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There’s a waterline on its side and one, showing the flood level, on the curtain in the background, which now strangely looks like scarred concrete.
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The piano survived the tsunami which so catastrophically hit the region it floated on the flood waters and somehow emerged with both its casing and its inner workings intact. It’s actually the zone around the Fukushima nuclear site, and Sakamoto is first seen, in a wonderfully resonant sequence (word play intentional), investigating a piano at a nearby agricultural school. Coda begins with a vista of a blasted landscape that could be the setting for a Tarkovsky film. Inevitably, this gives particular urgency to the work of someone who–having started his current career in his twenties–has barely stopped working since and, despite a reluctant obligatory hiatus, isn’t inclined to stop now.īut the physical devastation that Sakamoto has experienced–and on which he comments with robustly philosophical humor–is paralleled by the planetary devastation that is another theme of the film. Japanese composer, soundtrack writer, and electronics pioneer Ryuichi Sakamoto was diagnosed in 2014 with throat cancer, and much of Schible’s intimate film shows him musing courageously and wryly on his own mortality: having currently beaten the condition, Sakamoto says he knows he might live for another 10 years, or 20, or possibly just one. But Stephen Nomura Schible’s portrait film Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is about an artist very much concerned, these days at least, with the idea of endings, and of what comes after. “Coda” might be considered a tactless term to apply in a documentary about a musician who, at 66, is perhaps in the autumn rather than the winter of his career.