Sitting alone before a grand piano in a stark studio, Ryuichi Sakamoto takes the listener on a journey of his life, playing 20 of his compositions.
Shot entirely in black and white, on three 4K cameras, the film Opus, directed by Neo Sora, is the Japanese composer’s farewell, poetic yet bold, and deeply heartfelt.
Its world premiere is set for the Venice International Film Festival this month. The filming took place over several days, just a half year before his death on March 28 at 71.
Photo: AP
Sakamoto had been battling cancer since 2014, and could no longer do concert performances, and so he turned to film.
He plays pieces he had never performed on solo piano. He delivers a striking, new slow-tempo arrangement of Tong Poo, a composition from his early days with techno-pop Yellow Magic Orchestra that catapulted him to stardom in the late 1970s when Asian musicians still tended to be marginal in the West.
“I felt utterly hollow afterward, and my condition worsened for about a month,” Sakamoto says in a statement.
Photo: AP
He speaks only a few lines in the film.
“I need a break. This is tough. I’m pushing myself,” he says barely audibly in Japanese, about midway through the film.
He also says, “let’s go again,” indicating he wants to play a sequence again.
For the rest of the nearly two-hour film, he lets his piano do the talking.
The notes resonate from his fingers, lovingly shot in closeups, sometimes slowly, one pensive note at a time. Other times, they come jamming in those majestically Asian-evocative chords that have defined his sound.
After each piece, he lifts his hands up from the keys and holds them there in the air.
Opus is a testament to Sakamoto’s legendary filmography. He composed for some of the world’s greatest auteurs, including Bernardo Bertolucci, Brian DePalma, Takashi Miike, Alejandro Inarritu, Peter Kominsky and Nagisa Oshima.
The film is also evidence he remained active until the very end. He performs an excerpt from his meditative final album 12, released earlier this year.
By the time Sakamoto starts playing the melody from Bertolucci’s 1987 The Last Emperor, the emotions are almost overwhelming. The soundtrack, which also included musician David Byrne, won both an Oscar and a Grammy.
Sora, the director, who was raised in New York and Tokyo, says he and the crew were determined to capture the sense of time and timelessness, so crucial in Sakamoto’s art, in what everyone knew might be his final performance.
All the sounds that usually get taken out in post-production, rustling clothing, clicking nails or Sakamoto’s breathing, were purposely kept, not minimized in the mix.
“Part of the reason why we decided to shoot in black and white was because we thought that also highlighted the physicality of his body, with the black and white keys of the piano,” said Sora, named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2020.
Sakamoto first came up with a set list, and the filmmakers worked out with him in advance a detailed plan for a visual narrative and concept.
Designed as a film from the get-go, not just a documentary of a performance, the work features the lighting design, artful long takes and Zoom-lens closeups concocted by Bill Kirstein, the director of photography.
“We were able to get shots of hands and keys that we were never able to get before,” said Kirstein, comparing the film’s imagery to a drawing.
Hundreds of pounds of weights were laid on the floor so the camera dolly could move silently without creaking.
A memorable moment comes toward the end when Sakamoto plays Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, from the 1983 Oshima film bearing the same title and starring David Bowie and Golden Lion-winner Takeshi Kitano.
Sakamoto also acted in the film, portraying a World War II Japanese soldier who commands a prisoner-of-war camp. He was young, barely in his 30s. Yet in so many ways he remained unchanged as that frail silver-haired bespectacled man, crouched over his piano.
As the film moves to the final tune, Sakamoto has disappeared, gone to that other world that some call heaven. The piano, under a spotlight, is playing on its own, a reminder his music is eternal, and still here.
Last week the government announced that by year’s end Taiwan will have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world. Its inventory could exceed 1,400, or enough for the opening two hours of an invasion from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Snark aside, it sounds impressive. But an important piece is missing. Lost in all the “dialogues” and “debates” and “discussions” whose sole purpose is simply to dawdle and delay is what the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) alternative special defense budget proposal means for the defense of Taiwan. It is a betrayal of both Taiwan and the US. IT’S
Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” was crowned best picture at the 98th Academy Awards, handing Hollywood’s top honor to a comic, multi-generational American saga of political resistance. The ceremony Sunday, which also saw Michael B. Jordan win best actor and “Sinners” cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw make Oscar history as the first female director of photography to win the award, was a long-in-coming coronation for Anderson, a San Fernando Valley native who made his first short at age 18 and has been one of America’s most lionized filmmakers for decades. Before Sunday, Anderson had never won an Oscar. But “One Battle
In Kaohsiung’s Indigenous People’s Park (原住民主題公園), the dance group Push Hands is training. All its members are from Taiwan’s indigenous community, but their vibe is closer to that of a modern, urban hip-hop posse. MIXING CULTURES “The name Push Hands comes from the idea of pushing away tradition to expand our culture,” says Ljakuon (洪濬嚴), the 44-year-old founder and main teacher of the dance group. This is what makes Push Hands unique: while retaining their Aboriginal roots, and even reconnecting with them, they are adamant about doing something modern. Ljakuon started the group 20 years ago, initially with the sole intention of doing hip-hop dancing.
You would never believe Yancheng District (鹽埕) used to be a salt field. Today, it is a bustling, artsy, Kowloon-ish “old town” of Kaohsiung — full of neon lights, small shops, scooters and street food. Two hundred years ago, before Japanese occupiers developed a shipping powerhouse around it, Yancheng was a flat triangle where seawater was captured and dried to collect salt. This is what local art galleries are revealing during the first edition of the Yancheng Arts Festival. Shen Yu-rung (沈裕融), the main curator, says: “We chose the connection with salt as a theme. The ocean is still very near, just a
RSS