Dodes’ka-den

NEW 35MM PRINT! ► Unavailable for decades — and screening here in a sparkling new 35mm print — the ambitious, Oscar-nominated Dodes’ka-den was Kurosawa’s first film in colour, and his first work since Red Beard five years before. It was also something of a return to the Gorky-style “lower depths” he had explored in 1957’s The Lower Depths. A mix of realism, fantasy, and social panorama, Dodes’ka-den relates, in episodic, semi-allegorical fashion, the lives and dreams of several dwellers of a Tokyo slum. The film was shot in an actual dump; Kurosawa’s training as a painter is evident in the expressive, symbolic use of colour and the often-stylized sets. The stylizations extend to the odd title — the sound made by one character, a mentally-challenged boy obsessed with trains, to mimic the sound of a streetcar. As Donald Richie points out, the typical Japanese onomatopoeic word for the sound is something like gatan goton. Richie calls Dodes’ka-den “one of the most beautiful colour films ever made in Japan,” and suggests that one of its central music motifs, composed by Toru Takemitsu, resembles Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne. Made after several difficult years of abortive projects and inactivity, Dodes’ka-den proved a box-office failure; Kurosawa attempted suicide the following year. Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 144 mins.