Every time a giant of cinema disappears, one tries (legitimately) to scan its heritage, and to understand what were the real contributions that a filmmaker or actor gave to the world of seventh art, and what made it so emblematic of a historical period, of a cultural movement if not even of an entire film industry. In such an assessment, myriad questions, from the talent of the individual artist, to the ability with which he has pierced the collective imagination intercepting the needs of the public, to the very peculiarities of which his divism is composed. In the case of Tatsuya Nakadai, who died in Tokyo last November 8 at the age of 92, all the instances just indicated can – and must – be naturally considered in the light of an analysis of his artistic heritage. But at the base of everything it should be emphasized another factor, which has to do with the far-sighted choices made by the Japanese star since the dawn of his career, and which allowed him to enter, already from the times when he was a young and squattrinated teatrante, on the path of legend.
Those who are familiar with the History of Japanese cinema, and with the industrial dynamics on which the film industry of the Rising Sun has gone to build at the end of the American Employment, know well that the major-star relationship often denotes the constraints of exclusivity. Much of the great actors of the time, at least until the end of the Sixties, were contractually linked to one of Japan’s five large distribution houses: Toshirō Mifune, for a long time, could only work at the works of Tōhō; Shintaro Katsu and Raizō Ichikawa were bound by Daiei’s projects, as so many of their colleagues could rely on their artistic performance solely on Shochiku films (think Shima Iwashita) by Nikkatsu (Yujiro Ishihara or Joe Shishido) or Shin-Toho. Yet Tatsuya Nakadai, formed on the stage of the realist movement of Shingeki, could never have given up his theatrical vocation in favor of the great screen. And since the relationship of exclusivity with a production house would have bound him, for several years, to work on the projects of a single major, including those of “b or z series”, here it immediately decides to present itself in the world in Japanese cinema as a freelance: a systemic anomaly, which although not “paying” from the economic point of view – exclusive contracts were decidedly more remunerative for those who subscribed to them – allowed him from time to time to be written directly by the directors who wanted to collaborate with him, and who often came to conceive the characters precisely according to the histrionic and physical peculiarities of the actor, without which they went so to meet the usual problems –.
It is starting from such freedom, in the name of which Tatsuya Nakadai could alternate along the course of his memorable career the works on the set to the performances on the stage, that the actor has had the faculty to build a surgically weighted filmography, characterized by countless collaborations with many of the cinematographers-like of the Japanese golden age (from Kurosawa to Kobayashi The possibility to select the various projects without any external interference represented the propulsor behind its stakanovism (compared with the more than 160 films to which it participated) and the primary reason behind a truly stratified artistic path, able to assume every time of the branches never discounted and always in line with the transformations of which the Japanese film industry was object in the second half of the twentieth century and to follow. But that immense talent that Nakadai has given us testimony for more than sixty years of career had yet to be taken by someone to allow him to manifest himself: and the one who first of all gave the Istrianism of star-in-become the opportunity to assume the forms we have learned about movies after film, was Masaki Kobayashi; the true catalyst of the journey towards the artistic immortality of the actor.
To capture the attention of the legendary director was the so epic and unconventional physicality of the young interpreter, but above all his cultural heritage. After making him debut at the cinema with a small cameo in The Thick-Walled Room (1953) followed by the first important part in Black River (where the actor’s baritone voice, his protruding eyes capable of capturing a higher amount of light – according to Kurosawa – and the enigmatic aspect that distinguishes him are channelled into the perturbante portrait of an anarchist) that of the idealist Kaji in the trilogy of The human condition (1959-1961). All the great stars of the moment had been, in one way or another, taken into consideration to lead the ambitious adaptation of the novel of Junpei Gomikawa, yet Kobayashi, at the end of a long decisionmaking process, chooses to write a young promise like Nakadai in the main part, causing great stirring and curiosity in the press and among the professionals. The reason was precisely in the artistic and ethical baggage of the interpreter, the only, unlike the stars of time, able to embody both the modern and anti-military spirit of Japan in the late 1950s, and to understand the traditional values of the country, questioned on the stages of Shingeki.
