Not that I want to.
Yesterday I saw the great master Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August, which depicts an old woman's life as result of the atomic bomb during WWII. I don't like wars. I don't care for movies about wars. The image that has enraptured me is the image of the woman carrying an umbrella in the midst of a strong storm.
As she holds the umbrella above her, the wind blows so hard that it flips the umbrella inside out. At that moment, the umbrella resembles the petals of the rose seen earlier in the movie, and the woman its stem. Throughout the movie, the woman's grandchildren sing repeatedly Franz Schubert's The Rose among the Heather, a song based on Goethe's Heidenröslein. The lyrics, which I can't remember fully, were about a boy seeing a rose and, delighted by its beauty, approaches to take a closer look.
In the movie, Kurosawa includes an image of a trail of ants crawling toward and all over this rose. At the end, the grandchildren run after their grandmother like the ants toward the rose. Like the poem, they are all pursuing something beautiful. And by taking a closer look at their grandmother, the children find something valuable.
I couldn't help but think that I too am like the children. Perhaps all people are. We all search for something; some of us know what it is, others never find out.
I recall the one other image that has resurfaced countless times in my mind. It also comes from a Kurosawa movie - Ikiru.
This image is a middle-aged man, dying of cancer, sitting alone on a swing in the park he built with his life savings. As snow falls, he sings Gondola no Uta (The Gondola Song), one verse of which goes something like this:
Life is brief
fall in love, maidens
before the boat drifts away
on the waves
before the hand resting on your shoulder
becomes frail
for those who will never
be seen here again
I remember not being able to stop crying for minutes as I watches these last moments of the film. I believe the rose that I seek is to create images like these to move people, to move myself, to remind all what is true.
I have this secret plan (not so secret now) to recreate the image of the man on a swing in a movie that I will make.
Maybe I cried because I don't want to be that man.
