Hey. How’s this for a foreign film premise: a Japanese director films a Russian cast, whose hero is a member of obscure asian tribe from Manchuria whose nomadic and shamanistic ways are more akin to Native American Indians than most Asian cultures. That’s “Dersu Uzala,” Akira Kurosawa’s film that received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1976. Dersu Uzala is the name of the tracker of the Asiatic Nanai (called “Goldi” by the Russians in the film, which is a historically correct term used by early 20thC. Russians, but really a name for a smaller clan of the Nanai.)
Dersu guides a group of Russian surveyors across the wilderness and dangers of uncharted eastern Russia. Dersu is just the kind of guide one would need for a trip of this nature. He has a preternatural sense of his surroundings that saves the Russians time and time again: he is able to read the tracks that he finds in the wild and know not only how many men he is following, but their age and ethnicity; he is able to know when the rain will stop by listening to the birds; he is able to build a shelter from a tripod, a couple of rocks and grass that saves lives from a blizzard.
Dersu makes no distinctions between the men he guides or the “men” he see in the wild: martens, crows, badgers, mice…even fire, water, and wind he sees as “men” that not only he, but all people, have an obligation to honor and respect . Dersu has such raw and undiluted code of ethics, that he literally cannot understand a rich trapper’s desire to cheat him out of furs. He is indignant of another groups needless trapping of animal they do not use. Best of all, Dersu is a loyal and trustworthy friend to the captain of the Russians and to his family.
Slow paced, and perhaps a bit long, but beautiful in scope, as only Kurosawa can film, “Dursu Uzala” is an epic film of man vs nature and a wonderful representation of the “wild man” (as Thoreau termed) in modern cinema. It is also a good guide (like Dersu himself) to demonstrate what we, as modern men, have lost in our lack of respect of nature and one another.
