Song of the Horse (1971): Akira Kurosawa’s Television Documentary

“When I see horses running as fast as they can, tears well up in my eyes.” poet Kenji Miyazawa

In February 1966, Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa’s exclusive contract with Toho—the studio that nurtured his early career and produced eighteen of his previous twenty-three movies¹—came to an end, and he started considering the option of working overseas. Ever since Rashomon (1950) took home the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, Kurosawa had steadily developed status as an international film icon; his period masterpieces Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961) were successfully remade as westerns, The Magnificent Seven (1960) and A Fistful of Dollars (1964); and more than sixty offers had poured in from Hollywood admirers salivating at the opportunity to work with him. (One proposed collaboration would’ve starred Peter O’Toole as William Adams, a sixteenth-century navigator who became the first Englishman to reach Japan and be appointed a samurai by the shogun.)²

That June, Kurosawa appeared at the New York Four Seasons alongside Embassy Pictures’s Joseph E. Levine (one of the key personnel behind importing Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla to the United States) and announced plans for an action picture called Runaway Train.³ It was to be Kurosawa’s first color production, though he intended to shoot it with a black-and-white sensibility: a dark locomotive racing through snowy landscapes. The following spring, word came out that he would also direct sequences of 20th Century Fox’s Tora! Tora! Tora!, a U.S.-Japan co-production about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.⁴

Alas, both projects ended up being realized without the famous director. Runaway Train experienced numerous delays and was eventually shot by Andrei Konchalovsky in 1985. And Tora! Tora! Tora! was a catastrophe on all fronts. The script Kurosawa and co-screenwriters Hideo Oguni and Ryuzo Kikushima spent months putting together was ordered trimmed by the American financiers, and Kurosawa found himself at odds with Toei, the studio in charge of the movie’s Japanese sequences. (Toei’s modus operandi was to crank out films in an assembly line-esque fashion, and the crew clashed with Kurosawa’s unflagging perfectionism.) Other complications arose: at one point, Kurosawa suffered a nervous collapse, and 20th Century Fox launched a campaign portraying him as mentally ill. Finally, on Christmas Eve 1968—after a mere twenty-three days of shooting—he was let go from the project.⁵

Fallout from the Tora! Tora! Tora! debacle left Kurosawa with a tarnished reputation in the Japanese film community. What’s more, he was now stranded in an industry no longer willing to support the kind of movies he liked to make. Television had arrived in Japan in 1953 and became a household commodity within just a few years.⁶ Proliferation of at-home entertainment contributed to a massive decline in ticket sales: by 1970, attendance had fallen from an all-time high of 1.13 billion in 1958 to roughly 255 million.⁷ Consequently, the studios downsized, and budgets became smaller than what’d been afforded in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when Kurosawa and others turned out classic after classic.

Some responded to this sea change by switching to TV. Kurosawa’s friend and contemporary, Keisuke Kinoshita, told historian Audie Bock in May 1977: “[I]f I had to work in theatrical films I’d only be able to make one a year at the most under today’s bad financial conditions. To make features now requires too much compromise with the financiers who demand a sure thing—and of course I’m no good at compromise. […] Of course I would rather make features, but in television I can do whatever I want and a lot of it.”⁸ Kinoshita’s protégé, Masaki Kobayashi, despite loathing television, agreed to make a drama called The Fossil—simply so he could edit footage from the show into a 200-minute movie.⁹ As for Kurosawa, when one of his producers suggested he try his hand at a TV show, he allegedly replied: “I just can’t direct a stupid television drama.”¹⁰

In July 1969—together with Kinoshita, Kobayashi, and Kon Ichikawa—Kurosawa established a new production company, Club of the Four Knights. “We borrowed from a bank and this is the first time they have helped [a] film production. If [our first] film is a success, they will give us more, so it must be a success.”¹¹ Alas, the only movie to come out of this partnership was Kurosawa’s Dodesukaden (1970), made for ¥100 million (triple the cost of the average Japanese feature at the time).¹² In addition to lackluster box office, the picture accrued less-than-ecstatic reviews both domestically and abroad. New York Magazine’s Judith Crist dismissed Dodesukaden as “disappointing […] pedestrian and trite, its effects garish rather than surreal. It is [Kurosawa’s] first film in five years; we look forward to his next.”¹³

As it happens, that ‘next film’ was one Crist and other international admirers did not see—for it wasn’t and to this day hasn’t been given an official release outside Japan. Not considered part of Kurosawa’s official filmography, the movie in question only occasionally appears in studies on his work—and even then usually in the form of a fleeting mention. What’s more, it was the sort of project unexpected of the great director: made for the small-screen medium he despised.

