1. On one of the most mind boggling Saturdays ever in college basketball, featuring upset after upset after upset, I didn't watch a single second of action.
Instead, I tuned into the Criterion Channel. Once again, I listened to Bill Hader talk for two and half minutes about his experience with Akira Kurosawa's movie, Ikiru (1952). Then I watched this masterpiece.
Translated into English, "ikiru" means to live. Kurosawa's movie is a study of Kanji Watanabe, a longtime civic bureaucrat in Tokyo, who finds out he has stomach cancer and will die in about six months. This news awakens him to how he's existed as a dead man walking for most of his life and now he is determined to learn what it means to live and to act on what he learns.
I'm going to leave my comments about the movie's plot at that in case anyone reading this post decides to watch this movie. I don't want to give anything else away.
I will say, though, if you love the beauty of black and white film making, Ikiru is exquisitely filmed. Likewise, it's powerfully acted, with very little sentimentality. Ikiru also gives its viewers a detailed picture of post-WWII Tokyo, of the influence and impact of the USA's occupation of Japan and reforms the USA instituted.
In making this movie, Kurosawa drew inspiration from Tolstoy's novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, another study of a character coming to a deeper understanding of what it means to live as he dies of a terminal illness. About eleven or twelve years ago, I included The Death of Ivan Ilyich in my Survey of World Literature syllabus and I'm disappointed that I was ignorant of the movie, Ikiru. The two works would have paired beautifully.
As I watched (and, as it turns out, rewatched) Ikiru, other stories and movies sprung to mind. Certain scenes and interactions between characters brought to my mind vignettes from the Japanese series, Midnight Diner. Its treatment of the grind, of the deadening impact of office life, of the longing for something more reminded me of the Japanese movie, Shall We Dance? The movie's portrayal of paralyzed and entrenched civic bureaucracy brought to mind the movie Brazil. The movie's scenes of the suffocating office where Watanabe and his fellow bureaucrats worked got me thinking again about Herman Melville's portrayal of the stultifying environment and tedious tasks in a Wall Street lawyer's office in "Bartleby, the Scrivener".
2. The Criterion Channel not only features the movie, Ikiru, it also features a separate selection featuring the late film scholar Stephen Prince providing superb commentary on the movie as it plays, mostly without sound.
I decided to watch Ikiru again and listen to all that Stephen Prince had to say about the movie. Prince's discussion of Kurosawa's filmmaking techniques, his illuminating comments about Kurosawa's philosophical, social, sociological, and spiritual explorations, and Prince's broader comments about some of Kurosawa's other movies enthralled me.
I wished I were young again.
When I was in my 20s, 30s, 40s, and maybe even my 50s, I used to be able to watch as many as four movies in the same day, used to be able to stay up past midnight enjoying films.
This evening, though, after two viewings of Ikiru, after spending five hours with this movie, my mental energy was depleted. Yes, I was wound up, stimulated, my mind full of impressions and thoughts about Ikiru, with other thoughts about Bob Dylan as well as the Grateful Dead trying to muscle their way into my stream of consciousness.
So how did I settle down and ease myself to sleep?
I scooped out the clumps in Copper and Luna's litter pans, crawled into bed, and had Luna climb on my chest and Copper settle in near me, but not on me. Copper and Luna helped bring me back to earth and helped stop all the whirring and activity going on in my head.
3. Something else helped bring me down to earth. In the middle of the afternoon, Debbie took some donations up to St. Vincent de Paul's and then she read for a while at the Depot and then dropped in at the Lounge. She texted me and stopped me from making dinner because she was going to bring home Seafood Lo Mein from Wah Hing.
Debbie returned home. I broke into the takeout box of seafood and noodles and suddenly satisfied my physical appetite along with being in the midst of feeding my spiritual and mental hunger by diving into Ikiru.
Balance.
Delicious food. Stimulating cinema. Big questions about life. Keeping an eye on basketball scores. Scooping. Settling down with Copper and Luna. Going to sleep.
Yes!
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