Japanese musician, composer and performer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score for The Wilderness Hunter won many awards at the 69th BAFTAs, including Best Film and Best Sound, and was nominated for major awards including Best Original Score.
When I was researching him I found a documentary about him called < Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA>. I’ve recommended it to my friends and I think it’s a very interesting film and I’ve learnt a lot.
This is a personal documentary by renowned filmmaker and director Stephen Nomura-Skipper. The film follows Ryuichi Sakamoto’s work and personal life after his throat cancer. The main part of the film features Ryuichi Sakamoto’s work on the soundtrack for the film “The Wilderness Hunter”, and the soundtrack for “The Wilderness Hunter”, which is also included in the film, became the original soundtrack for the documentary. The soundtrack of The Wilderness Hunter is the original soundtrack of the documentary, serving both as a documentary and as a reality check. The audience is treated to a glimpse of the musician’s life while watching the production of the soundtrack.
In his works, Ryuichi Sakamoto has arranged a large number of realistic ambient sounds, turning the world of cinema into a mirror of reality through the mapping of sound and film, bringing the film score into the realm of humanistic thinking. For example, in Ryuichi Sakamoto: The Finale, a piano was used to play the music that was washed away by the tsunami after the earthquake in Japan. This way of combining reality and touching the true nature of the world transcends the music itself, elevating the act of film scoring into the realm of humanistic expression, and even extending it into a kind of performance art, fulfilling a realistic concern beyond the musician’s voice. In addition to the above-mentioned choice of ethnic instruments and the arrangement of natural sounds, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s musical compositions also often include a deep sense of cross-cultural exchange. In his film score, The Wilderness Hunter, Ryuichi Sakamoto, in a departure from his usual style, makes extensive use of the original ambient sounds of the Nordic ice fields, with the addition of electronic melodies, resulting in a score that both fits the context of the film and reflects his personal interests, laying the foundation for the film’s intention and narrative. It is worth noting that Ryuichi Sakamoto experimented with film scoring in Asia in the late 1980s, and that the 1987 film The Last Emperor, directed by the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, was scored by Ryuichi Sakamoto on location in the Forbidden City in Beijing, a historic move to have a foreigner tell the story of China. Ryuichi Sakamoto, who had never visited China before the film was made, and had never been exposed to Chinese culture, was able to produce the film’s score and performance through a detailed exchange with a Chinese composer. This example demonstrates the cross-cultural possibilities of musical exchange, and the possibility of ‘mother-topic’ expression. Intercultural communication is not a deliberate search for the boundaries of ‘self’ or ‘other’, but rather a search for ‘cultural matrices’ that follow from the ‘cultural imaginary’. It is a search for the “cultural matrix” after the “cultural imagination”.
After watching this documentary, I felt that the film score is both an expression on the world stage and an emotional support on the road of life for Ryuichi Sakamoto. The important musical works that he has composed in the fertile soil of Asian culture with a true heart represent the East, belong to the East and express the East, and make the unique charm of the East in the soundtrack in the process of world cinema exchange. In Ryuichi Sakamoto’s scores, the multiplicity of reality is intertwined with the realism of cinema, and the Orient in film is thus unfolded.