Dersu Uzala

Prior to the glorious artifices of his Ran and Kagemusha, Akira Kurosawa spent two years in the Siberian wilderness with a film crew and a screen adaptation of the journals of Russian explorer Vladimir Arseniev. He came away perhaps with his fill of nature in the raw, and a somber travelogue elegizing the fall of the natural man before the encroachments of civilization, in an effort that would win the 1975 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The title character (a gnomish Maxim Munzuk, a kind of backwoods Yoda) is a solitary hunter who agrees to help Arseniev (an affectingly meditative Yuri Solomin) and his party of soldiers chart the frozen unknown at the turn of the century. The irony, of course, is that Dersu is complicit in his own downfall, ensuring the end of noble savagery just as surely as civilization's gift of smallpox kills off his family. Low on thrills -- encounters with bandits and a stalking tiger end at first inconclusively, but reprise with understated tragedy -- and big on Cinemascope vistas, the film is, despite its scale, a miniature. The bond between Dersu and Arseniev resonates with poignant melancholy, and fittingly the parting gift from the scientist to his guide is the latter's undoing.

-- Peter Keough