There was a queue at the cinema which quickly made its way back up the stair case to the street outside. Sakamoto may not be a household name in Australia but he is not unknown. After the tickets were scanned, a process ticket holders were allowed inside for the sold out screening. There was the usual as people found each other and then their seats and then the rustling of chip packets. Why cinemas advertise popcorn is beyond me - its not just the working of multiple surreptitious jaws that is offensive it is also the smell. Horrible.
The documentary started with footage after the tsunami in Fukushima and Sakamoto's discovery of the now famous piano the 'tsunami piano'. The tsunami was now way back in 2011 and precedes Sakamoto's discovery of a stage three throat cancer that stopped him playing and composing music while he underwent treatment. A call from Director Alesandro J. Inarritu soon had him back at work composing the soundtrack for The Revenant as he admired his films so much.
The documentary ,looks at a career that started in the 1970s with electronic band Yellow Magic Orchestra. There is great footage from a live performance in America and an interview where he explains why he likes computers and synthesisers. Essentially he argues they can play the music a lot faster than the human hand and rather than sending decades learning to play that fast you can program a machine and focus on ideas instead. Very pragmatic!
A lot of time is spent looking at footage from the Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky and listening to sounds and music from his film Solaris. Sakamoto even had a copy of his collection of polaroids Instant Light. Sakamoto credits Tarkovsky with being a musician given the way he uses the sound of footsteps and water in his films. He is a composer. And post The Revenant soundtrack Sakamoto turned to Tarkovsky for inspiration especially in his use of Bach Chorales. Sakamoto finds a lot of melancholy in these which is not surprising given the wars and political instability not to mention the plague that racked Europe at the time.
Sakamoto's concerns about his own world emerged in the early 1990s when evidence of climate change first appeared. Sakamoto has subsequently appeared at demonstrations against nuclear power in Tokyo after the Fukushima earthquake and the subsequent tsunami. Recordings on the 'tsunami piano' have been used in the compositions for his latest CD. He talks about the piano being a product of the Industrial Revolution in the way tat the case and the strings are made. When a piano is in tune it sounds natural to us he say but all of the components and the materials from which they are made have been forced into a particular shape to make those sounds. It is only natural that they will attempt to return to their natural shape. And the tsunami in Fukushima only helped speed up that return in the case of the 'tsunami piano'.
Along the way the documentary looks at the success Sakamoto achieved writing the scores for Merry Christmas Mt Lawrence, The Sheltering Sky and The Last Emperor. Unsure of his future post cancer, Sakamoto wants to leave work behind that has significance. He has traveled to Kenya to the site of the oldest human remains ever found in a search for the origins of the rhythms and sounds that have shaped music. he has also traveled to the North Pole to see the effects of climate change and taken sound recordings of pre-Industrial Revolution snow melting. The purest sounds you can imagine he says...
In the documentary there is a scene where Sakamoto with his plays for tsunami survivors. His music has a global appeal but the history of the atom bomb in Japan, his politic activism and his concern for the environment give his work a strong local focus.
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