Yves here. Satyajit Das sent along some cerebral fare, since the fictional treatment of death can’t be depicted as “lighter”. He features one of my favorite films, Ikiru, prominently, and spares us bromides like Love Story.
By Satyajit Das a former banker and author of numerous works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011), A Banquet of Consequences RELOADED (2021) and Fortune’s Fool: Australia’s Choices (2022). His latest book is on ecotourism and man’s relationship with wild animals – Wild Quests (out 1 May 2024). A version of this post appeared originally in New Indian Express Online
In 2022, Oliver Hermanus directed a film – Living. Scripted by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro and starring the British character actor Bill Nighy, it is set in post-war England and revolves around a public servant diagnosed with a terminal illness. He seeks to correct a frustrated life of quiet despair by a final redemptive act – building a children’s playground in a poor neighbourhood which has been thwarted repeatedly by a sclerotic bureaucracy schooled in saying ‘no’.
The film is a remake of the 1952 film Ikiru directed by Akira Kurosawa which was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The remake, which speaks to a pitiful lack of originality and creativity in many arts today, is a pale imitation of the original which is regarded rightfully as one of Kurosawa’s seminal works.
Ikiru features an extraordinary death scene which director Hermanus restages. The original sets a benchmark in portraying cinematic death. Leaving aside the comic book bang-bang shoot’em up blood and gore of action thrillers, film depiction of dying is difficult. Prurient lingering, overly graphic footage or cowardly disavowal is hard to avoid. The choice between bathos and pathos is delicate. The same holds for sex scenes in films.
There are a few interesting death scenes in films. Ridley Scott’s ending of his 1982 Bladerunner – the Tears in Rainsequence – is noteworthy. It is a short monologue spoken by replicant Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer): “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.”
The frequently referenced speech speaks to a surprisingly insightful exploration of what it means to die. Everything that an individual has seen or experienced is expunged as if it never happened. The universality of the words, as death our common fate, is haunting. Written by David Peoples, Hauer altered the dialogue to create the moving death soliloquy.
Its power is enhanced by the framing of and symbols within the sequence. Batty saves Deckard (Harrison Ford) who intends to kill him. Batty’s words as he rescues Deckard in an act of grace are telling: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” It captures the terror of death which affects all of us. Batty also appears to be holding a white dove. The literary reference to Wagner is intriguing. His hand is pierced by a nail. The crucifixion allusions are potent.
At the other extreme is the hilarious death scene in Blake Edwards’ otherwise execrable and unfunny 1968 comedy The Party designed around Sellers’ improvisational talents. In the sequence known as the Bugler Who Wouldn’t Die, Hrundi V. Bakshi (portrayed by Sellers in blackface makeup which would raise politically correct hackles today) takes forever to die after repeatedly being shot and after the director yells “cut” in an effort to get more screen time to display his thespian virtuosity. Hrundi also accidentally blows up an enormous fort set rigged with explosives, ruining the film. It is humorous but not weighty.
In his magisterial trilogy, Bengali film director Satyajit Ray created several powerful death scenes. They all involve the death of the family of the central character – Apu. The death of Durga, his sister, is framed conventionally by a violent storm. The deaths of his parents are entirely on another plane. The boy’s ill mother, Sarbajaya, is in her garden as night falls. The background fades until only fireflies can be seen. Then, they too fade into black signifying her death. As Apu’s father Harihar lies dying, there is a loud clap. The camera captures pigeons taking flight as he gasps his final breath, releasing his spirit.
In Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, the death of protagonist Watanabe Kenji (played magnificently by Shimura Takashi) is magical. He sits on a swing in the park, which the dying bureaucrat fought to build. It is snowing. Watanabe peacefully contemplates the playground which is his final achievement. The swing is then filmed moving backwards and forward empty signalling his death. The soundtrack – Kenji whistling a mournful traditional song – continues to play.
The death completes a cycle. The initial images in Ikiru is a close-up of an x-ray photo of Watanabe’s stomach cancer and his stunned face as he realises his fate. The final sequence shows him also alone, without family or friends, without recognition or reward, but at peace with himself.
Living is preparation for death. Hamlet recognised the need to be ready for the end, which comes when it chooses or is chosen. Ikiru ironically means to live.
46 comments
Comments are closed.
