Dodes'ka-den (1970)

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Dodes'ka-den is a 1970 Japanese drama film directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film stars Yoshitaka Zushi, Kin Sugai, Toshiyuki Tonomura, and Shinsuke Minami. It is based on Shūgorō Yamamoto's 1962 novel A City Without Seasons and is about a group of homeless and poverty-stricken people living on the outskirts of Tokyo.

Production

Five years had elapsed since the release of Akira Kurosawa's last film, Red Beard (1965). The Japanese film industry was collapsing as the major studios were slashing their production schedules or shutting down entirely due to television stealing the movie audience. When Kurosawa was let go from the American film Tora! Tora! Tora! by Twentieth Century Fox in 1969, it was rumored that the Japanese director's mental health was deteriorating.

It marks a stylistic departure from Kurosawa's previous works. It has no central story and no protagonist. Instead it weaves together the stories of a group of characters living in a slum as a series of anecdotes. It was his first color film, and he had only ever worked with a few of the actors previously; Kamatari Fujiwara, Atsushi Watanabe, Kunie Tanaka, and Yoshitaka Zushi.

In contrast to Red Beard, which was in production for two years, filming for Dodes'ka-den began on April 23, 1970, and was finished in only 27 days, two months ahead of schedule. According to Stephen Prince, it was shot for standard-ratio 35 mm movie film rather than the anamorphic widescreen that Kurosawa had used since The Hidden Fortress (1958).

The film's title "Dodeska-den" are the playacting "words" uttered by the boy character to mimic the sound of his imaginary trolley car in motion. It is not a commonly used onomatopoeic word in the Japanese vocabulary, but was invented by author Shūgorō Yamamoto in Kisetsu no Nai Machi (A City Without Seasons), the original novel on which the film was based.

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