ikiru
i believe i watched seven samurai for the last one of these tournaments i participated in, at which point the only kurosawa's i had seen previously were yojimbo and rashomon. that makes this my fourth one, meaning he's one of the classic arthouse directors i have the least familiarity with, so i'm very glad to finally have had the push to see this one. i was already aware of the overall story and the structural gambit of it all, which is perhaps why i hadn't seen it yet, hoping that one day i would forget any details so i could go in fresh, but it turned out not to have mattered. it was very good!
the only criticism i could make (which barely counts as a criticism) is simply how direct it all is, lacking in any real poetry or abstraction save for a couple truly wonderful moments, but that seems to be kurosawa's style and he's quite good at it. in the same vein, shimura's performance is a bit one-note for much of the film, but he hits that note as clean and true as anyone ever has so it certainly isn't detrimental, although turning ikiru into a more well-rounded character may be the thing that could get me to properly love the film. i found myself wishing the film were longer so it might find the space for an extraneous subplot or two that could provide us a deeper glimpse at how ikiru behaves in the world when he isn't directly facing down his own mortality. the opening narration attempts to rectify this a bit, but it seems to betray an inability or perhaps unwillingness on kurosawa's part to pencil in minute character detail using the language of cinema, certainly in comparison to someone like ozu (on whom i'm also far from an expert). kurosawa's particular cinematic language seems to me most comfortable in bold strokes and sweeping gestures, which is obviously why he's such a purveyor of grand epics, in which it is readily accepted that characters stand in for certain ideals rather than characters in themselves. but i could easily be off-base as an admitted kurosawa neophyte, so please correct me if i'm wrong. certainly there is some lovely character detail among the town in yojimbo, although even that could lean rather broad.
the shot of ikiru on the swing is indeed iconic for a reason, the type of shot that is so laden with the accumulated meaning of the entire film, the purest expression of everything kurosawa wishes to say about this man's redeemed life. this thing is obviously filled with existential ideas, perfectly calibrated to get one reflecting on one's own life and impending death. kurosawa suggests that only one faced directly with his own mortality can truly live a good life, as the rest of us are left bickering over the credit for the good work that man did. in this sense, kurosawa's directness finds a clear purpose, forcing us to see everything through ikiru's point of view so that the audience itself can face it's own mortality and hopefully come to the same epiphany as ikiru and the funeral-goers at the end of the film. but of course kurosawa knows that much of the audience will go right back to their old indifferent vanity as soon as they leave the theater just as the characters in the film, so his only hope is that he can get through to that one person who returns to the park at the end of the film. unfortunately, that guy probably isn't me, but it's a nice thought.