Thanks for this amazing text.
Why are the xalitalistic elites oushing for wars, seemingly not afraid of death
>>>Why are the xalitalistic elites oushing for wars, seemingly not afraid of death
Perhaps they are, which is why they are busy trying to distract themselves from it with their bombastic foolishness desperate to convince everyone including themselves that they matter; vampires who seek to fill their hollow existence using the lives of others.
What is our entire ruling class, but parasites seeking to emulate the illusion of being vampires? The beautiful, romantic kind. They might be thinking of a different image, but as a group, they create nothing, do nothing, understand nothing, but who consume everything, while creating a stage for their hoped for perpetual… existence.
I wouldn’t be too harsh on the 2022 ‘Living’ it was a respectful homage to Ikiru – for me, one of the greatest films ever made, but it lacked the courage to set it in contemporary times, as Kurosawa did. There have been several attempts to make an American remake of Ikiru (allegedly, Stephen Spielbergs all time favourite film), but perhaps thankfully, we’ve been spared that.
Japanese films (or at least, older ones), do seem to deal with death differently. Kurosawa’s later Red Beard has an amazing scene where a doctor dignifies a dying peasants last hours by giving him his full attention. Ozu’s Tokyo Story gives an extraordinary amount of time and space at the end of the film to the death of a matriarch. Whole battalions of wannabe film auteurs have tried to do their Ozu homage, but they usually steer away from the death scenes. Much of it I think is cultural – those cultures which emphasise a continuity of the dead persons spirit seem more comfortable with dealing with death than those that assume its a full stop. Nobody likes a story with an unsatisfactory conclusion, but usually that’s what a death represents.
I cannot but think that the treatment of death in films like ‘Ikiru” is because everybody involved in that film had lived through the horrors of WW2 only seven years earlier. How many of the actors in that film were combat vets for example that had perhaps had seen death. And the girls in that filmed must have grown up under the shadow of bomber raids dropping destruction on where they lived. I bet that a lot of the people in that film and its production were familiar with death and were not prepared to tap dance their way around it.
This sense of death and trauma permeates nearly all Ozu’s post war films – Early Spring and Tokyo Story in particular. In the latter, two men discuss their lost sons with a very typical Japanese resignation. In the former, its clear the lead female character has suffered some form of unspecified trauma during the war, but its precise nature is unspoken. You even get it of course in commercial films, such as the original (amazing) Gojira. The most recent Godzilla, Godzilla Minus 1, catches this sense surprisingly well (its depiction of immediate post war Tokyo is very accurate).
Kurosawa was less inclined to look back – he (like many film makers), avoided direct involvement in the war for a variety of reasons (not necessarily cowardice – the Tokyo establishment distrusted the artistic community and preferred to keep them where they could keep an eye on them). The main traumas he talked about where the double suicide of his older brother, and the horrors of the 1929 Kanto earthquake, where he saw numerous burnt bodies piled up in the rivers of Tokyo. That said, some of his immediate post war films like Stray Dog and No Regrets for our Youth are fascinating insights into that period.
Later film makers were more direct – the astonishing The Human Condition trilogy was written and directed by Manchurian war vets and was unsparing about the wars cruelty (as was the original Burmese Harp). Those films were all major box office successes, which is pretty much universally ignored when Japan commentators go on about Japan ignoring its past war crimes. The shutting down of open discussion of Japans war experiences really only happened a couple of decades after the war. It was usually only left to fringe radicals who kept brining it up – its often a feature of later low budget cheap and nasty Japanese cinema of the 1970’s onwards.
as was the original Burmese Harp
You probably mean “Fires on the plain”. The film by Kon Ichikawa is indeed harrowing.
Yes, sorry, I’d forgotten the original name. It was remade several times, with less realism and more sentimentality on each iteration.
Definitely one of the more intriguing posts and discussions on NC. Thank you and all.
Saw NIghy (self-effacing and humble) and director Stephen Wooley at a Q&A. They trod very carefully around the topic of Living’s origins.
A few too many shots of men in suits and bowler hats ascending and descending tstaircases – we get it – but the scene of the empty swing going back and forth in the snow is indeed powerful and iconic.
What I also found fascinating was the denoument, cf. “Everything that an individual has seen or experienced is expunged as if it never happened.”
