THE STORY OF THE SHOT

Ikiru

“SOMETIMES I THINK of my death,” Akira Kurosawa once wrote. “I think of ceasing to be…and it is from these thoughts that came.” The story of bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) who, learning he is terminally ill, looks for meaning in his life,— the title translates as “To live” or “To living” — ends on a note of sublime poetry: a flashback to a contented Watanabe sitting on a swing in a playground he helped build, singing a song about the fleeting nature of life as snow lightly falls around him. As director Scott Derrickson put it: “That’s the movie’s iconic image, heartbreaking and heroic, visually beautiful — one of Kurosawa’s five or six great cinematic moments.”