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The early 1970s marked a torrid time for legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Coming off the back of his first outright commercial failure with “Dodes'ka-den” (1970) and having been fired from the Hollywood project “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (1970), the director attempted to take his own life in 1971, miraculously surviving. However, the auteur's fortunes would take a turn the following year, as studio Mosfilm of the Soviet Union offered him the opportunity to adapt V.K. Arsenyev's 1923 memoir “Dersu Uzala”. Having wanted to work with the material earlier in his career, Kurosawa accepted, thus producing one of his most overlooked epics.

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The Russian language film follows Captain Vladimir Arsenyev (Yuriy Solomin), a soldier leading a group of men on a topography mission in Imperial Russia's vast Ussuri region. One night, his camp is visited by the nomad hunter, Dersu Uzala (Maksim Munzuk...

What a great way to encounter such an unusual masterpiece — Akira Kurosawa reenergized his creative career with this ambitious, uncompromised historical epic, filmed for Mosfilm on location in the wilds of far-East Siberia. A local woodsman becomes a guide for a Russian survey team, and a great friendship is formed. It’s like nothing Kurosawa made before or since — an adventure that stresses nature-friendly philosophy over action. The good extras are topped by Stuart Galbraith IV’s expert commentary, which includes three additional specialists to cover this film and its director in full fascinating detail.

Dersu Uzala

Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] 158

1975 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 142 min. / Street Date September 28, 2022 / Available from Imprint / aud 34.95

Starring: Yuriy Solomin, Maksim Munzuk, Mikhail Bychkov. Svetlana Danilchenko.

Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai, Fyodor Dobronravov, Yuriy Gantman

Production Designer: Yurily Raksha

Costume Design: Tatyana Lichmanova

Film Editor: Valentina Stepannova

Original Music: Isaac Schwarts

Written by Akira Kurosawa, Yuri Nagibin from the book Dersi okhotnikbyV.

(Akira Kurosawa, 1975, Artificial Eye, U)

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,...