The park, which was Mr. Williams’ [how faceless can a bureaucrat get? Not even having a first name!], was praised and promoted as a foundation of greater things to come whilst he was alive. But once he died, all the great promises slowly disappeared under his successors’ gentle avalanche of paperwork.
I’m surprised no one mentioned the funeral scene in Kurosawa’s Dreams. It’s a beautiful, positive depiction of death and how it can be celebrated. Although it has many uses, I’d personally keep Kurosawa’s Red Beard for an insight into how to celebrate life, or how to live a meaningful life, even more so than in Ikiru. In Red Beard he draws extensively on Dostoyevsky, for instance the German doctor of Humiliated and Insulted. But then again, references to Dostoyevsky are everywhere, not least in his low-budget depiction of The Idiot (unfortunately, one of the very few Kurosawa movies I wouldn’t recommend). Without going into spoilers, Red Beard is one of the best movies ever made and everyone should watch it at least once
For a reading of Ikiru, the essay in Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro’s book on Kurosawa is very good. And an excellent short essay (less than four pages) on death in the cinema would be Pasolini’s “Observations on the Long Take”, in which he analyzes the Zapruder film, ex.:
Oh, thanks for the reminder about Mitsuhiro’s excellent essays. You gave me a reason to dig that book out of an old pile to remind myself.
A point he makes very well is that even though we are signalled from the beginning of the film that Watanabes death is inevitable, it actually comes as a shock to us as it happens so early in the film, and with such unexpected force. The narrator simply tells us out of the blue that he has died. This is, of course, how it often happens. We only find out the details of how he dies… and why it was not a tragedy, at the very end.
The death scene in Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” was one of the most affecting when I saw the movie i college. The “death rattle” was terrifying to me at the time. I had never been with a person as they were dying. Since then, during my time as a pastor, I was with a number of people as they were dying. Bergman’s depiction of that scene was quite realistic.
A movie with many death scenes is my favorite, “Harold and Maude,” the oddest rom-com ever. This was one of the funniest.
Ah, Ruth Gordon!
The death scene that most terrified me was in the climax of Looking for Mr Goodbar – the sight of Diane Keaton’s face sinking into the dark under strobe light, with the fading beat of a heart. Shudder!
Interesting that no one mentions the final death scene of the knight and his mates in Bergman’s “Seventh Seal”. And the whole movie is also about finding purpose in life when facing death.
I love Ikiru, I have it on dvd
Flipping through channels this past Monday and of course, the History channel I think was running different episodes on WW II. The ending of one episode featured the island of Saipan and once the American military had finally conquered the Japanese, persuading the surrender by island residents was not proceeding as initially planned. Rather than surrender or succumb to the victors, they were showing dead island residents dead on the shore and beaches, as many leaped off the cliffs instead of being held captive.
Unbelievable to watch that, and then recall scenes from Iwo Jima in the book Flags Of Our Fathers, or from the D-Day landing scenes in Saving Private Ryan. War is hell.
In more recent movie news I came across this CNBC article, and a new big movie project from the mind and the wallet of Kevin Costner. Dances with Wolves sounds more watchable, so maybe Costner is cooking up a franchise film winner. I had been reading earlier in 2024, that this project had lead him to part ways from the series, after season 5 of Yellowstone.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/22/kevin-costner-mortgaging-california-estate-fund-horizon-movie-series.html
Ikiru (To Live) 1952 eng sub
Who came up with that publicity poster?
I’ve never seen that poster before, talk about misleading!
It reminds me of one Japanese film from the period (an excellent one), that featured the huge star Toshiro Mifune on the poster and credits, as the love interest of the leading lady. In reality, he was in just one shot – as a picture she holds – the actual actor playing her husband (executed in the first scene) was someone different who didn’t even look like Mifune. Being depicted on the picture was the least Mifune could get away with contractually, but this didn’t stop the studio from pretending he was a co-star.
Don’t know, definitely goofy looking. But I’m able to watch.
I had to click on it twice to start the movie.
Un-embedded Link:
https://ok.ru/video/6757918575302
The best film I’ve seen about death is “Silverlake Life: The View from Here”. It’s extremely honest, about a gay couple who film themselves dying of AIDS in the early 1990s. I recommend it highly, but it’s not for the faint of heart.
