I Live in Fear (aka Record of a Living Being)

“One of Kurosawa’s strangest and most personal films” (Philip Kemp), I Live in Fear (also know as Record of a Living Being) is a Lear-like tragedy set against the horror of the atomic age. Toshiro Mifune, here a mere 35 years old, gives a head-turning performance as a stooped, elderly industrialist who, fearful that nuclear war is imminent, tries to convince his family (and his mistress) to move to the safety of Brazil. They respond by trying to have him declared insane. Kurosawa, who originally conceived of the film as a satire, would later say, “We really felt we were making the kind of picture that, after everything was over and the last judgement was upon us, we could stand up and account for our past lives by saying proudly: ‘ We are the men who made I Live in Fear.’” He would return again to the subject of the atomic bomb in 1991’s Rhapsody in August. “One of Mifune’s most astoundingly skillful performances” (Audie Bock). “One of Kurosawa’s most underrated . . . [and] among the most memorable: eerie, troubling, and haunting” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader). “Perhaps Kurosawa’s most sweeping statement on the human condition” (Film Forum New York). B&W, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 103 mins.