The Erased Grave of Dersu Uzala: Kurosawa’S Cinema of Memory and Mourning

JJKC 2 (1) pp. 63–79 Intellect Limited 2010 Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema Volume 2 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jjkc.2.1.63_1 OLGA V. SOLOVIEVA New Haven The erased grave of Dersu Uzala: Kurosawa’s cinema of memory and mourning ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Kurosawa Akira’s Dersu Uzala (1975) represents one of the director’s many attempts Vladimir Arseniev to make his cinema into Japan’s entryway into the global community of nations. The Siberia price of this entry is the acknowledgment as well as forgetting of uncomfortable his- Nanai/Hezhe people torical facts. A revisiting of Kurosawa’s film, set in 1902–1907, against the historical 70mm foil of the two world wars, reveals that this cinematic memorial to a Nanai tribesman Intercultural silently acknowledges and laments Japan’s participation in the extermination of the communication minority peoples of the Manchukuo state and in the destruction of pre-industrial pan- Asian Siberia. Even if Dersu Uzala can be regarded as a turning point in Kurosawa’s career in terms of style, as many critics do to the detriment of the film’s reputation, this film is nonetheless equally indebted to Kurosawa’s world-view and sensibility of the 1950s–1960s, to which he brings new aesthetic means and political concerns. Memory is the most faithful of films – the only one that can register at any height, and right up to the very moment of death. But who can fail to see the difference between memory and that objective image that gives it eternal substance? André Bazin, ‘Cinema and Exploration’ 63 JJJKC_2.1_art_Solovieva_063-080.inddJKC_2.1_art_Solovieva_063-080.indd 6363 112/2/102/2/10 112:23:102:23:10 PPMM Olga V. Solovieva IN THE STEPS OF ARSENIEV: KUROSAWA’S DERSU UZALA AND ITS NARRATIVE FRAME OF GRIEF Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975) has for many years been considered a film marking a decline in the director’s creative power. Film scholars such as Joan Mellen and Donald Richie, as well as critics in Japan who had praised his earlier films of the 1950s and 1960s, were disappointed by Kurosawa’s Russian film, accusing the director of an exaggerated emphasis on the epic, showy style of the 70 mm format at the expense of thematic substance and depth (Galbraith 2001: 512–5). Only in this decade has a rehabilitation of Dersu Uzala, along his other films of the 1970s, begun. See, for example, The Emperor and the Wolf, Stuart Galbraith’s double biography of Kurosawa and Mifune: The critics failed to realize that, like Lean, Kurosawa used the format in a matter quite unlike that of other directors. In 70 mm, Dersu Uzala is more intimate than epic. With it he creates mood not, as Mellen states, at the expense of substance, but to draw his two characters closer together and to heighten the reality of the world they inhabit (2001: 515). But the rehabilitation and re-reading of Dersu Uzala deserves to be taken even further than Galbraith’s restoration of psychological depth. The epic quali- ties of the film (as evidenced in format, geopolitical setting and international participation) go beyond the psychological to include political and philosophi- cal dimensions; these should merit our attention now that the global scope of Kurosawa’s film-making comes more and more to the fore (Martinez 2009). In the following, I would like to show that even if Dersu Uzala can be regarded as a turning point in Kurosawa’s career in terms of style, this film is nonetheless equally indebted to Kurosawa’s world-view and sensibility of the 1950s– 1960s, to which he brings new aesthetic means and political concerns. Dersu Uzala is a cinematic adaptation of the 1926/1928 memoir by the Russian explorer of Siberia, Vladimir Arseniev, entitled В дебрях Уссурийского края/In the Wilds of Ussuriland and translated into English in 1941 by Malcolm Burr as Dersu the Trapper. The film starts where the book ends: in 1910 Arseniev returns to the village of Korforovskaya, where several years before at the edge of the woods he had buried Dersu Uzala, his expedition guide. To his consternation, Arseniev realizes that the development of the village and its growth far beyond its previous borders have swallowed up the grove of cedars that used to mark the gravesite. With the trees cut down and the grave levelled, there is no sign or mark left to record his friend Dersu apart from Arseniev’s memory. In fact, by the end of the story Arseniev describes how after burying Dersu he had sat by the road grieving and commemorating. In writing down this recollection, he adds: ‘As in the cinema, all the pictures of our past life together were unrolled before the eyes of my memory’ (Arseniev [1928] 1996: 339). By this point in the book, the ‘pictures’ of Arseniev’s and Dersu’s adventures unrolling in Arseniev’s memory are already familiar to the reader. The book ends with this melancholy farewell not only to Dersu, but also to Dersu’s natural habitat, the taiga, which is vanishing under the advance of towns, rail- roads and highways. Arseniev’s earlier and more technical expedition diaries – published in 1912 in the journal of the Russian Far East Приамурье/The Amur Region and in 1921 in two books, По Уccурийскому Краю/In the Ussuri Region and 64 JJJKC_2.1_art_Solovieva_063-080.inddJKC_2.1_art_Solovieva_063-080.indd 6464 112/2/102/2/10 112:23:112:23:11 PPMM The erased grave of Dersu Uzala Дерсу Узала/Dersu Uzala – had contained scattered and fragmentary episodes involving Dersu. The English-language adaptation Dersu the Trapper brings these fragments together and presents a coherent and suspenseful narrative about the two men’s meeting and their friendship and adventures in the Ussuri region of Siberia. Seizing upon Arseniev’s reference to the cinematic nature of memory, Kurosawa places the explorer’s visit to Korforovskaya at the film’s very beginning so that the whole narrative can be staged in two long flashback sequences, framed as Arseniev’s act of remembering. The first Japanese translation of In the Wilds of Ussuriland (titled after the Russian original’s subtitle, ‘A Journey Through the Mountains of the Sihote- Alin Region’, Shihota-Arin sanmyaku tôsaki, was published in 1938. Kurosawa discovered the book during the Second World War and began to think of filming it with Japanese actors and with the island of Hokkaidô as a setting, but he abandoned this project as unfeasible. Hokkaidô eventually became the location of Hakuchi (1951), Kurosawa’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, of which Dersu Uzala was therefore the major conceptual predecessor and competitor. In 1973, when the Soviet production studio Mosfilm invited Kurosawa to make a film of his choice in Russia, the more than twenty- year-old idea of adapting Arseniev’s book resurfaced. Mosfilm’s invitation gave Kurosawa an opportunity to shoot on location in Siberia, in the very region where Arseniev had conducted his expeditions at the dawn of the twentieth century. Most of the characters could stay Russian, framing and bringing out the focus on the Asian protagonist Dersu, a hunter from the Ussuri branch of the Nanai tribe (known to the Russians of that period as the Goldi). Shot in the Russian language with Russian actors and a predominantly Russian crew, this Siberia-based film may seem to have had little relevance and interest for a Japanese audience. The question of Kurosawa’s topic appears even more intriguing if one considers that Kurosawa insisted on his commitment to the local audience, claiming, ‘I would never make a film especially for foreign audiences […] If a work cannot have mean- ing for a Japanese audience, I – as a Japanese artist – am simply not interested’ (Martinez 2009: 26). Although upon the film’s release Kurosawa claimed many times that its message is ecological and that modern man has a lot to learn from Dersu in this respect (Stone 1991: 160–161; Cardullo 1992: 180), the director’s concern with the protagonist and his grave seems to have much darker, unexpressed roots. Yoshimoto points out that Kurosawa framed the film’s narrative in a way that highlights its sense of grief: Significantly, even at the end of the film, the narrative never comes back to the opening scene of Arseniev’s visit to Dersu’s grave site in 1910; instead, it concludes with the scene of the burial of Dersu in 1907, when he is murdered by a robber for his expensive rifle, a parting gift from Arseniev. Thus, never reaching a resolution, the film is permanently suspended between the two moments of grief over Dersu’s death. (Yoshimoto 2000: 345) But what are Dersu and his death to Japanese audiences? We know that the original idea of the film was at odds with Japanese militarism. In a 1981 inter- view, Tony Rayns asked the film director about the influence of militarism – the national situation in which he entered the film industry – on his cinematic career: ‘Do you think your career would have developed differently if the 65 JJJKC_2.1_art_Solovieva_063-080.inddJKC_2.1_art_Solovieva_063-080.indd 6565 112/2/102/2/10 112:23:112:23:11 PPMM Olga V. Solovieva national situation had been different?’ (1981: 83). In response to this question, Kurosawa described the climate of censorship that doomed many of his wartime ideas: There was no freedom of expression during the war. All I could do was read books and write scenarios, without having any real outlet for my own feelings.

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