Alongside Akira Kurosawa's customarily virile athletic work, this slow, contemplative movie is apt to be seen all the more clearly as an old man's movie, a movie made with a reduced pulse rate and a tenacious, almost desperate attempt to savor every passing moment. At bottom, it is a My Most Unforgettable Character tale, set around the turn of the century and having to do with a Russian army captain who, while inexpertly leading a geological expedition through the uncharted forests of Eastern Russia, meets a stoop-backed, shaggy-coated hunter and trapper (he is at first mistaken for a bear) and persuades the reclusive woodsman to join the expedition as a guide. Kurosawa gets an almost magical sense of landscape onto the widescreen (the movie was shot, with Russian financing, in 70mm). He stoutly resists the compositional rules of Romantic landscape painting that have governed outdoor location shooting since the beginnings of cinema -- that is, he never attempts to box in the terrain by way of artificial devices of framing or perspective. Rather, he lets the terrain run perfectly, flatly parallel to the screen plane, so that the viewer is confronted with an overall texture, instead of a structure, for each locale -- a vivid and individualized texture that's like a wall or a tapestry examined from the microscopic vantage point of a spider. The pantheism of this movie is not something worn only on the outside, like an ecology bumper sticker, but is inscribed into the movie's every shot. (1976) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.