Dodes'ka-den

Director: Akira Kurosawa

1970 / 144min / 35mm

The subjects of Kurosawa’s first color film are confined physically to living in a crude shantytown in a Tokyo rubbish dump, but individually find refuge—and torment—in the life of the mind. A mentally challenged adolescent fantasizes about being a trolley car, a beggar and his son “build” an imaginary dream house, and a pair of day laboring souses amuse themselves with wife-swapping, with a tacit understanding that the sport is never to be commented on. Adapting Shūgorō Yamamoto’s 1962 novel A City Without Seasons, Kurosawa self-financed Dodes'ka-den, an unusual vignette-based entry in his filmography which, with its breezy production and embrace of the zoom lens, suggests the aging director entering into a dialogue with the upstarts of the Japanese New Wave.