In spite of its critical acclaim, the unconventional soundtrack was designated ineligible for an Academy Award nomination because Sakamoto’s input, as the primary composer, was supposedly indistinguishable in the mix. Marking a renewed collaboration between Sakamoto and the electronic musician Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) with added help from Bryce Dessner (of The National), The Revenant score is deceptively minimal but clearly abstract: ambient, bellowing drones, prickly sound effects, and multiple layers of recordings play simultaneously, interspersed with long pauses. Iñárritu’s The Revenant (15), for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. When Sakamoto returned from his unprecedented year-long sabbatical in 2015, he completed two very different projects: Yamada’s Japanese Academy Award–winning film and Alejandro G. Next month at the Japan Society, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto will introduce Yoji Yamada’s Nagasaki: Memories of My Son (15), a film that he agreed to score in 2014, before he was diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer. Which is a rare but great route for a documentary to take with its subject.Some reading music: listen to this week’s special mix below. This film posits him as a listening post, as a paragon for zen and acceptance, and it in turn models that attitude. Sakamoto absorbs everything around him in a calm manner, describing even his cancer diagnosis in unflappable terms.
It’s a gentle film, understanding that one’s appreciation of music is helped by contrasting it with lengthy silences. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda skillfully incorporates Schible’s footage of Sakamoto, historical video of the man, and clips from films he’s scored to build a portrait of his work as continually in conversation with itself, across time and distance. Coda instead delves into his process, whether that entails a back-and-forth with a film director or sticking a bucket on his head in order to listen to the rain. If you want to know his life story, it’s easy to read some interviews or articles. I can’t say that I learned much about him either, but again, that’s not really the point. I was familiar with him primarily from the film soundtracks he’s composed, and at no point did I feel like I was being held at arm’s length.
#Ryuichi sakamoto documentary movie
The lack of exposition doesn’t make the movie impenetrable to non-fans of Sakamoto. As the doc understands the man and his art, music is a process of receiving the world around you and channeling it into something new to convey your thoughts or emotions. After that, the rest is just shading in more details. The film does nearly all the leg work of helping an audience “understand” its lead in the opening minutes, as Sakamoto tweaks the water-damaged piano in preparation for his performance, the camera drawing in close and making us feel as though we share his intuitive connection to sound. It’s more invested in Sakamoto as a personality than a biography to lay out.
This is not the kind of documentary that merely recites facts that anyone could learn from browsing Wikipedia. There’s no textual or voiceover aid to explain what, for example, the Yellow Magic Orchestra was, put in for anyone unfamiliar with Sakamoto. Coda has the confidence not to hold the viewer’s hand in touring his life. Sakamoto is one of world music’s titans, a pioneer in genres as wide-ranging as electronica and classical. There’s a term for such a feeling in Japanese- mono no aware, or “the pathos of things.” Coda is suffused in that mood. As Sakamoto surveys damage wrought in his native Japan by the 2011 earthquake or plays a concert on a piano salvaged from the tsunami floodwaters, one can’t help but reflect on impermanence. The most obvious ties Ryuichi Sakamoto’s anti-nuclear activism to his wider concerns about his own mortality brought about by his recent cancer. Director Stephen Schible spent five years with his title subject, and draws sharp connections between disparate aspects of his life and work. There are too many documentaries about aged artists reflecting on their careers, but Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda distinguishes itself with an unusual level of formal and thematic grace.
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