Direction: Seeing Scripts Seminar

We were given the task of reading a film script that we hadn’t seen and then writing a story outline on it. I chose to read Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru. The main themes of the story are the meaning of life and relationships. The main character Kanji Watanabe discovers he has cancer and only has a year to live. Until then he had spent up to thirty years working in the same office doing the same job. After finding out about his condition he tried to make the most of his time by going out and having fun, seeing a girl and working on a project at work that made a difference to other people’s lives.

http://www.varley.net/Pages/top_25_movies.htm, 2006

Kurosawa has a distinctive style of directing, he has made many critically acclaimed films one of them being Rashomon. In this film the story is told in four different points of views. It is very interesting how Kurosawa portrays each character and their version of the story. In a similar way in Ikiru the audience learns about Watanabe working on this project after his death through his work colleagues at his funeral. The rest of the story is told through flashbacks. In addition to this the characters in the film realise Watanabe’s great actions at the same time the audience does. Therefore it was like putting bits of the puzzle together. Each colleague remembered certain times they had with Watanabe and all the bits added up – why he had missed work, why he was so full of enthusiasm all of a sudden, how hard he had worked on the project. Once again Kurosawa used different points of views to deliver the narrative.

I would really like to see the film now; it would be interesting to see how the shots look on screen.