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Dersu Uzala

Starring: Maksim Munzuk, Yuri Solomin, Svetlana Danilchenko

Director: Akira Kurosawa

The film: Filmed in the middle of a professionally lean decade that was bookended by his attempted suicide in 1971 and return to form in 1980 with Kagemusha, Akira Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala was the only film the director ever made outside Japan.

A combination of the poorly received Dodesukaden (1970) and financial problems besetting the Japanese film industry had made Kurosawa, with his taste for high-budget, overlong productions, virtually unemployable at home,  but the Soviet Union's Mosfilm studio was happy to bankroll this adaptation of the writings of  Russian explorer Vladimir Arseniev.

However, this was no sell-out  for Kurosawa. He had filmed Russian literature before, including Dostoyevsky's The Idiot (1951) and Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths (1957), and had been considering this story for decades.  He was also given complete artistic control over the film, which took the best foreign film Oscar in 1976.

Dersu Uzala is based on the book Dersu, okhotnik (1923), Arseniev's autobiographical account of his association with a nomadic hunter and fur trapper who saved his life on more than one occasion and taught him how to survive in the harsh and extremely inhospitable Russian Far East. The setting is the Ussuri basin on the border with northeastern China - part of which was fiercely fought over by the Soviets and  China in 1969 - and a few Chinese characters crop up through the film. Although one of these is  sensitively portrayed, others are less charitably represented, and Chinese authorities criticised the film as being propaganda for a Soviet expansionist agenda.

Any political undertones the  film may carry, however, are far outweighed by its two central themes - friendship and the power of nature. As Kurosawa told the Los Angeles Times in April 1976, soon after its American premiere: 'The appeal I wanted to make in this movie was to conserve nature, which is a worldwide concern today.' While this appeal may, in retrospect, have fallen on less than receptive ears, there's no denying that Dersu Uzala, while it does have its flaws, offers some of the most breathtaking outdoor scenes ever  captured on film. And the old man himself, with his quiet appreciation for the world around him, is one of world cinema's most memorably inspiring characters.

The extras: This Artificial Eye DVD had been keenly anticipated by Kurosawa fans ever since it was first announced, with existing editions having poor image quality. Sadly,  it's no improvement, and is only a repackaging of a 2001 Russian Film Council version, with the same extras. It looks like a  rough VHS  copy and will disappoint anyone with a critical eye for image quality; contrast and brightness flickering, and inconsistent colour levels are only the more obvious problems. Both the film and the extras are inconveniently  spread across  two discs. The latter include a  one-minute archive news clip of Arseniev, a three-part interview with actor Yuri Solomin and a short making-of segment. The  soundtrack is  in both Russian and English, with English as the default setting. The Chinese subtitles advertised on the case are nowhere to be found. While this is a disappointing release,  it's probably the best that will be available for  some time, given the Russian film archive Gosfilmofond's reputed Soviet-style reluctance to release original film negatives.



From the Vault: 1975