Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Ikiru
1952 · Akira Kurosawa · Ikiru 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
Count the stacks of folders on the desks around Watanabe. (staging)
Kurosawa builds city hall out of repetition: identical desks in rows, towers of petitions, subordinates arranged behind their section chief like furniture. The narrator calls him a mummy at his post.
Payoff: The office is composed so that nothing can happen in it. Thirty years of a life are stated by the geometry before any dialogue explains them. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). The reading calls the frame a closed set: a space packed with information and arranged so that no action can get out of it.
Notice when the backgrounds stop being sharp. (camera)
Nakai shoots the bureaucracy in hard deep focus where every desk and paper stays legible. When Watanabe goes out into the bars and the cabaret, the focus shallows and the camera starts to move.
Payoff: The lens changes with his condition. Rigidity and looseness are photographed differently, so you can see the release before he can name it.
Watch Shimura's eyes while the rest of him stays still. (performance)
Shimura plays the diagnosis and the collapse after it almost entirely without movement. The hat, the stoop, the fixed shoulders stay constant. Everything is happening behind the face.
Payoff: An enormous interior event is given almost no external expression. You have to lean in, which is what the whole film keeps asking of you.
Listen to Watanabe sing the old song in the bar. (sound)
He performs Gondola no Uta, sentimental Takarazuka material from 1915, in a cracked voice. Hayasaka's score stays out of it. The room goes quiet and the other drinkers get uncomfortable.
Payoff: A piece of period schmaltz becomes the visible shape of what a man failed to live. Nothing in the scoring tells you to feel that. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture that lays bare a whole social and spiritual relation instead of expressing a mood.
Track the petition the neighborhood women keep carrying around. (setting)
A request for a playground on a patch of waste ground gets passed from department to department. The same folder keeps reappearing in different hands, always being sent somewhere else.
Payoff: A single piece of paper is the film's measure of the institution. Watch where it goes and you learn what the office is actually for.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the folders, the hat, and the stoop. Kurosawa builds Watanabe's life out of repetition before he acts.