Great Things # 3: Kurosawa's Ikiru

OK, so virtually everybody has heard of the legendary Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa. Well, at least, film historians and all-round academics... and a few of us who watch a black and white movie once in a while!

Back in the 1950's, Kurosawa created a number of films which changed the face of cinema: two of his best known, Seven Samurai and Rashomon are regularly featured in film magazine lists of the greatest films of all time.

Ikiru is another classic, and differed from many of Kurosawa's films because it does not feature any action sequences, and is subdued compared to a lot of his output. However, the drama of Ikiru is based on the story it tells, and the message of the movie.

The word 'Ikiru' means 'to live' and thus the film focuses on the meaning of life, through an office chief who is revealed to be suffering from cancer through an x-ray image right in the first scenes of the film. We learn that he has dedicated himself to work and bringing up his son since the death of his wife years earlier. However, the discovery of his terminal illness prompts him to question the life choices he has made, particularly as we see the bureaucratic stuggles of his office life, and also how distant and ungrateful his son is towards him.

The challenge for the office chief is to find meaning in life when it is drawing to a close, at a time when death is imminent.

As if to emphasise the passing of human life, the film is seperated into two halves, the first dealing chronologically with the discovery of his illness and how he attempts to deal with this. The second half then focuses on the aftermath of his death, seeing his colleagues and friends discussing him at the wake following his funeral, and flashbacks to his final days. Through this structure we see how he exists firstly in life, then in death.


In trying to make sense of his final days, the bureacrat befriends firstly a young girl in his office (who completely mis-reads his intentions) and then a drunk in a bar. Through these relationships he finds the solution to his problem of how to make the most of his life, even though he has little time left. (I'm not going to give much more detail than this so you will have to watch it!)

One of the things I most enjoyed about Ikiru is the cinematography - considering it's a black and white film, some of the images really stick in your mind, such as the central character sitting on a swing in a park, and one of the final scenes when he looks at the sunset, which looks spectacular, even though we only see it in black and white!

Ultimately, Ikiru is still relevant because it deals with timeless issues that perhaps are of even more importance in today's world, how to combine the practicalities of life and making a success of life - achieving aims which transcend time and space, and go on after your time is up!

The Ikiru I watched is a scratchy, black and white subtitled film - of another era - which somehow skips 50 years to seem like it was made for an audience of today, rather than yesteryear. Put simply, I love it. It is a bit like It's a Wondeful Life in the sense that it leaves you with an added hope, and solution to life's issues - although thankfully, Ikiru does this without a cheesy, smaltzy ending!