An old pond
A frog jumps in -
the sound of water.
"Well of course if a frog jumps into the water, there's going to be a noise". Is that your reaction to those eleven words and a hyphen? Well, then you simply have no feeling for haiku. Please do not mistake me, I don't say that; It is Akira Kurosawa. At last, after dabbling for a few weeks, I am through with Something like an autobiography by Kurosawa. Rashomon (1950, Jap) comes to most of our minds on hearing the word Kurosawa. Interestingly, in this book Kurosawsa has told his own story starting right from his childhood and ending it with the making of Rashomon. However he continued to make films as late as early nineties. I am not an expert on film making or the history of world cinema, but I have been impressed by Kurosawa's films like Dersu Uzala(1975) and Ran (1985). Needless to mention Rashomon. Andha Naal (1954, Tam, S.Balachander), one of the greatest performances of Sivaji Ganesan ever, follows a similar script as Rashomon. The plot is simple. It is something like the game Chinese whispers that we would have played at some point of time or the other. It is about how a same event takes amusingly different forms when coloured, consciously or unconsciously, by the perceptions and motives of the individuals who report it. (Sorry....I could not make that sentence simpler!! I think I am yet to recover from the hangover of yesterday's Income Tax Act test.) Virumaandi (2004, Tam, Kamal Hassan) also belongs to the same genre of story telling.
The day just before the shooting was about to start, the three assistant directors Daiei had assigned me came to see me at the inn where I was staying. I wondered what the problem could be. It turned out that they found the script baffling and wanted me to explain it to them. "Please read it again more carefully," I told them. "If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible." But they wouldn't leave. "We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don't understand it at all; that's why we want you to explain it to us."
I was horrified as well curious at the same time while reading that para from the book. Horrified - as I imagined myself to be Kurosawa for a moment; Just a day before the shoot and the assistants saying something like that! Curious - to know Kurosawa's explanation for that. Rashomon went on to win many awards including the Oscar for Best foreign language film. The film's recognition the world over was like "pouring water into the sleeping ears of the Japanese film industry."
Some verses from the book that make me smile...
Cheerful on the way there,
Fearful on the way home.
(Lyrics of a song from his directorial debut Sugata Sanshiro, 1942.)
On the mountaintop
water appears
and tumbles down.
(When I first read it, I was struck with amazement. It was apparently a poem by an amateur, but I felt as if its pure, clear vision and simple, straightforward expression had hit me over the head. My affection for my own poems, which were no more than words lined up and twisted around in different ways, dried up completely. - Kurosawa)
We sing thanks for our teacher's kindness,
We have honored and revered...
.. After the years, met daily as brothers and sisters,
You go on..
..In the gleam of fireflies.
(A few lines from his school graduation day)
Kurosawa talks about a lot of people in his autobiography but film director Yamamoto Kajiro, whom Kurosawa describes as the best teacher of my entire life, takes away the largest share. The next biggest impact on Kurosawa was probably by his elder brother about whom Kurosawa says ...But I prefer to think of my brother as a negative strip of film that led to my own development as a positive image.
Specifically, the last few pages where Kurosawa tells us about film-making are worth a dozen reads. Cinema resembles so many other arts. If cinema has very literary characteristics, it also has theatrical qualities, a philosophical side, attributes of painting and sculpture and musical elements. But cinema is, in the final analysis, cinema. - AK
[By the way, this post is by no means a book review.
It is rather Something like a book review.
And thanks to Anish cheta for gifting me this book]
