Akira Kurosawa’s Testament
Does Humanity Still Have the Will to Envision the Next 400 Years?
“I’ll be dead at eighty. But cinema absolutely has the beauty and the power to save the world from war and lead the world to peace. War can be started in an instant, but establishing peace will take at least four hundred years. If I could live another four hundred years and keep making films I would use my cinema to bring the world to peace. But my life is no longer enough.”
These are words that the film director Kurosawa Akira left as a testament to Obayashi Nobuhiko. Passed from a director who defined one era to the director who would define the next, they press upon me now with an extraordinary rawness.
Kurosawa went on to say this.
“How old are you, Obayashi? Fifty, is it? I’m already eighty. But what took me eighty years to learn you could do in sixty. That means you can go twenty years further than I did. And if you can’t make it, your children will. And if they can’t, your grandchildren will carry it a little further. And if someday one of them makes the film that stands four hundred years beyond mine, then at last the power of cinema will have rid the world of war. That is the power of cinema. And it is for that purpose that I learned from the films of those who came before me in Japan, in America, and in Europe.”
The power of cinema…
Does anyone in the present age know this power?
Does anyone truly believe in it?
“Human beings are truly foolish. They still cannot stop making war. There is nothing as foolish as a human being. And yet for some reason human beings created this thing called cinema. Cinema is a strange thing. It was supposed to be a recording device invented by scientific civilization to capture reality faithfully. But for some reason scientific civilization breaks down all the time. Breaking down is what scientific civilization does. And yet thanks to those breakdowns the recordings came out wrong. Figures leapt across the frame. People flew off to impossible places. All kinds of strange images were born. And if you take those and bring them to life, what you get is not fact, not realism, but a truth that transcends fact. What cinema can depict is the truth of the human heart.”
It was around 2017 that Obayashi first shared this conversation publicly as a testament Kurosawa had entrusted to him as the next generation. By then Obayashi had received a terminal diagnosis of lung cancer. Obayashi Nobuhiko was the director who made his explosive debut in 1977 with House, his first commercial feature, a work that earned a cult following as a psychedelic film. Even as he lived without knowing when death would come he continued making films. His anti-cancer treatment proved effective and his condition temporarily improved. Kurosawa’s testament was something Obayashi, sensing his own death drawing near, passed on in turn to the filmmakers of the generation that would follow.
With the time his treatment had bought him he left behind one final film before departing this world. That film was Labyrinth of Cinema. I personally believe Obayashi made this work to carry Kurosawa’s will forward to the next generation. In the entire history of cinema it is the work that has shaken the deepest part of my being. It was through this film that I understood for the first time what Kurosawa meant by “the power of cinema.”
Leaders who openly slaughter the leaders of other nations and topple governments on a whim, clinging to the old ways. When those who must end refuse to end, history always arrives at a devastating conclusion.