Co-produced¹⁴ and broadcast (on August 31, 1971) by Nippon Television, Song of the Horse is a 73-minute color documentary about equines in contemporary Japan, narrated by Noboru Mitani and child actor Hiroyuki Kawase. The duo had recently played a beggar and his son in Dodesukaden, and Kawase was fresh off a role in Yoshimitsu Banno’s Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971); he would later appear in Jun Fukuda’s Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973). As the narrators, Mitani and Kawase behave like audience members: while Mitani occasionally lectures Kawase about horses, their commentary largely consists of colloquial remarks on the images. (“Like a brush!” Kawase exclaims at a close-up of a foal swishing its tail.)

The film itself is virtually plotless. Following an opening pair of slow-motion close-ups of galloping thoroughbreds, Kurosawa presents a montage on the depiction of equines in Japanese art (paintings, sculptures, children’s illustrations, etc.). From here, he takes us to rural Japan, where horses, despite not being as plentiful as they once were, are revered. Mitani describes how the people of Nanbu (now part of Iwate Prefecture) “used to live, eat, and sleep” with the animals. We see Chagu Chagu Umako, an Iwate summer festival in which horses adorned with colorful fittings parade from Onikoshi Souzen Shrine to Morioka Hachiman Shrine. We see another festival in Soma District, Fukushima Prefecture, an area known for horse breeding. Mitani explains that while Japan breeds three thousand horses each year, their numbers are decreasing—as agrarians have less use for them thanks to advancing technology. Nevertheless, he assures Kawase (and the audience) that Japanese horses shall not vanish, for they’re still viable for entertainment.

At this point, Song of the Horse changes emphasis, focusing less on the role the animals play in 20th century Japan in favor of depicting their daily lives in captivity. A colt is born in a stable; he learns to stand—a clattering of bells on the soundtrack accentuating his triumph—and later trots outside with the adults. Various groups of full-grown horses gallop at breakneck speed (as Kawase cheers “Run faster!”). The animals graze and spar: a clash between two stallions is filmed in slow-motion, underscored by drums and intercut with shots of cloud formations. As the picture enters its final thirty minutes, thoroughbreds are sold at auction and prepared for racing. If the picture has anything resembling a climax, it would be the 38th Japan Derby—June 13, 1971—wherein the horse Hikaru Imai emerged victorious.

Song of the Horse is a curious and lackluster entry in Kurosawa’s filmography. While some of the early sequences depicting equine reverence are lively and interesting, the majority of the film consists of grueling footage of the animals simply grazing or galloping through fields for interminable periods of time. The repetition becomes tiring, and the film seldom knows when to cut from a shot long after it’s ceased being interesting. In one punishing moment, the audience endures two long-lasting shots (more than three minutes combined) of a group of horses running. During which the camera occasionally zooms in or out on the animals but shows little else; the background, the scenery, the way everything’s shot—it all remains the same.

Part of the problem might be that Kurosawa apparently didn’t enact his usual practice of cutting the film himself. Song of the Horse’s editing is credited to Reiko Kaneko, an assistant to Kurosawa who previously cut Dodesukaden—in addition to three Ishiro Honda sci-fi movies: King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), Gorath (1962), and Matango (1963)—and it is the cumbersome image assembly that hurts Song of the Horse more than anything. (My recurring impression was that the picture had been intentionally padded out to meet a mandatory runtime, which in fairness to the editor may have been the case.) Despite some impressive visual tricks—slow-motion, rack focus on blades of grass, fences silhouetted against the morning sky, gorgeous vistas of horses grazing before the ocean—Song of the Horse lacks momentum. The impeccable rhythm and quintessential joining of shots for which Kurosawa is renowned is absent and, without a story to fall back on, the movie becomes one of the few genuinely dull entries in his career.

