Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Asia-Pacific : culture, politics, and society) by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Asia-Pacific : culture, politics, and society) by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

Author:Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto [Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2012-05-31T22:00:00+00:00


16. Record of a Living Being

Record of a Living Being (Ikimono no kiroku, 1955) is about a man who fears the possibility of nuclear extermination so much that he eventually goes insane. The protagonist Nakajima (Mifune Toshiro), the owner of a foundry, tries to emigrate to Brazil with every member of his extended family to avoid the effect of nuclear fallout. The film’s narrative is remarkably simple in its single-minded focus on Nakajima’s struggle for survival and his family’s resistance to his quixotic plan. Stylistically, Record of a Living Being is a typical Kurosawa film. The shot is often cluttered with people and objects; objects are placed in front of characters to partially obstruct our view (e.g., Nakajima’s face filmed through a mosquito net looks like the face of a man dying of “ashes of death”). But unlike many other Kurosawa films, there is not much movement within each shot. The static shot packed with objects and human figures creates an oppressive atmosphere appropriate for the film’s subject. Another conspicuous feature is the sparse use of music. Film music can be heard only during the opening credits and after the film’s main narrative is completely over.1 The composer Hayasaka Fumio, who was arguably Kurosawa’s most important collaborator since Drunken Angel, died of tuberculosis during the filming of Record of a Living Being. Hayasaka left only a few sketches of music for the film, and they were completed by his disciple Sato Masaru, who composed music for every Kurosawa film from Throne of Blood to Red Beard. Record of a Living Being is also notable for the first systematic use of multicamera shooting by Kurosawa. In his preceding film, Seven Samurai, he had simultaneously used several cameras with telephoto lens to shoot the final battle sequence. The complex action scenes with peasants, bandits, samurai, and galloping horses moving in different directions in rain and mud at multiple planes of the shot could not be repeated twice in exactly the same manner. The multicamera technique was therefore employed to capture the dynamic action of the scenes without breaking them down into disjunctive segments. Kurosawa applied the same technique to Record of a Living Being, an incomparably more static film with no action scenes in a conventional sense. In multicamera shooting, actors do not face the camera as an invisible observer. They are simultaneously filmed by several — typically three — cameras, which, moreover, do not necessarily remain stationary. Therefore, it becomes extremely difficult for actors to completely control their bodies and become fictional characters vis-à-vis every camera present during the filming. When the technique is used masterfully, multicamera shooting can create an unexpected effect by capturing a dimension or moment of actors’ bodies that eludes their conscious control. It can also decenter the represented space on the screen by showing us the montage of images that cannot be captured from the orthodox camera positions. Kurosawa continues to refine this technique in the rest of his career to create stunning visual and thematic effects.



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