Thank you for giving me the name of that movie. I saw it decades ago and have never been able to forget it.
There’s also the scene in Little Big Man where Chief Dan George’s character decides his time has come. He makes the hero take him to the mountain top to die. Only he doesn’t die. Realizing he must carry on, he walks back down the mountain.
I was introduced to 1950’s Japanese cinema through L.A. Times film critic Charles Champlin’s early 1970’s hosting of these films on N.E.T. (later PBS). Kurosawa and the other Japanese directors of the 1950’s were reacting to the “death-cult” aspects of Shōwa Fascism during the 1926-1945 period. Japan needed a sharp re-set from the madness of that horrifically homicidal culture. It was important for the cinema to portray death as something more personal and peaceful.
I recently watched Tràn Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things which portrays a lyrical arc of death and renewal.
Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room is a powerful film about death – of a class, of a family, of the protagonist.
My favorite Japanese film about death is Departures from 2008 about a failed cellist who takes up the profession of a Japanese ritual mortician. The encoffining ceremony of a dead woman is one of the most beautiful ceremonies I’ve ever seen. The film emphasizes the Japanese avoidance of those who work in this field as the main character’s wife leaves him in shame over his choice of a new profession. It might be more sentimental than some would like, but the cello music in the film is deeply affecting.
My other choice of a film about death is the HBO film Wit directed by Mike Nichols, a harrowing exploration of a literature professor (played by Emma Thompson) diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer and based on the play of the same name. The death scene at the end is unforgettable.
From Wikipedia:
Seen that one and indeed is memorable, especially since nowadays we don’t see many Japanese (actual) movies, good or bad.
And the scene in Wit, having as background the music from Symphony of 1000 sorrows, with the explanation of the John Donne poem about vanquishing death, is a tearjerker for me…
However, in the US, Breaking Bad is an entire TV show with many seasons, dealing with the terminal lung cancer of the main protagonist. Who dies redeeming himself by saving his “Igor” from bondage…
If you are looking for recent Japanese cinema, I would say check out for Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Evil Does Not Exist. I know it has screened in the US at some theaters. His previous film Drive My Car is also excellent. Anything directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Iwai Shunji, Fukada Koji, or Hayakawa Chie is worth seeing. For animation, look for works by Shinkai Makoto, who has taken the art to another level. There’s a lot more, but those are directors with whom you sort of can’t go wrong.
Also, if you want a finely-crafted film full of Tokyo ambiance, Wim Wenders’ latest Perfect Days with Yakusho Koji delivers, though in effect it’s sort of a PR film for the Nippon Foundation and Shibuya-ku.
Returning to the 1950s and regarding the representation of death in Kurosawa’s films, mention should certainly be made of The Bad Sleep Well and especially Throne of Blood, the latter having one of the most eye-popping death scenes I can recall in Japanese film. I won’t give a spoiler but simply note that during the production it seems that Kurosawa wanted to use the crew and have a contest in the studio parking lot to figure out which crew members could really do it well, until Mifune stepped in to insist, “uhh, no, we’re not going to do that — we need some real professionals for this.”
Annoyingly, those of us in Europe find it particularly hard to see the best up to date Japanese films – for various reasons they often only get released very late, or not at all. Even streaming them can be difficult.
As you say, Shinkai is making wonderful animation. Perfect Days is also wonderful, although several people I know who watched it disliked it for various reasons (being boring is one of them). Sadly though, Japanese cinema is a pale shadow of its former self – for whatever reason, South Korea is producing vastly better TV and film content. I find almost anything made for Japanese TV these days to be unwatchable (the one exception being the series on sumo, Sanctuary).
Kurosawa of course was pretty much incapable of making a dull movie. The final scene of Throne of Blood still draws gasps from modern audiences.
I love Mike Nichols. He never shies from the hard truth.
I wonder where one can watch that film.
Unfortunately, it looks like it’s only available with an HBO Max subscription, according to justwatch.com. It seems like there are no free trials available either.
The most important things in life are found close to death.
When a person, dies, they become complete and whole in a way that they can’t be while still alive. When their end comes, they can do no more. Not surprises, no further growth or reconciliation. What they have done is done, and in a strange way they become for the last time a new thing again, stable and unchanging, fading slowly in memory.
