Dersu Uzala

Film Notes

In the early 1970s Akira Kurosawa's fortunes and spirit were at a low ebb. He'd been dropped by Hollywood from the Pearl Harbor epic Tora! Tora! Tora! in which he had invested much time and energy. His first colour film Dodes'ka-den was a critical and box-office failure. A crisis in the Japanese film industry had made financing his movies impossible. As a result he attempted suicide. But eventually his career was restored by a Soviet invitation to direct a film version of a non-fiction work he'd loved in his youth, and back in the 1940s he had planned a Japanese version that was aborted, partly due to unsuitable locations but mainly because its themes were in conflict with Japanese militarism. Published in 1923, the book is a memoir by the Russian army engineer Captain Vladimir Arsenyev about his friendship with a nomadic hunter, Dersu Uzala, of the remote Nanai tribe, known at the time as the Goldi people. Uzala twice saved Arsenyev's life while acting as a guide to his surveying expedition in remote eastern Siberia during the first years of the 20th century, the first time in a blizzard, the second after an accident on a raft in a fast-flowing river.

Shot on location over a period of nine months, it's an elegiac film of great visual and spiritual beauty about the relationship between an intelligent European raised in an advanced urban world (the tall, handsome Yuri Solomin), and a wise, nomadic Asian in close touch with the wilderness (the stocky, elderly Maxim Munzuk). Both actors are excellent.

This humanist masterwork is close in spirit to John Ford and has many of the ingredients of a classic western. The central relationship recalls that between the pioneers and the native Americans in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, though the violent incidents happen offstage. The film won an Oscar for best foreign language film, and Kurosawa went on to make Kagemusha, Ran and Dreams with backing from Lucas, Spielberg and Coppola.

Philip French, The Observer, Sun 8 Jan 2012

WHEN Akira Kurosawa, the gifted Japanese director, takes the unusual step of making a movie in coproduction with the Soviet film industry and when the first half is delicate and haunting and the second half is numb and ponderous, it is hard not to jump to conclusions about who did what.

“Dersu Uzale" was shown at the 1976 New York Film Festival. The following review by Richard Eder appeared Oct 5, 1976. 

Essentially, “Dersu Uzala” is a Tolstonyan parable about the encounter of the blind and deaf power of civilizetion with the perceiving and magical helplessness of nature. Set in the Asian forests of Imperial Russia around the turn of the century, it tells of the relationship between a military mapping expedition and an old Tungus trapper who acts as its guide.

“Fire is a man,” he tells them. “Water is a man, too.” The captain, a sensitive intermediary between the brutal confidence of the soldier-surveyors and the mystical trapper, hires him as guide. In a series of episodes, told flatly and some with obviousness, but with accumulating force, we see Dersu, through the captain's eyes, reveal his total communication with the world he lives in.

Seeing footprints, he knows that men have been by two days before, end that they are Chinese. Seeing trees with the bark off, he predicts that they will find a shelter, and they do. When the party is about to leave the shelter, he insists on repairing the roof first: for anyone else who may come along.

Dersu, marvelously played by Maxim Munzzuk, a Soviet Asian, draws his wisdom from his complete openness to the natural world. The openness means vulnerability as well. The captain, whose relation to the old man is a growing reverence, discovers him one night, broken with grief by the fire. He is remembering his family, dead of smallpox; and he has no barriers against remembered pain‐it is as real as a tree falling upon him. 

In the climactic scene of this first part, Dersu and the captain go out to chart a frozen lake. Kurosawa films the cold as it has rarely, if ever, been filmed. It is a visible, red‐eyed enemy, visibly terrifying. The two are lost and Dersu, seeing death,- is in total fear. The captain has his civilized schooling to constrain him; he also has a compass. When the compass fails, though, Dersu saves them both.

Then this beautiful first part recedes. The detachment prepares to return to the city. Dersu declines the captain's offer to come with them. He would die in the city, he says, but as he trudges off through the snow we see he is older and is simply following his own road to death. The soldiers march down a railroad track, singing; Dersu reach the top of a hill. Just before he crosses, he turns and waves. “Dersul” the captain cries. “Captain!” Dersu calls back.

It is complete, or should be. If “Dersu Uzala” ended there it would be an odd marvel. But it goes on, repeating the cycle. The captain returns some years later, this time in the summer. He meets Dersu, who displays his powers once more, but with diminishing effect. He has grown too old for the forest; finally he goes to the city with the captain, can't adapt to it, and returns to the forest for the last time.

The episodes in this second part go on endlessly, loosely, obviously. They lack the revelations of the winter scenes and they do little but belabor at length the points already made. They wreck the film's balance and make its achievements dull.

Richard Eder, New York Times, October 5th 1976