Screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto, whose collaborations with Akira Kurosawa still have the power to shock and inspire today, has just died at the age of 100.
His first IMDB credit was the script for Rashomon, which is mind-boggling the more you think about it. It’s one of the most influential scripts ever written – especially when you consider how much it has been imitated, and how Rashomon itself – the concept of one story being told from many different points of view – has worked its way into the common lexicon.
Their collaboration continued, and Hashimoto worked with Kurosawa on 8 different screenplays spanning a 20-year period…
…including major international hit The Seven Samurai – which of course has spawned many many remakes/spin-offs – to this DAY – and the quieter Ikiru (which, in my own humble opinion, is one of the best films ever made – with certainly one of the best final scenes AND final shots.) I wrote about Ikiru here. Hashimoto also wrote the great Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, and … the list goes on and on.
For a far more indepth obituary, I highly recommend the one in The New York Times, by Margalit Fox. I love how Fox ends the obit. Well-played.
Rest in peace, sir!
Sheila,
I just read your thread on Twitter about Ikiru and I was pleased to see that it has the same effect on you as it has on me. I watch it every couple of years although the older I get, the harder it is to get through. The last time I watched it I became obsessed with the song Takeshi Shimura sang. I’ve been trying to find out more about it and I have come up with some info which I will inflict on you because everyone I know is tired of hearing about it. If you have any info to add, I’d love to hear about it.
The song is called Gondola No Uta and it was composed around 1915 for Matsui Sumako, who was a popular stage actress at the time. She was one of the first people to perform Shakespeare and Ibsen in Japan as well as being one of the first Japanese women to perform onstage. In 1913 Shinpei Nakayama composed Katchousa No Uta (Katyusha’s Song) for her sing in an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection. The song was a massive hit and is considered to be the first modern Japanese pop song.
Nakayama wrote Gondola No Uta for another of Sumako’s plays, and it too became a hit. In 1918 her lover, the director of her theater company, died of the Spanish flu and not long after she hanged herself in despair. In 1947 Mizoguchi made a movie about her called The Love of Sumako the Actress. (This is a very abbreviated take on Sumako. Her story is amazing.)
Gondola No Uta has become something of a standard in Japan and it was quite popular in the 1950s among enka singers. Not too long ago it was used in the
anime Fushigi Yûgi Genbu Kaidenand and it became a minor hit, yet again. I don’t have a copy of the original record but it’s Nipponophone #223 in case you happen to have an extra copy stashed away in a closet somewhere. Here are some clips Matsui Sumako singing.
Michael
Gondola no uta
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyblSL2ddg8
Katchousa No Uta
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiMpE83f8GM
Wow, Michael, all of this is so fascinating – I knew none of this. Thank you!
and it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Ikiru – I first saw it as a 20something and it wrecked me. I watched it maybe 10 years later and it felt even more spookily relevant – time ticking away, the film still feels like an URGENT message like: “we only have one life, as far as we know. Do not waste your time here.” I need to see it again – it’s been a while.