Dersu Uzala (Kurosawa, 1975): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm
This 70mm presentation (also screening on February 27th) is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details of the Kurosawa programme here. Tonight's screening will be introduced by season co-curator Ian Haydn Smith.
Observer review:
In the early 1970s Akira
Kurosawa's fortunes and spirit were at a low ebb. He'd been dropped by
Hollywood from the Pearl Harbor epic Tora! Tora! Tora! in which he had invested much time and energy. His first colour film Dodes'ka-den was
a critical and box-office failure. A crisis in the Japanese film
industry had made financing his movies impossible. As a result he
attempted suicide. But eventually his career was restored by a Soviet
invitation to direct a film version of a non-fiction work he'd loved in
his youth, and back in the 1940s he had planned a Japanese version that
was aborted, partly due to unsuitable locations but mainly because its
themes were in conflict with Japanese militarism. Published in 1923, the book
is a memoir by the Russian army engineer Captain Vladimir Arsenyev
about his friendship with a nomadic hunter, Dersu Uzala, of the remote
Nanai tribe, known at the time as the Goldi people. Uzala twice saved
Arsenyev's life while acting as a guide to his surveying expedition in
remote eastern Siberia during the first years of the 20th century, the
first time in a blizzard, the second after an accident on a raft in a
fast-flowing river. Shot on location
over a period of nine months, it's an elegiac film of great visual and
spiritual beauty about the relationship between an intelligent European
raised in an advanced urban world (the tall, handsome Yuri Solomin), and
a wise, nomadic Asian in close touch with the wilderness (the stocky,
elderly Maxim Munzuk). Both actors are excellent. This
humanist masterwork is close in spirit to John Ford and has many of the
ingredients of a classic western. The central relationship recalls that
between the pioneers and the native Americans in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper,
though the violent incidents happen offstage. The film won an Oscar for
best foreign language film, and Kurosawa went on to make Kagemusha, Ran and Dreams with backing from Lucas, Spielberg and Coppola.
Philip French
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