Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa - 1952)

Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto
Cinematography Asakazu Nakai 
Starring Takashi Shimura

Of the great Japanese directors (or at least those that I am aware of), Akira Kurosawa seems to have been the most preoccupied with moral dilemmas, of the spiritual fragility of humankind. Kurosawa's fixation with the darker side of human nature seemed to cover most of his oeuvre, and these themes percolated in his period pieces as well as dramas set in contemporary backdrops, and of the latter, Ikiru could very well be the finest. 

The film's premise of an aging government official diagnosed with a terminal illness and with hardly a year to live provided Kurosawa enough fodder for a critique of bureaucracy as well as the cynicism of modern society. But most of all, as the title Ikiru (which roughly translates as "to live") indicates, the film also asks what it means to live, which is not the same as merely existing.

When the film's protagonist Kenji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), after 30 years in government service, realises that he has stomach cancer and has less than a year to live, he is faced with the bare truth that he has accomplished nothing all these years. Deciding to make the most of the time he has, the otherwise miserly Watanabe indulges in the city's nightlife and tries to flirt with a young woman from his office, but he soon tires of it. With his days coming to an end, he seeks truth, or simply put, a sense of purpose. And he very soon finds it during one of his evenings out with the young woman.

'Ikiru' is split neatly into two halves, the first depicting Watanabe's predicament and his search for meaning, and the second a memorial after his death, where his co-workers discuss his "legacy". Kurosawa opens the film by showing us an X-ray of Watanabe's cancer-afflicted tummy, followed by a dissolve into a shot of Watanabe, surrounded, even overwhelmed, by files all around him. Almost immediately, we are shown a group of women making a ruckus with the local municipals for taking so long to cover up stagnating water bodies in their area, giving us a glimpse into the rampant red-tapism in public sector bodies in Japan at the time. It would also prove to be a vital part of the narrative, later on. 

Throughout the remaining portion of the first half, Kurosawa tries to put the viewer on its protagonist's side, imploring us to empathise with the poor man's plight. To make sure that we do, Kurosawa makes use of every possible device in his cinematic arsenal - deep focus photography, montage sequences, wide-angle shots etc.. Especially moving are the montage sequences where he flips through memories of life with his son whose mother died when he was a kid (the son is now indifferent towards his father), the long shot showing Watanabe all alone in the clinic as he waits for the doctor's verdict, a desolate figure, and the close-up where Watanabe, looking straight into the camera, sings in a drunken stupor, "Life is short - fall in love, dear maiden", as his eyes brim with tears. When Watanabe, after finding his purpose, walks out of the restaurant when a birthday celebration is on in the background with the "Happy Birthday" refrain, it is hard to miss the allegory.

It is in the second half that Kurosawa's portrait of contemporary Japanese society becomes especially bleak. As Watanabe's co-workers gather at a memorial held after his death, what begins as a discussion on whether he was aware of his terminal illness soon delves into something less than mud-slinging, as they try to wring credit out of the departed bureaucrat for his parting gift to the world, which was to cover up the open sewer and turn it into a children's park. As they gulp cup after cup of sake, Kurosawa lets us note the irony with which the bureaucrats, who were all too eager to dump the women's request to the other department, are now desperate for the credit once the work has been completed.

But Kurosawa refuses to be cynical about humanity. As the film closes on a shot of the park with children gleefully playing in it, we are reminded, without any words spoken, that Watanabe's efforts, no matter how late in life, did not go in vain, and that the world could do with a few more of his ilk.

Kurosawa's flashy style when it came to telling his stories, which play upon the film's pacing too, are in marked contrast with the more nuanced styles of Ozu and Mizoguchi. One might even be tempted to call his style "brash", as many have, but does that really matter? He spoke from his heart, and was master of his craft, which alone accounts for his triumph as one of the cinema's formidable artists.

Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray-1955)

Written and Directed by Satyajit Ray
Based on the novel "Pather Panchali" by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee
Cinematography Subrata Mitra
Starring Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee, Subir Banerjee, Uma Dasgupta and Chunibala Devi

I first saw Pather Panchali at a film society screening, when I was still in college and had little exposure to what cinephiles term "world cinema". My first experience of the film left me confused, to be frank. While the film's beautiful images and music no doubt caught me unawares, I was definitely in the dark as to what the film was coming to say.

I definitely understood that the film was centered on a poor Brahmin family living under grinding poverty in rural Bengal, but all I could see was a series of incidents centered around them, with hardly a plot, and it moved at an excruciatingly slow pace. Where lay the greatness of Pather Panchali? Does it lie hidden in some obscure symbolism, or is the film and its adherents merely being pretentious?

Over the years since then, I happened to see the film close to 10 times in its entirety, and went through every possible literature on the film that I could lay my hands on. Slowly, the film grew on me and I began to realise that the film had no hidden meaning, that everything the director wanted to convey is all there for you to see and hear. Even the novel on which the film is based- and which I haven't read -seemed to contend itself simply with acquainting the reader with the rhythm of life in rural India, it is said.

Soon, I learnt that a story need not always have a plot as in conventional dramaturgy, that it could take the form of poetry as well, by emphasising mood, atmosphere and character psychology instead of plot points. Taken that into view, Pather Panchali does qualify as a masterful piece of filmmaking.

If I failed to "get" the film, as many members of the audience felt during that first screening, it had to do with conventional notions of what comprised "good" or "meaningful" cinema; one of the prerequisites was that you had to have a plot-driven storyline, preferably one with a "message", some hard hitting dialogues, and a style intent on realism. Barring the last of the criteria, Pather Panchali meets none of these.

While the film has often been brushed aside as dry staple for intellectuals to feed on, Pather Panchali actually is a film that needs to be savoured with both the head and heart, only that you needed a heart of a different kind. While you used your brain to admire the way Ray has transformed words on page to an audio-visual experience onscreen, you needed a heart to take delight in such sequences as the one in which young Durga and Apu follow a sweetmeat seller, their astonishment at catching their first glimpse of a moving train, the way villagers react to a band's rendition of Tipperary, and the moments depicting the onset of the monsoon.

While Satyajit Ray's debut feature enjoyed tremendous critical and commercial success around the world, playing in over 20 festivals, it was not without its share of detractors, many of whose claims seem downright ludicrous. While the film received a lot of flak back home (with former Indian actress and Member of Parliament Nargis Dutt leading the tirade) for not showing India as a prosperous country rife with beautiful men and women singing and dancing their way through life, the western world was fairly appalled with its depiction of poverty, and a leading critic for the New York Times lampooned the film's loose structure in his review, saying the film would hardly have passed for a "rough cut" in Hollywood.

Ray, however, was humble enough to acknowledge the last of these claims, for the opening scenes of Pather Panchali are not very promising. Since every member of the crew were amateurs, the film, shot in sequence, bore the marks of a novice in its opening sequences. You felt instinctively that the camera positions were inadequate in some shots, that there was no clear spatial orientation, and cuts were often made at the wrong moments. But as the film progressed, you could clearly sense that this the work of an artist who has a grasp on the aesthetics of the film medium.

While Pather Panchali is by no means Ray's best work, it is definitely the film for which he is most remembered, for the impact it created in international film circles and for the fact that it heralded the arrival of a great master in the scene, the availability of whose films are increasingly becoming unavailable in the country of his birth except in badly damaged prints and DVD transfers.