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Circular pan followed by downward tilt and reverse track, "an old rubbish heap." Gorky's scroungers in a tenement house, far more expressionistically angular than Renoir's. The timbre is purposefully abrasive, the tinker (Eijiro Tono) scrapes away at pots as his wife (Eiko Miyoshi) hacks up a lung, a scratchy tessitura is orchestrated among the ensemble. Theatrical soliloquies avail the ailing thespian (Kamatari Fujiwara) no more, the fallen samurai (Minoru Chiaki) remembers the Shogun days while pimping out the young prostitute (Akemi Negishi). "Can't mix the wheat with the shaft," same with silver and kindness according to the landlord (Ganjiro Nakamura), who sees himself as a father to his tenants but is seen by everyone as the Devil. He's married to "the demon bitch" (Isuzu Yamada), who fights with her sister (Kyoko Kagawa) for the attention of a thief (Toshiro Mifune). "How can you go to hell if you're already there?" Humanity in a crater, crunched by Akira Kurosawa's long lenses. The sleeping room is filthy and claustrophobic and full of battered walls and dilapidated diagonals, but it's also a raft in the sea, a fragile refuge from the wind howling outside. The aged pilgrim (Bokuzen Hidari) is "like a pebble in the river," who lends a sympathetic ear but knows to get while the getting's good. Deep-focus arrangements for days: Multiple figures sharing the screen in different spatial planes, a single light source at night turning them into silhouetted slivers, Mifune and Nakamura in profile close-up with Yamada's cackling visage in the background window between them. (Frankenheimer's The Iceman Cometh suggests a close study.) Kurosawa's humanist and cynical sides, fused in a defiant dance against annihilation, curtailed by a suicidal spoilsport. Dodes'ka-den surveys the pit from another angle. With Nijiko Kiyokawa, Koji Mitsui, Haruo Tanaka, Atsushi Watanabe, and Kichijiro Ueda. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |