Dersu Uzala (1975)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Film Review

The failure of his first colour feature Dodes'ka-den (1970) came as a bitter blow to director Akira Kurosawa.  Once one of Japan's most esteemed filmmakers, Kurosawa was now having serious difficulty finding financial support and an audience.  Depression led him to attempt suicide in 1971 but within two years he was back in business, making his most ambitious film with the support of the Soviet film company Mosfilm.  Dersu Uzala was a spectacular beginning to the mature phase of Kurosawa's career, an elegiac contemplation on man's relationship with the natural world that is both visually stunning and harrowingly humane.   

The film is based on the real-life exploits of the Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev, as recorded in his memoirs Dersu Uzala.  The book had previously been adapted by the Soviet filmmaker Agasi Babayan in 1961 and Kurosawa had been interested in making his own film version for over twenty years.  Dersu Uzala had two themes that appealed to the Japanese filmmaker.  First there was the account of an extraordinary friendship between two men from very different cultures, a Russian topographer and a nomadic Chinese - two people who, in spite of their differences, grew to develop a profound understanding and respect for each other that offers hope for humanity.  Then there is the story of man's relationship with nature, something that was a particular concern for Kurosawa.  "People should be more humble toward nature," he once remarked, " because we are a part of it and we must become harmonized with it."  In Dersu Uzala, Kurosawa shows how small man is when set aside the vastness of nature and persuades us that it is only by showing humility and respecting the natural world that humanity will survive.

The only one of Kurosawa's films to be shot on 70mm film, Dersu Uzala has a visual impact that surpasses almost anything to be found in his other work.  The most arresting sequence comes towards the end of Part One, with Arsenyev and his dwarfish companion making a desperate bid to survive, constructing a makeshift shelter from sea grass as the sun sinks inexorably towards the horizon.  It is a frantic race against time, and the stark visuals coupled with some frenetic camerawork and editing conjure up a harrowing sense of urgency.  This is life on a knife-edge - two feeble humans pitted against the awesome might of nature.  Even in his more action-oriented samurai films, Kurosawa never crafted a more tense and gripping sequence than this.

The pace slows down markedly in the film's second part, as the tragic final chapter in Dersu's life is recounted with exquisite humanity.  This reveals a new side to Kurosawa's art - more contemplative, more subtle, more ironic.  In the first half of the film, Dersu shows us how to live with dignity in a hostile world.  In the second half, Dersu becomes a tragic figure, progressively demeaned by the cruel processes of ageing.  Out of place in the civilised modern world, he must return to nature, but it is here that he dies, slain not by the savagery of nature but by the thoughtless greed of man.  There is a pointed meaning to Dersu's death that gives Kurosawa's film a special pertinence.  Man's worst enemy is not nature but himself.

Released in 1975 after a long and gruelling location shoot in one of the most inhospitable regions of Siberia Dersu Uzala was a phenomenal success both in the Soviet Union and abroad.  Just when it looked as if his talents were failing him, Akira Kurosawa came back in a blaze of glory, deluged with praise from critics the world over.  Not only did the film receive two major awards at the 9th Moscow International Film Festival, it was also awarded the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1976, the second time Kurosawa received the award (the first being for his 1950 masterpiece Rashomon, the film that first introduced him to western audiences).  Before his death in 1998, Kurosawa would make five more films, including two of his grandest samurai films, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1984).  As impressive as these late films are, none of them has quite the poetry  and import of Dersu Uzala - a film that, in our ecologically conscious era, has a profound resonance.

Film Synopsis

In 1902, Captain Vladimir Arsenyev leads a topographical expedition into the eastern extremities of Imperial Russia.  It is whilst mapping the Ussuri region that he comes across an old Nanai tribesman named Dersu Uzala whose instincts for survival soon make a deep impression on Arsenyev and his men.  Dersu agrees to accompany the party on its daring survey of the uncharted wastelands of Siberia and on two occasions Arsenyev's life is saved by his faithful guide.  When the old man's sight begins to fail him, he accepts Arsenyev's kind invitation to live in a room in his townhouse.  Dersu soon finds urban living is not to his liking and insists that he return to his one true home, to resume his nomadic existence...