The success of the first chapter of the trilogy, combined with the lessons of Kobayashi and the contractual freedom of the actor, prepare the ground for its rise to national stardom, parable that from that moment will never truly stop its ascensional course. already in the three years ’59/’61, in the pauses between the filming of the anti-war saga, Nakadai is chosen by Kon Ichikawa (Odd Obsession), Mikio Naruse (The Woman Who Ascends the Stairs and Daughters, Wives and a Mother, preceded by Untamed Woman in 57) and Akira Kurosawa (in Yojimbo and in the sequel If Ichikawa emphasizes the disturbing sensuality of man, able to evoke a panic terror in those who look and in particular in women who meet his sexual favor, Naruse on the contrary teaches him, along with actress-maestra Hideko Takamine, how to act in subtraction and convey emotions in a more realistic and less emphatic manner, especially in contemporary dramas. Metabolized these coordinates, on which Nakadai founded an incredible sequence of “dangered” and mephistofelic characters – from the protagonist of The Face of Another of Teshigahara (1966) to that of The Inheritance (1962) of the same Kobayashi – here is that the director of The human condition re-introduces him to his friend Kurosawa, with which the actor, after a humiliating cameo more.
It is with “The Emperor of Japanese cinema” that Tatsuya Nakadai approaches the world of jidaigeki/chanbara, that is to that universe of languages and iconography so historically encoded, that they will drag it towards the lids of legend. The traditionalist frames of the films “cappa and sword” allow him to break down every interpretative inhibition, and to blow up his theatrical derivation istrionism in schedges of violence (verbal and physical) that will in an instant excavate the consciences of the spectators, contaminating with the poetic realism shaken the grammages of the works on the ronin/samurai, always less depositary than the repositories. The two kurosawaian collaborations, which will find their sublimation only in the eighties with Kagemusha – The shadow of the warrior and Ran, reveal the most emphatic drifts of his poetic expression, erected at the highest levels by the work to which we attach, still today, the heritage of Nakadai, and that the same actor considered the apical point of his extraordinary career: Harakiri (1962) by Masaki Kobayashi. Here the director, in setting up an invective at the glazing against the contradictions of the (dis) honoring system of samurai and the inhuman classism that has long dominated the society of the Levant well beyond the fall of the institution of the swordsmen, builds around the actor an environment “vergine” and spoglio, apparently frozen over time, so that his star can bring forth the spectra only Thanks to the baritone stamp, made even more serious by the enphatic and unrealistic intonation that Nakadai puts on every verbal expression, the interpreter comes to give life to a literally spectral performance, with which it transmutes the surrounding space in a physically infernal horizon.
But the reason why jidaigeki assumes a bit the frame-chaleidoscope aspect of the talents of the actor, is to be found not only in its theatrical appeal – which is well combined with the istrionic formation of the star – but in the polyhedrity of tones and registers that this genre intrinsically hosts, and that Tatsuya Nakadai already demonstrates in the following years of being able to metabolize to the great. From this point of view, are the collaborations with Kihachi Okamoto (the so-called “Buddha of Japanese cinema”) and with Hideo Gosha that demonstrate the immense ability to adapt the actor, whose distinctive ability, the attitude that has contributed to make it so unique and singular, we perceive it precisely in its “sponge” being and in its spirit of observation.
Without building a priori performance, Nakadai establishes his approach to the character depending on the emotional reactions of his colleagues or the emotions that, from time to time, trapelano from the eyes of the directors in the moments when they talk to him about the part that will go to interpret. It is this communicative tune with those who direct the set that allowed the Japanese star to adapt organically to the languages of the various films, enlisted on his body, almost chameleonically, the grammatical codes. This is when Nakadai’s movements can pass seamlessly from the extreme rarefaction seen in Harakiri to the hyper-frenetic rhythms of the fighting of The Sword of Doom (1966), L’ultimo samurai (1967), Kill! (1968) and Goyokin (1969), despite being placed in the same frames of genre. Thus comes an incomparable poetic versatility, which if combined with the depths of its unmistakable vocal timbre and the photogeny of a tetro face but always emotionally transparent, allowed him so much to embody the brutality of merciless figures – from The Wolves (1971) to Onimasa (1982), up to Heat Wave (1991) and Belladonna of Sadness (1973), where he literally gives voice to tirelessly cultivated, both on the set and on the scenes, until a few moments before the end. As if the recitation, as an antechamber frame of the afterlife, had metaphorically delivered it to immortality, already guaranteed by the work of all those disciples – including the name of Kōji Yakusho – who learned the craft of the actor under the directives of the legendary I devote to the stage art school Mumeijuku, bringing forward the artistic legacy and traghetta. That is, in that dimension to which only those who, like Tatsuya Nakadai, were able to vibrate the cords of the heart of millions of spectators even with a single change of intonation. Or just sitting quiet.
L’articolo Tatsuya Nakadai: the most free actor in Japanese Golden Age cinema comes from SentieriSelvaggi.