Well said DK
More and more people are chronicling their terminal cancer on social media, especially Youtube. So much of their remaining time on earth spent tied up with the medical appointments and research, while rent and other bills still have to be paid. Probably the biggest indictment of capitalism is how it forces us to spend our last days on earth.
This was the most touching one:
My Thyroid Cancer Story – Joe Plater
https://www.youtube.com/@JoePlater
Stairway to Heaven with David Niven is a great death scene in cinema, except he somehow doesn’t kick the bucket.
Thanks for highlighting this film for the weekend. I have always loved Kurosawa’s films and tried to see them all. I think there is only one that I have missed but perhaps I will buy the collection (celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth) for a grandson and get to see it. Akira wrote the screenplay for Runaway Train in 1960 but never got to make it. Wiki says there were uncredited contributions by frequent Kurosawa collaborators Hideo Oguni and Ryuzo Kikushima. The film that was made in 1985 by Andrei Konccouvsky had Jon Voight and Eric Roberts in it as Manny and Buck, two escaped convicts. It had a very American death scene at the end of it of Manny on top of the hurtling train. The best part is an incredibly powerful scene which I’ve always wondered was from the original script or the revision. Others must have thought it was moving as that scene is shown on YouTube here.
Ps. How could we have a whole discussion about death and Japanese cinema and omit MIshima’s masterpiece (?) Patriotism or the Rite of Love and Death. Only 30 minutes but it rapidly cleared the college screening of all but two of us.
That film is indeed powerful — difficult to watch —, and we are very fortunate it even exists.
After the “Mishima Incident,” in 1970, his widow requested the destruction all of extant copies of the film. She was the rights-holder, not the studio, so they were all burned in the incinerator at Daiei’s studio in Chofu. The film was not an officially-approved work by Daiei, and was created under nearly clandestine conditions, being filmed at night, after the studio closed, etc. The producer, Fujii Hiroaki, convinced Mishima’s widow to not destroy the master negative. Nearly forty years later, he was able to recover it from a tea box in the family home, and get it released. So, really we have him to thank for being able to even see the film.
I was fortunate to speak with Fujii several times and once asked him why Mishima’s family didn’t want these images to circulate (the widow also refused to give permission to Shochiku to distribute Fukasaku’s hallucinatory gender-bending Black Lizard, as Mishima did the film adaptation, and it includes a flashback that shows him in a knife fight and some other surreal stuff I won’t describe; for many years that film was unavailable except in VHS, and I think still today not on DVD or BR). So, I asked: was the widow’s decision to eliminate the film Patriotism and suppress distribution in some way motivated by her denial of Mishima’s homosexuality, i.e., that this was not the image of him that she wanted remembered? Fujii replied that, no, it didn’t have anything to do with that, but was simply that she didn’t want to see anything that might remind her of his death.
Mishima actually didn’t do many films, but you can see him in Masumura Yasuzô’s Afraid to Die, which is available on DVD with subtitles.
However, the film with Mishima I have found the most interesting, is a documentary, Mishima Yukio vs Todai Zenkyoto 50-nen-me no Shinjitsu [Mishima: The Last Debate], which is about his celebrated public debate with the Univ. of Tokyo Zenkyoto. It’s quite striking, as Mishima just openly presents himself as a royalist and very simply defends his views, and despite the fact that the students would be, I think, closer to “our” current thinking about politics in the West, i.e., that Japan should become a more open, democratic society, they come off as frivolous and far less sympathetic than the openly right-wing Mishima.
Thank you very much, Acacia, for this enlightening information, esp. re tea box.
You can watch Ikuru for free on Kanopy, using your library card:
https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/ikiru-0
Don Corleone’s “perfect death”
https://youtu.be/4IRYpjj2_gw?si=U2OMaX6Gu1DoJ3uK
The preoccupation with the manner of death is an aesthetic distortion of understanding. An individual is a grain of sand on the shore of a sea on a random planet in the multiverse. More attention should be paid to avoiding taking the lives of others than to arranging the flowers of our own departure.
Thank you Yves for this opportunity to spend a few Sunday morning minutes contemplating Death. It’s a good practice.
Hauer’s performance was magnificent.
On films about death, I would bring here Alain Renais’s “L’Amour à mort” and Kore-Eda’s “After Life”, both are amazing films on that subject.