Cine-Journal Today

March 14, 2001

VALEDICTORY FILMS

      I like to collect last words and last shots.
      My favorite last words are, admittedly, apocryphal. They were allegedly spoken by General Albert Sedgwick at the Second Battle of Bull Run. He was examining the parapets of the Union defenses and an adjutant warned him of Confederate sharpshooters in the nearby woods. General Sedgwick, the story goes, replied, "Nonsense. They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist --"
      Which may be why his name now graces an avenue in the Bronx.
      Last shots are a bit easier to validate. Just run the film.
      Sometimes the final shot really is a summation of a filmmaker's career. I'm thinking of the final shot of Hawks's Rio Lobo, with a wounded John Wayne stumbling along with one of Hawks's ex-models-turned-failed-actress under his arm, supporting his aging carcass. The male-female interaction in time of crisis, the interdependence of the group and, in the final films of his career, the fading of heroic powers -- it's all there in that one shot. Similarly, the gathering darkness surrounding Anne Bancroft at the end of Seven Women is a grim final statement of the direction that John Ford's career had been tending for a long time.
      On the other hand, the final shot of Joseph Losey's ultimate feature, Steaming, the rising helium balloons in the steambath, has a lightness and grace that could hardly be called characteristic of that otherwise brilliant filmmaker.
      What propelled me into this reverie for the dead and dying is my viewing yesterday of Madadayo, Akira Kurosawa's final film. The film itself is a masterpiece of concision and understatement, two qualities I don't generally associate with Kurosawa. The opening sequence of a teacher (Tatsuo Matsumura) addressing his class and announcing his retirement is a brilliant example of how cinematic a great director can be with just a bunch of people in a room talking. There is a purity, a crystalline contemplativeness to this brief scene that comes from Kurosawa's perfect choices of camera placement and movement and his cutting rhythms.

      Kurosawa was a great admirer of John Ford, as is well known. Intriguingly, Madadayo is the most overtly Fordian of all his films, a low-key tribute to the creation of a community as surrogate family, with echoes of The Long Gray Line and Wings of Eagles, but with a more restrained, drier humor that reminds me of an anecdotal film like The Sun Shines Bright.
      Until the last shots of the film.
      Then Kurosawa reasserts himself in the vaguely fantastic mode of his late films, with a beautiful tracking shot from a small boy (in a dream sequence) to the golden sky to which his gaze is directed, a sky that is quite obviously a painted backdrop like those found in kabuki, which changes from gold to brilliant, supersaturated blues and greens as the final credits roll.
As Montaigne wrote, "Let us hope we make no statement with our deaths that we did not make in life."