IKIRU (dir. Akira Kurosawa) 1952
too often the endlessly resonant brilliance of Ikiru’s final scene is reduced to that one medium frontal shot of watanabe singing away his final hours, but this freeze frame reminds us that the sequence derives its power not from what we’re seeing, but rather from how we’re seeing it. beyond Kurosawa’s careful context (and its rafts of anecdotal evidence and conjecture), the scene relies on several layers of mediation… various narrative means and methods used to isolate the man at the center of this story from everything that isolated him from everything else. the beautiful image seen above locates watanabe at the logical conclusion of a complex grid, machinery both complex and purely functional, seeing the man at the bottom of the method. it’s only because kurosawa has lead us through this perfect tunnel of right angles that we feel how cosmically difficult it can be to resign yourself to a simple little song, swinging back in forth in a space empty of the children for whom it was designed.
p.s. Takashi Shimura also stars in Ishiro Honda’s GODZILLA (perhaps you’ve heard of it?), the Criterion DVD & Blu-ray of which hits stores on tuesday.
Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru (1952)
