An early founding father of electronic/ techno music in the 1970s, and one of the most revered film music composers of the last 40 years, Tokyo-born Ryuichi Sakamoto has been long overdue for the documentary treatment, only Coda pays tribute to Sakamoto’s artistic and activist achievements in the somber shadow of a 2014 diagnosis of throat cancer. Sakamoto has won all kinds of awards for both his music composed for the cinema such asThe Last Emperor and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, as well as his beautifully minimalist Satie-like compositions, both as a solo artist and with the Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Director Stephen Schible takes a Zen-like meditative approach to documentary filmmaking that appropriately attends to his filmed subject's personality and artistic sensibility—capturing Sakamoto’s quiet genius and his constant search for the perfect sound, despite the burden of a daily reckoning with the cancer inside him. It’s a film that, if anything, perfectly captures an artist’s temperament: Schible’s unintrusive presence lets Sakamoto be our guide (it’s also narrated by Sakamoto), whether it’s following the composer as he browses the sonic possibilities of a forest by taking field recordings (“The world is full of sounds. We don’t normally hear them as music,” he says at one point) or plinking out notes on a piano experimenting with a new score.
We also see Sakamoto’s political side, getting an intimate glimpse into his dedicated anti-nuclear activities (he’s touring the infamous Fukushima disaster site as the movie opens) but also how he subtly incorporates this political activist side of himself into his work.
Despite the inevitable pall cast over the film by the knowledge of Sakamoto’s illness, Coda still seems to leave a faint flickering of hope and rich new creative possibilities to be explored on the horizon for this singular artist. Recommended.