Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [7]
I don’t remember exactly what it was that I saw when I was in nursery school and what I saw in primary school. I just remember that there was a kind of slapstick comedy I found very interesting. And I remember a scene in which a man who has escaped from prison scales a tall building. He comes out onto the roof and jumps off into a dark canal below. This may have been the French crime-adventure film Zigomar, directed by Victorin Jasset and first released in Japan in November 1911.
Another scene I recall shows a boy and girl who have become friends on a ship. The ship is on the verge of sinking, and the boy is about to step into an already overfull lifeboat when he sees the girl still on the ship. He gives her his place in the lifeboat and stays behind on the ship, waving goodbye. This was apparently a film adaptation of the Italian novel Il Cuore (The Heart).
But I much preferred comedy. One day when we went to the theater, they weren’t showing a comedy, and I cried and fretted about it. I remember my older sisters telling me I was being so stupid and disobedient that a policeman was coming to take me away. I was terrified.
However, my contact with the movies at this age has, I feel, no relation to my later becoming a film director. I simply enjoyed the varied and pleasant stimulation added to ordinary everyday life by watching the motion-picture screen. I relished laughing, getting scared, feeling sad and being moved to tears.
Looking back and reflecting on it, I think my father’s attitude toward films reinforced my own inclinations and encouraged me to become what I am today. He was a strict man of military background, but at a time when the idea of watching movies was hardly well received in educators’ circles, he took his whole family to the movies regularly. Later in more reactionary times he steadfastly maintained his conviction that going to the movies has an educational value; he never changed.
Another aspect of my father’s thinking that had an important effect on me was his attitude toward sports. After he left the army academy, he took a position at a gymnastics school, where he set up facilities not only for traditional Japanese martial arts such as judo and kendō swordfighting, but for all kinds of athletics. He built Japan’s first swimming pool, and he worked to make baseball popular. He persevered in the promotion of all sports, and his ideas have stayed with me. When I was small, it seems that I was very weak and sickly. My father used to complain about this state of affairs in spite of the fact that “we had the yokozuna [champion sumo wrestler] Umegatani hold you in his arms when you were a baby so that you would grow strong.” Nevertheless, I am my father’s son. I, too, like both watching and participating in sports, and I approach sports in terms of single-minded devotion to a discipline. This is clearly my father’s influence.
Morimura Gakuen
SOMETHING STRANGE happened one day after I had already become a film director. The Nichigeki Theater in Tokyo was showing a film by my contemporary Inagaki Hiroshi, Wasurerareta kora (Forgotten Children, 1949), which is about retarded children. In one scene a classroom full of children listens to the teacher while off to one side a solitary child sits at his desk amusing himself, oblivious of the others.
As I watched this scene, I gradually came to feel deeply moved and depressed. Soon I was very uneasy. I had seen that child somewhere. Who could it be?
Suddenly I rose from my seat in the theater and went out into the lobby, where I sat down heavily on a sofa. Feeling somehow faint, I stretched out and put my head down. A woman theater employee came up to me and asked if I was all right. I replied,