Dodes’ka-den is described as “a kind of guerrilla filmmaking”. The 1970 production was month long exercise in rapid and cost effective design decision making. In the course of this exercise, Kurosawa established a bold new aesthetic for color and character driven storytelling. His use of color is iconic, and surreal, while never disrupting one’s emotional engagement with the narrative.

It’s tempting to interpret Dodes’ka-den as the foreshadowing of stylistic techniques yet to be fully revealed. Tempting; the film is minimal and schematic in relation to Kurosawa’s body of work. As strong as his feeling for color was in 1970, the thoughts come across as an emerging dialect, while later expressions “Kagemusha” (’80) and “Ran” (’85) – both of them – present formal and immersive master courses in a stunning visual language.