Coda
Even if you don’t recognize the name Ryuichi Sakamoto, you might remember his evocative film score for the hair-raising, Oscar-winning film The Revenant (2015), which he composed while undergoing treatment for throat cancer. Before that, he won an Oscar for the score to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor.
Film composing represents only a tiny fraction of the work of this prolific Japanese composer/musician/dancer, who co-founded the pioneering electronic music trio Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 1970s.
The 66-year-old artist is front and center in a new documentary, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, which screens Oct. 10 at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art as part of its powerful Spotlight Cinema series.
Magnolia Pictures
Skate Kitchen
When Coda opens, Sakamoto is touring the wasteland surrounding the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. In a stark room stained with a waist-high water mark, Sakamoto — in a stylish black outfit with a shock of white hair — peers into the innards and plunks around on the strings and keys of a “corpse piano” that survived the tsunami. He tours an eerie city frozen in time, workers’ shoes left on the floor when the alarms sounded. He plays a concert for a weary-looking audience in a cold high school gym; audience members are wearing parkas.
Sakamoto has become an outspoken anti-nuclear activist, and director Stephen Nomura Schible shows him participating in massive demonstrations. But the film isn’t about the rage of protesters; it’s about Sakamoto’s careful devotion to music-making and limitless curiosity about the world — and the sounds that surround us. We see him playing around in his studio, recording the sounds of household objects. He runs a bow along the edge of a cymbal, and pronounces it good. He’s in the woods, tapping on logs. He travels to the North Pole to do field recordings for a piece on climate change.
Spend some time with Riyuchi Sakamoto and you will see and hear the world differently. It’s what some of us want in a movie experience.
Coda is considered an “art film,” and sadly, Madison audiences have too few opportunities to experience these types of movies on the big screen. “These are films that are dominant in the national conversation around cinema, but nevertheless don’t make it to local theaters,” says Spotlight curator Mike King.
John McEnroe, In the Realm of Perfection
Spotlight Cinema launched on Oct. 3 with Skate Kitchen, a debut feature film about a female skateboarding crew made by director Crystal Moselle (The Wolfpack). Although the eight-film series is evenly split between narratives and documentaries, several of the films explore the overlap between fiction and nonfiction. King points out that the U.S. documentary about striking copper miners Bisbee ‘17 (Oct. 24) and 3 Faces (Nov. 28), a narrative film by Iranian dissident Jafar Pahahi, both make use of “real” people as actors, but in very different ways.
“I look to cinema to show me things I haven’t seen before, and it is thrilling to encounter films that truly surprise you,” says King, pointing to the “head-spinning study of tennis legend John McEnroe, In the Realm of Perfection,” which screens on Nov. 14. “By closely watching McEnroe’s performance at the ‘84 French Open, director Julien Faraut extrapolates this amazing philosophical inquiry into human nature. Even if you know nothing about tennis (like myself), cinema allows you an entry into this world, if you open yourself up to it.”
