Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA
トーク情報- fuzaihin
fuzaihin Credit... Neo Sora/MUBI Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda NYT Critic's Pick Directed by Stephen Nomura Schible Documentary 1h 40m More than halfway through the documentary “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, ” the Japanese pianist and composer offers an insight that captures the tension at the heart of his art. Discussing the components of a piano, he explains how, since the industrial revolution, pianos have been made possible by imposition of civilization on nature. Machinery presses wood and strings into shape. “We humans say it falls out of tune, but that’s not exactly accurate, ” Mr. Sakamoto says. When the instrument’s tuning goes awry, it means “matter is struggling to return to a natural state. ” The conflict between industrial and natural elements, and Mr. Sakamoto’s embrace of both, runs throughout “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, ” an uncommonly engaging artist portrait from Stephen Nomura Schible. The creative process is notoriously difficult to capture on camera, but by the end of this documentary, you will feel as if you not only understand Mr. Sakamoto intellectually, but also share a sense of the excitement he feels when discovering just the right match of sounds. Video A preview of the film. Based on watching him at work, Mr. Sakamoto is more liable to approach a cymbal with a bow or a coffee mug than he is with a drumstick. He embraces computers to help with composition and, in footage we see of him as a younger man, praises their ability to play fast, difficult musical phrases. But he also strives to incorporate natural sounds into his work. We see him recording audio of melting snow in the Arctic, the way it would have sounded before human disruption. His environmental activism is presented as a function of his art. He visits the Fukushima contamination site and, as the movie opens, plays a piano that survived the 2011 Japanese tsunami damaged but intact. (“I felt as if I was playing the corpse of a piano that had drowned, ” he says. ) He later admits it took him time to appr