There are, however, a few discussions to be had on how Song of the Horse relates to Kurosawa’s life and career—beginning with the music. Masaru Sato had been the director’s regular composer since the mid-1950s, starting when he finished the score for Record of a Living Being (1955) after Fumio Hayasaka (Sato’s mentor) died of tuberculosis. He went on to compose for all of Kurosawa’s subsequent endeavors in the ‘50s and ‘60s, turning out a plethora of OSTs ranging from colorful and energetic—Yojimbo—to disturbing and atmospheric—Throne of Blood (1957). Having surrendered the baton to Toru Takemitsu for Dodesukaden, Sato returned for the little-known Song of the Horse and delivered a soothing score (performed by the Tokyo Chamber Orchestra) reverent for the animals on screen. In addition to drums and string instruments, he employs subtle touches (such as the aforementioned clattering of bells when the baby horse learns to stand), and his music is arguably the picture’s most appealing quality.

Alas, Song of the Horse marked Sato and Kurosawa’s final collaboration, as their partnership became one of many casualties suffered during the chaotic, unhappy making of Kagemusha (1980). Sato initially agreed to score this epic about a thief who becomes the body double for a feudal warlord, but creative differences caused him to walk before post-production. Shinichiro Ikebe ultimately scored the film, and Sato never worked with Kurosawa again.¹⁵

Perhaps the last noteworthy aspect to Song of the Horse is how it preluded the most infamous event in Akira Kurosawa’s life. On the morning of December 22, 1971—less than four months after the film broadcast on NTV—Kurosawa’s maid heard the water in his bathroom running loudly and found the director with slash marks across his throat and wrists. (“Later,” recalled Kurosawa’s nephew Mike Inoue, “he said the reason he had drained the tub was that he did not want his family to see all the bloody water. Luckily, because he did that, she heard him.”)¹⁶ Kurosawa recovered and two years later received yet another offer to make a film overseas. This one came to fruition, and the Russian language Dersu Uzala (1975) ended up being one of the most beautiful and engrossing pictures of his later career.

Kurosawa directed five movies after Dersu Uzala and never in that time disclosed the reason behind his 1971 suicide attempt. Some have suggested that he’d feared his career was over, due to the collapse of Runaway Train, the damage inflicted on his reputation by the Tora! Tora! Tora! debacle, and—we might speculate—the fact that a TV documentary was the only job he could land after the disappointment of Dodesukaden. But whether any of this was on Kurosawa’s mind when he slashed his throat and wrists constitutes mere speculation. In an interview with the Criterion Collection, script supervisor Teruyo Nogami remembered: “[W]hen we traveled to the USSR [for Dersu Uzala], foreign reporters had no compunction about asking Kurosawa straight out why he’d wanted to kill himself. He always answered the same way: ‘At the time, I couldn’t bear to go on living, not for one more minute or second.’ What made his life so unbearable he never said.”¹⁷

Notes and citations:

1. I am counting only the movies on which Kurosawa was the sole director and which he considered part of his official filmography. Films based on his screenplays but directed by others are not taken into account; nor are pictures of which he only handled segments, such as Kajiro Yamamoto’s Horse (1941) or the Toho labor union movie Those Who Make Tomorrow (1946).
2. Galbraith, Stuart, IV. The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. New York: Faber & Faber, 2002, p. 441
3. Ibid
4. Ibid, pp. 444-48
5. Ibid, pp. 449-58
6. In 1953, the cheapest TV set in Japan cost roughly ¥175,000. By 1958, however, the price had dropped to ¥60,000, and the number of sets in Japan had grown from 866 to over 1.5 million. Source: Chun, Jayson Makoto. A Nation of a Hundred Million Idiots?: A Social History of Japanese Television, 1953 – 1973. New York: Routledge, 2006
7. Galbraith, Stuart, IV. The Japanese Filmography: A Complete Reference Work to 209 Filmmakers and the More Than 1250 Films Released in the United States, 1900-1994. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1996, p. 471
8. Bock, Audie. Japanese Film Directors. New York: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1978, p. 205
9. Ibid, p. 247
10. Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 487
11. Ibid, p. 474
12. Ibid, p. 486
13. Crist, Judith. “Uneasy Rider.” New York vol. 4, no. 11, 11 October 1971, p. 67
14. The credits list Kurosawa’s company, Kurosawa Production, as co-producer.
15. Galbraith, The Emperor and the Wolf, p. 559
16. Ibid, p. 487
17. “A Conversation with Teruyo Nogami.” Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Dodes’ka-den, The Criterion Collection DVD booklet, 2009, p. 18