, despite many criticisms that they rendered his films either too abstract or too sentimental. In certain of his earlier works, these two sides of Kurosawa co-exist without cohering. But in IKIRU, the two entwine in perfect harmony. In the first half of the film, the narrative closely follows the actions of a city bureaucratic, Watanabe Kanji, but when the words of an innocent factory girl inspire him to reinvent himself, the scene shifts abruptly forward to Watanabe's wake. From this point on, Watanabe's actions are revealed through the reminiscences of his subordinates, clearly drunk on the free sake offered at the wake. Critics have charged that the wake scene is too long and sentimental, but I have to say that this unprecedented structural shift was a stroke of genius. Had the change in Watanabe following his resolution to see a small park built been portrayed with the narrative techniques employed in the first half of the film, Kurosawa would have finished with a predictably implausible heroic yarn. Although we would have lauded Watanabe's actions, we would have resented the film for its preachy tone and might have concluded that this protagonist lived in a world far removed from ours. But in IKIRU, the moment the protagonist stops being an ordinary man and undertakes a noble challenge inconceivable for an ordinary person, the narrative shifts away from him. We now observe his actions reflected in the eyes of ordinary people. Some of those people salaciously attribute Watanabe's sudden, lively energy to a mistress. Others would discredit his achievements, arguing that despite Watanabe's dedication, senior officials, their eyes on an upcoming election, pushed the park to its completion. Nevertheless, as the conversation unfolds during the interminable wake, enhanced by sake and the sentimentality, words of praise for Watanabe gradually dominate. In other words, in the latter half of the film, Watanabe's centrality is gradually ceded to ordinary people, who at first doubt but eventually believe that heroes are still possible. The film does not portray a single saintly soul, but average people, who doubt yet believe, believe yet doubt, that human beings have the potential to transform themselves from pettiness to greatness. If we were simply told Watanabe's story, we would hear no more than the story of an extraordinary individual, never connecting his life (and actions) with our own. But in a film about people who aspire to be like Watanabe while doubting they ever can, we see ourselves reflected. And thus we experience the tragic distance between ideals and reality, an urgent problem for every human being. Accompanied by something nearly like pain, this pierces the heart of all who see Ikiru. [Translated by Linda Hoaglund] IKIRU By Roger Ebert The old man knows he is dying of cancer. In a bar, he tells a stranger he has money to spend on a ``really good time,'' but doesn't know how to spend it. The stranger takes him out on the town, to gambling parlors, dance halls and the red light district, and finally to a bar where the piano player calls for requests and the old man, still wearing his overcoat and hat, asks for ``Life Is Short--Fall in Love, Dear Maiden.'' ``Oh, yeah, one of those old '20s songs,'' the piano man says, but he plays it, and then the old man starts to sing. His voice is soft and he scarcely moves his lips, but the bar falls silent, the party girls and the drunken salary men drawn for a moment into a reverie about the shortness of their own lives. This moment comes near the center point of IKIRU, Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film about a bureaucrat who works for 30 years at Tokyo City Hall and never accomplishes anything. Mr. Watanabe has become the chief of his section, and sits with a pile of papers on either side of his desk, in front of shelves filled with countless more documents. Down a long table on either side of him, his assistants shuffle these papers back and forth. Nothing is ever decided. His job is to deal with citizen complaints, but his real job is to take a small rubber stamp and press it against each one of the documents, to show that he has handled it. The opening shot of the film is an X-ray of Watanabe's chest. ``He has gastric cancer, but doesn't yet know it,'' says a narrator. ``He just drifts through life. In fact, he's barely alive.'' The X-ray fades into his face--into the sad, tired, utterly common face of the actor Takashi Shimura, who in 11 films by Kurosawa and many by others, played an everyman who embodied his characters by not seeming to embody anything at all. There is a frightening scene in his doctor's office, where another patient chatters mindlessly; he is a messenger of doom, describing Watanabe's precise symptoms and attributing them to stomach cancer. ``If they say you can eat anything you want,'' he says, ``that means you have less than a year.'' When the doctor uses the very words that were predicted, the old bureaucrat turns away from the room, so that only the camera can see him, and he looks utterly forlorn. Kurosawa opens his story with a deliberate, low-key pacing, although at the end there is rage against the dying of the light. In a scene that never fails to shake me, Watanabe goes home and cries himself to sleep under his blanket, while the camera pans up to a commendation he was awarded after 25 years at his post. It is not so bad that he must die. What is worse is that he has never lived. ``I just can't die--I don't know what I've been living for all these years,'' he says to the stranger in the bar. He never drinks, but now he is drinking: ``This expensive saki is a protest against my life up to now.'' His leave of absence at the office continues, day after day. Finally a young woman who wants to resign tracks him down to get his stamp on her papers. He asks her to spend the day with him, and they go to pachinko parlors and the movies. She tells him her nicknames for everyone in the office. His nickname is ``the Mummy.'' She is afraid she has offended him, but no: ``I became a mummy for the sake of my son, but he doesn't appreciate me.'' She encourages him to go see his son. But when he tries to tell him about his illness, the son cuts him off--insists on getting the property due him before the old man squanders it on women. Later, on a final outing with the young woman, he tells her about a time when he was young and thought he was drowning. He says, ``My son's far away somewhere--just as my parents were far away when I was drowning.'' The word "ikiru" has been translated as ``To Live,'' and at some point on his long descent into despair, Mr. Watanabe determines to accomplish at least one worthwhile thing before he dies. He arrives at this decision in a restaurant, talking to the young woman while in a room behind them there is a celebration going on. As he leaves, girls in the other room sing ``Happy Birthday'' to a friend--but in a way they sing for Watanabe's rebirth. A group of women have been shuttled from one office to another, protesting against a pool of stagnant water in their neighborhood. Watanabe becomes a madman, personally escorting the case from one bureaucrat to another, determined to see that a children's park is built on the wasteland before he dies. It all leads up to Watanabe's final triumph, seen in one of the greatest closing shots in the cinema. The scenes of his efforts do not come in chronological order, but as flashbacks from his funeral service. Watanabe's family and associates gather to remember him, drinking too much and finally talking too much, trying to unravel the mystery of his death and the behavior that led up to it. And here we see the real heart of the movie, in the way one man's effort to do the right thing can inspire, or confuse, or anger, or frustrate, those who see it only from the outside, through the lens of their own unexamined lives. We who have followed Watanabe on his last journey are now brought forcibly back to the land of the living, to cynicism and gossip. Mentally, we urge the survivors to think differently, to arrive at our conclusions. And that is how Kurosawa achieves his final effect: He makes us not witnesses to Watanabe's decision, but evangelists for it. I think this is one of the few movies that might actually be able to inspire someone to lead their life a little differently. Kurosawa made it in 1952, when he was 42 (and Shimura was only 47). It came right after Rashomon (1951) and The Idiot (1952), which also starred Shimura. Ahead was his popular classic The Seven Samurai (1955) and other samurai films like The Hidden Fortress (1960), the film that inspired the characters R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars. The film was not released internationally until 1960, maybe because it was thought ``too Japanese,'' but in fact it is universal. I saw IKIRU first in 1960 or 1961. I went to the movie because it was playing in a campus film series and only cost a quarter. I sat enveloped in the story of Watanabe for 2 1/2 hours, and wrote about it in a class where the essay topic was Plato's statement, ``the unexamined life is not worth living.'' Over the years I have seen IKIRU every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think. And the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
