Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Stray Dog
1949 · Akira Kurosawa · Stray Dog on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for sweat, fans, and panting dogs in every scene. (setting)
Asakazu Nakai photographs Tokyo in the summer of 1949 as one continuous physical condition. Shirts go dark down the spine and stay dark. Fans turn and move nothing. Nobody in this film is ever dry.
Payoff: The heat is the pressure the whole story runs on, and it is applied to you in the first five minutes.
Look at the people behind Murakami's head in every shot. (staging)
Kurosawa stacks his compositions deep, so foreground action always plays against a crowded, populated background. The crew shot in real thoroughfares, tenements, stadiums, and black-market stalls rather than on sets.
Payoff: The investigation is never lifted out of the city producing it. A hundred other people are broke and waiting in every frame.
Count the minutes Murakami walks the markets without speaking. (cutting)
He puts on the rags of a demobbed soldier and drifts. Several minutes of layered dissolves and superimpositions, legs, stalls, sun, faces that never look at the camera. Nothing gets solved.
Payoff: The thriller stops working for a while and you are left only looking. The man who comes out of it is not the one who went in. In the reading: pure optical and sound situation (opsign). The reading calls this an opsign: the link between seeing and doing goes slack, so you feel the time instead of the progress.
Notice that the gun's crimes happen off screen. (structure)
The Colt does its damage somewhere else. It returns to Murakami as a report, a number, a fact on a desk. You almost never see the weapon in the hand that is using it.
Payoff: A gun you can see is a prop. One firing in a part of the city you cannot picture becomes a debt he keeps paying. In the reading: index-of-lack. The reading calls this an index of lack: a trace pointing at a situation the film deliberately keeps out of the frame.
Listen for music drifting in from somewhere else. (sound)
Fumio Hayasaka and Kurosawa build the track out of the world: radio, market din, popular tunes, a ballpark crowd, cicadas under everything. The score seldom tells you what to feel about a scene.
Payoff: Ordinary pleasant noise keeps playing against dread, which is how the film keeps the crime inside daily life.
Once you have seen it
Watch how alike the two young men look. (staging)
Both came back from the war. Both had everything stolen on the road home. One went to the police, one bought a gun. By the end they are wrestling in a field, indistinguishable in the mud.
Payoff: What separates them is circumstance rather than character, which is an unsettling thing for a police film to conclude. In the reading: imprint (empreinte). The reading calls this the imprint: the mark a situation leaves on a man, and the mark these two leave on each other.
Track how each lead opens onto a bigger one. (structure)
A name gets him a pistol-broker. The broker gets him a rental racket. The situation assembles itself behind Murakami as a consequence of what he does rather than pressing on him from the start.
Payoff: Procedure here is a way of disclosing a world nobody could see yet, one room at a time.
Listen for the piano and the children during the ending. (sound)
The climax plays with a piano drifting from a nearby house and children singing on with their day. Kurosawa refuses to clear the social world out of the frame for the violence.
Payoff: The crime is never isolated from the life around it, so the resolution arrives without any sense of ceremony.
Watch Shimura stay calm while Mifune winds tighter. (performance)
Mifune plays Murakami raw, guilty, and physically clenched, nothing like the swagger he became famous for. Shimura's Sato is unhurried and humane throughout, and never matches the younger man's pitch.
Payoff: The steadiness of one performance is what measures the deterioration of the other, scene by scene.
Carry this in: Watch the backgrounds. Behind the detective in nearly every shot are a hundred people just as broke.