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At the Heart of the Invisible

By Clifford Hilo

Now out on Criterion DVD, Akira Kurosawa's Dodesukaden is a brilliant misstep right into the heart of an artist.

Kurosawa as the Impressionist. Before as a black-and-white director, Kurosawa was the ultimate visualist of the movement and of the figure. He arranged characters within his canvas like an ancient architect would erect pillars in a temple, as if with the knowledge of composing the sacred and eternal. Kurosawa was like John Ford in his classical rigidity, where every form existed within the mastery of a horizon line. Certainty of things above all else. Then how strange it is to discover that after all those years of mining the realism of décor, one discovers that he was after all just a closeted Debussy? Perhaps the smudged, delicate trace of pink smoke in High and Low would have been the best indication of this new tendency. And when I say Debussy, I say Cezanne as well. Because it is within this wild growth and fulsome work of color textured by the apparition of more color that Kurosawa puts himself within the picture. 

As Serge Daney has pointed out, within this Dodesukaden, one doesn't know who is more mad than the other: the gentle idiot who thinks he is the neighborhood trolley train or the still-life painter who mistakes the rubble of the world as his own personal Mt. St. Victiore. The gag is that they are both insane. Yet one has the feeling that it is the film itself that is the madman. As if possessed by the impossibility of the venture of his own project, Kurosawa gave in completely to this Dionysian insanity. One quote from a friend recalls how he even painted his own shadows upon the ground of the film set. Like Van Gogh, it is the madman who seeks to reproduce the world in his own image. The artist's supreme vanity.
 

One is shocked by the color of Dodesukaden. Sergei Eisenstein once modeled an image in his film Ivan the Terrible after Paul Gauguin's Yellow Christ. Eisenstein had so loved this image but he had only seen the black-and-white lithograph reproduction of the painting, so he sent his researchers to scour Europe for a duplicate of Gauguin's painting. When he finally found the painting he so dearly admired, it was not at all what he had expected it to be. He found the colors that Gauguin used to be rather trivial and foolish; it was a coloration and experience drastically in contrast from the ones he had so wished for in his own mind. Is this then the same manner with which we have sought color for so long from Kurosawa? All the wondrous daubs of painterly expression that one imagines overlaying the masterpiece of Rashomon? How blue would have been that sky that he had populated by a single floating cloud? Or Mifune's sallow-white skin in Drunken Angel? Or the blood spurt in Sanjuro? But these are all ruminations that fall beside the point. What colors besides black and white could he have employed any better to achieve the work of mourning and solitude in a film like Ikiru? Nor was Kurosawa alone -- weren't Mizoguchi's sickly lemon pastel in Princess Yang Kwei Fei more Stanley Donen dance than Hokusai ukiyo-e?

But one is also already tremendously bored by Kurosawa. Poor Kurosawa, that he should be born so late into the world of superior grade color film stock, when directors like Nagisa Oshima and Seijun Suzuki had already placed their wagers and won large when they had defined a whole generation of Japanese filmmaking with just three bold colors: red, yellow, and blue. When one thinks of the vibrancy of colors of 1960s Japanese filmmaking, one necessarily turns to Cruel Story of Youth, not Dodesukaden.

But, ultimately, it is the dissonance between the allegory and its own illustration that defines the relationship between this body and its soul. Kurosawa dares enough to throw the arc of a rainbow across a trash heap, and finds morsels of sentimental poetry in the fluttering garbage bag that tumbles over blackened dirt. Bright children's finger-painted trains wallpaper a shanty-town corrugated tin house, a battle of the sexes performed as the clash of a red and a yellow, and poison green make-up on a face that signals the phrase, "No hope beyond this point." This variety of colors is more akin to an MGM musical, but the situation of the film's morals is something more along the lines of 19th century Socialist realism -- go to Kurosawa's Donzoko adaptation of Maxim Gorky. Like a front-page manga scandal from Yoshihiro Tatsumi, or the  ugly and stupid world of Kafka's nightmare stories, Dodesukaden is the expression of Walker Evans photography done in Technicolor -- a step towards the holiness of modernity's "garbage." Miscreants, ne'er-do-wells, the pathological, and the downright stupid clutch to their invisible space of dreaming, all the while trying to subsist within their own conditions of hard-luck living.  Much like standing frozen still in the mud and staring at the stars. If every character in Eisenstein's Potemkin is the courageous hero of the story, every character in Dodesukaden is the tragic Oedipus. One can attempt to bridge the pathos of this story with the mercy of a tragic Catholic Saint, but the film sinks away from us. The profound tragedy of this film cannot be salvaged by the few graces of a painter's brush.

One must love Kurosawa though. Take to heart the moral lesson he teaches to us with the elderly man whose enfeebled body understands the great, unknown secret of humanity. Understand the man as though he would want to be understood. There is a scene where the old man is sleeping on the floor and a burglar breaks in through the tatami window. He sneaks gently across the floor and picks up a chest of tools and starts for the window sill. The old man feebly requests that the thief put down his tool chest. Rather, the thief should go to his desk and remove some money from the wallet. He tells the thief to return in a few days and he will have saved up more money to give to him. And finally, should the thief come the next time, he should not use the window like a common thief, but rather the door as a welcome guest. This is the great lesson of Kurosawa, embrace not only the man but the thing that makes him mad as well. Welcome the thief as though he were the neighbor. Thus, we must embrace Kurosawa for his malady as well and look at the emotions of his color and drama on their own terms, as the obsession of a man who simply loves the act of cinema too much to stop painting.

It is necessary to embrace Kurosawa as this mad artist, because it is with our sympathies that we embrace the other poete maudits: Don Quixote, Borges, and Selznick, whose abilities were to exist not at all within the objectivity of the common world, but always within the extremity of their own dreaming. If Manny Farber made the moral injunction to always chew at the edges of a form, whether the edge of a canvas or movie screen, Kurosawa goes one step further to bring his skill as a director directly to the center of his cinema. The flux of the imagination in Kurosawa lies at the heart of the unseen. It is to see giants where everyone else only sees windmills. It is the rattle of the syllables "Do Desu Ka Den" of the trolley idiot's rumble, the slum dweller as dreaming architect, or the still-life painter poised with easel in front of a mountain of garbage. Kurosawa is that gentle idiot who charges through an ethos of modernity pretending that he has the velocity of Lumiere's train. He forgets the rambling accusations hurled after him because he can only hear the sound and vision of his own pure obsessions. He shouts aloud for everyone to hear: DO-DESU-KA-DEN!




 

Date Posted: 3/20/2009