Abstract
ABSTRACTKurosawa Akira's Dersu Uzala (1975) represents one of the director's many attempts to make his cinema into Japan's entryway into the global community of nations. The price of this entry is the acknowledgment as well as forgetting of uncomfortable historical facts. A revisiting of Kurosawa's film, set in 1902–1907, against the historical foil of the two world wars, reveals that this cinematic memorial to a Nanai tribesman silently acknowledges and laments Japan's participation in the extermination of the minority peoples of the Manchukuo state and in the destruction of pre-industrial pan-Asian Siberia. Even if Dersu Uzala can be regarded as a turning point in Kurosawa's career in terms of style, as many critics do to the detriment of the film's reputation, this film is nonetheless equally indebted to Kurosawa's world-view and sensibility of the 1950s–1960s, to which he brings new aesthetic means and political concerns.
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