Even the tsunami piano is returning to its natural state, he says. In choosing sounds for his new project, Sakamoto is also responding to the improvisatory nature of music and the way life itself has seemed to mirror it.
“How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. “Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well,” Bowles says. Sakamoto thought Bowles was the best thing about it and used Bowles’voiceover in async’s fullmoon, the album’s emotional centre. The Sheltering Sky was based on a book by Paul Bowles, who had a cameo in the film.
We watch Sakamoto conducting an orchestra for the soundtrack in studio while the matching footage for both movies is shown onscreen. That led to his Academy Award-winning contribution to Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic Oscar winner, The Last Emperor (1986), and his echt romantic score for Bertolucci’s gorgeous follow-up, The Sheltering Sky (1990). The result was arguably the most iconic and recognizable of his entire musical output, a simple repetitive tune that is as beautiful 35 years later as it was when the film was released in 1983. Lawrence opposite David Bowie, Sakamoto refused unless he could also write the score. When Nagisa Oshima asked him to act in Merry Christmas, Mr. Schible uses 1979 footage of Sakamoto from his synth-based heyday with the influential Yellow Magic Orchestra as a stepping stone to an overview of his film career. Sakamoto is consumed by the melancholy of Bach’s music. Instead we see his fascination with the great Russian filmmaker Tarkovsky’s use of Bach chorales. There are no talking heads, no mention of Sakamoto’s personal life, marriages, children and the like. He imagines that his new album will be like composing for an Andrei Tarkovsky film that doesn’t exist.Ĭoda is that rare document that captures a composer’s creative process. We see him assiduously creating soundscapes on his computer (while sitting on an exercise ball), using natural forest sounds, for example, or delighting in the imposing result of a violin bow stroked over a cymbal that becomes fodder for The Revenant’s main theme. Iñárritu’s The Revenant and working on his first solo album in eight years, async. Once he’s able, his musical career resumes with the scoring of Alejandro G. We follow his anti-nuclear activism triggered by Fukushima and then enter with him into his one-year sabbatical from music while he fights throat cancer. The film, shot over a five-year period, begins with footage of Sakamoto playing a piano that survived the 2011 tsunami. But as Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, Stephen Nomura Schible’s meticulous documentary on the now 66-year-old composer-performer indicates, Sakamoto’s own music is likely to outlast him. “One that won’t dissipate over time.“ He’s seated at the piano listening to the sound he’s just made melt into thin air. “I’m fascinated by the notion of a perpetual sound,” Ryuichi Sakamoto says.
Music and the Movies - Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda