Akira Kurosawa Films 101: 1975 – 1985
These films represented Akira Kurosawa’s ascendance to greater international acclaim, while he struggled to find financing in Japan, where the movie industry was shriveling.
Dersu Uzala (1975)
A story of solitary survival and shared survival, nature erasure, and growing old,
Dersu Uzala has an unusual and redemptive place in the Kurosawa canon. This first film after his 1971 suicide attempt was Kurosawa’s sole project abroad — a collaboration with Mosfilm, shot entirely in the USSR — as well as his only Foreign Language Oscar winner (
Rashomon predated the Foreign Language category, but was awarded an Honorary Oscar in 1952). Yet the script revisits a book Kurosawa had first loved and begun adapting decades earlier: Dersu Uzala, Russian surveyor Vladimir K. Arseniev’s 1923 memoir of exploring the Ussuri River region (near Vladivostok) in Siberia. The text was itself animated by the author’s ink sketches: a flock of birds frills a paragraph, footprints in snow stipples a margin. Shot in 70mm, Kurosawa’s rendering, in turn, features some of the director’s most painterly vistas and immersive soundscapes.