Nobody was better at composing for the 4:3 frame than Akira Kurosawa. Like many of the directors of the day, he routinely used normal to slightly wide lenses; with the advent of widescreen, he abandoned them in favor of telephotos, and rarely looked back.

Here’s a scene from Ikiru (1952) that illustrates. The protagonist Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) has been having stomach pains; he has finally gone to the doctor. The scene takes place in the waiting room and proceeds in four movements, each one characterized by a different composition.

In part one, he enters the room; note the multiplane composition at which Kurosawa excelled. Notice also the newspaper in the foreground — it punctuates the scene, at the beginning and end, like bookends.

After Watanabe is seated, the man with the newspaper moves to sit opposite him. The composition is more or less symmetrical: another patient is between, forming the apex of a triangle, and a “window” on either side (the one on the right is actually the glass door to the waiting room). Although the composition is symmetrical, it’s not quite centered — the the entrance to the doctor’s office is to the right, waiting for him.

The man between them is called into the office; the third movement begins when Newspaper Man moves to sit beside Watanabe. The camera shifts slightly; now the composition is unbalanced; the weight is to the right, with another patient and the door to the office on that side. Newspaper Man begins to talk about the poor guy who just got up, about his symptoms, how the doctors said its just an ulcer, but that it’s really stomach cancer. As he describes the fatal symptoms, Watanabe becomes increasingly distressed and agitated, sliding down the couch to get away, and finally moving to another seat.

In the fourth movement, we get the first close-up of the scene, of Watanabe’s distressed face. The other patient is out-of-frame, all that remains is Watanabe and his tormentor, the yawning maw of the office, where his fate will be sealed. Watanabe crumples his hat as newspaper man prattles obliviously away. Our perspective is distorted so that a third of the frame is filled with Watanabe’s face; we cannot miss his agony.

Finally, newspaper man figures out what’s going on and, with a wonderful “Oh, crap!” expression, sits back and raises his newspaper to cover his face. With that, Watanabe’s isolation is complete.

The composition supports and augments the growing mood of despair in the scene, underlining and clarifying Watanabe’s anguish. At first, the composition is relatively balanced, as Watanabe has no reason not to believe that he has a relatively benign, though possibly chronic, condition. Then it becomes increasingly asymmetrical as it becomes clear to Watanabe — and us — that his symptoms are the same as the fatal ones Newspaper Man describes.  Another thing to notice is that as the scene progresses, the weight of the composition falls increasingly upon Watanabe; eventually, he’s completely isolated in the frame, courtesy of that newspaper.

Even though we are told the protagonist’s symptoms in exposition, they are underlined and driven home by the staging and composition.  Here’s the entire scene for your viewing pleasure. Note how it evolves organically, flowing from bad to worse within the frame. It’s a single shot, and although Kurosawa could have cut from composition to composition, he did not, preferring to do it by moving his actors around instead. Enjoy!

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(note: Ikiru is every bit a masterpiece as Rashomon or The Seven Samurai; it is available in a very good Criterion edition. Highly recommended)