DEATH EQUALS FREEDOM
Talbot, Daniel
Death Equals Freedom by DANIEL TALBOT What is it like to learn that we have cancer? That we will die within a year? Does this awful knowledge provoke acts of terror, beauty, courage? Do we...
...others go in for kicks of various kinds— booze, girls, crowd milling—in a state of utter confusion and stupor...
...This great Japanese film was made in 1952 but is now being shown for the first time in the United States...
...Through patience, perseverance, and a sustained hacking away at the dense bureaucratic jungle of City Hall, he fathers a playground for children...
...He refuses to submit to death, he makes a worship of his remaining days on earth—indeed it is the very notion of death-on-his-doorstep that brings him the first full bucket of freedom he has ever dipped into...
...They build swiftly and consecutively into one image: the haunting, wracked, life-thirsting face of Watanaki-san (played superbly by Takashi Shimura, who will be remembered for his role as the woodcutter in Rashomon...
...and what could be more pathetic than a bunch of mediocre officials clamoring for a little attention and credit...
...The son and daughter-in-law were concerned only with getting the old man's money and considered him selfish for spending it on the young girl...
...Now, from Japan, comes a film which has to do with these very things: Ikuru (literally, in Japanese, "to live" but known in America as Doomed or Living) by Akira Kurosawa (creator of Rashomon, Drunken Angel, and The Men Who Tread on The Tiger's Tail, among others...
...Some of the young people are portrayed as cynical, interested only in money and a plodding security...
...He hides it from his son and daughter-in-law and his associates at the Citizens Section of City Hall, of which he is the chief...
...The drunker they become the more avid the hero (in flashback) appears...
...And if we know that the life of man is inherently more spiritual than natural, why don't we spring our traps and exploit the infinite freedoms of an unfettered spirit...
...Everything the hero does is inspired by the urgencies of life: when told by a cancer patient what the painful symptoms are, Watanaki-san groans maniacally in protest...
...Do we find ourselves, in these petty, narrowing times, paying more attention to boring, meaningless work and enslaving compulsions than to the endless El Dorados of creative energy within ourselves that beg to be discovered and tapped for the good of self and society...
...As the hero's last days at City Hall are reconstructed by the officials at the wake, the scene shifts frantically between Watanaki-san scurrying about the halls and the officials laughing and then crying out of guilt...
...It appears, however, that the picture will play the circuit, and for this we can only be grateful to the efforts of Thomas J. Brandon, who is not only presenting this truly important film, but all the other interesting films in the Japanese Festival that have run recently at the Little Carnegie in New York City...
...One night he meets a "writer of trashy novels," tells him about the cancer, and, at the writer's suggestion, they decide to paint the town red...
...And within this restlessness, there is restraint, immediate contrast, and a sense of the divinely delicate...
...By now he has come to terms with his situation and, desiring to spend his remaining months in the creation of something meaningful, he returns to his office...
...The magnificence of this film is in its totally unvarnished image of the physical sensation of being...
...a youthful girl...
...The story concerns an old man who, though told by a doctor that he has an ulcer, knows intuitively that he has stomach cancer...
...He feigns going to work every morning and wanders around the city in a state of shock...
...the loss of his hat makes him fly after it in a thick crowd...
...the clang of an alarm clock, which reminds him of the passage of time, sends him diving under the bed cover in retreat...
...The knowledge shatters him...
...Given a cancer victim as the core of a story, how easily it could have lapsed into the sheerest soap opera...
...It is at his wake that the glory of this man and the smallness and meanness of those around him are revealed, through a series of arresting flashbacks...
...and after being mired in a red-taped City Hall, whose sole function, it appears, is to keep anything from happening anywhere, he pursues city officials like a man possessed to bring about the playground project...
...Do we discover the unalterable truth that we have taken too much for granted in our lives...
...He recently returned from Spain, where he spent a year writing and working on a film...
...At this writing, the United States Customs authorities have delayed the importation of the picture on the ground that one sequence is obscene...
...This man's face is saying: I know I am going to die and therefore I feel life— pulsating life!—in everything, every second, everywhere...
...The camera— restless as a wild stallion—seems to have been taken over by Watanaki-san himself...
...His life is so enhanced by senses of purpose that the irony of his situation is tripled...
...A few weeks later, a young girl who works in his office comes to his home to get him to sign her resignation...
...As for the playground, the unctuous City Hall officials at the wake each try to claim credit in the eyes of the press and among themselves...
...The truth, abetted by alcohol and an official who knows the inside story, finally emerges...
...The film is constructed on two major pinwheels of flashbacks, with frenzied cutting in each one...
...Is life, roughly speaking, more "natural" (in the brute, animal sense) than "spiritual...
...And then he dies...
...What does it really mean to live...
...Yet, upon rare occasions there are films, like Umberto D, Bicycle Thief, Grand Illusion, and Citizen Kane, that transcend visual imagery and tell us something about life which, to paraphrase Stefan Zweig, increases the measure of truth in the universe...
...They wander from bar to bar, dance hall to dance hall, watch a strip act, pick up two prostitutes...
...He induces her to spend her free time with him...
...Beyond this there are sharp glimpses of postwar disillusion and despair in Japan...
...At the end of this pleasure binge, the usual letdown occurs...
...the petty bureaucrats sit at long tables buried under tons of documents, sunk forever in the apathy of the clerk's world...
...But as you follow Watanaki-san's nightmare voyage, you feel you are in the presence of an indestructible human being...
...They go out for dinner every night, listen to music, and walk around...
...It is not a romance: he simply wishes to be in the company of DANIEL TALBOT, editor of the newly published "Film: An Anthology," served for three years as Eastern story editor for Warner Brothers...
...When these philosophic considerations show up in a movie we must, as a rule, exercise caution, if not downright suspicion, in our appraisal, inasmuch as they require the tool of closely reasoned words...
...The gossip at his home and office is that he is having a shameful affair...
...Of course, he not only leaves sufficient money for them to buy a new house, but it comes out that he had worked for thirty years in a stifling job only because he wanted to provide a better life for his son, whom he adored...
...The imagery is as vivid as the idea of this film, particularly in the final flashback sequence...
Vol. 24 • March 1960 • No. 3
