18:00 Screening of "Dersu Uzala" by Akira Kurosawa
(the film is mentioned in the Interview with Patrick Evans)
20:30 Bar & DJs
 
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"Dersu Uzala"
by Akira Kurosawa, 1975
144 min, Rus. w Eng. subtitles
 
The film is based on the autobiographical writings of Russian soldier Vladimir Arseniev during his surveying expeditions in Siberia in the early 1900's. Kurosawa had read Vladimir Arseniev's memoir Dersu Uzala in the 1940s, and at a crucial juncture of his career, saw in it the opportunity to make something expansive and unconventional.
 
The film tells the story of an unusual friendship between Arseniev and the nomadic tribal hunter Dersu Uzala, who guides the explorers team through the woods. Dersu is fully integrated into his environment, he is communicating with animals, plants and fire, reads the sky and the weather and considers "Man very small before the face of nature." To Arseniev, he embodies something civilized men have lost, something that can no longer survive in the world that the land measurer Arseniev is helping to build. The friendship endures over many years and travels through the siberian wilderness and comes to a tragic ending when Dersu, facing his old age, must choose between his spiritual death in the civilised city life in Khabarovsk or a physical death in the wilds of Siberia.
 
The film is a great parable about the encounter of the blind and deaf power of civilization with the perceiving and magical helplessness of nature, as well as about the inextricable conflict between nature and culture, civilisation and wilderness.
 
The film is almost entirely shot outdoors in the Russian Far East wilderness, in the "astonishingly beautiful, gigantic and awesome Great Nature of the Ussuri region”. The unspoiled vastness of the Siberian wilderness offered a radically new canvas for Kurosawa. Always a powerful visual stylist, Kurosawa crafted some of his most striking imagery for Dersu Uzala, especially in a numinous, eerily lit confrontation with a tiger. The making of Dersu Uzala was a major undertaking for the crew. It was nearly a four-year project, with two years spent on location in Siberia, shooting on expensive and unwieldy 65mm film.
 
Speaking of the film in greater detail, Kurosawa said, "The relationship between human beings and nature is getting worse and worse...I wanted to have people all over the world know about this Soviet Asian character who lived in harmony with nature... I think people should be more humble toward nature because we are a part of it and we must become harmonized with it. If nature is destroyed, human beings will be destroyed too. So we can learn a lot from Dersu," (quoted in Donald Richie's The Films of Akira Kurosawa).
 
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