Kino immer anders
Coda is not only a portrait of Ryuichi Sakamoto, but a meditation or rather an improvisation on the nature of sound itself, woven through with his genre-bending music. Director Stephen Nomura Schible follows Sakamoto through the twilight of his life, a period shadowed by illness yet marked by an almost childlike awe for discovery. Before the camera stands a musician who crafted wistful film scores and liminal compositions, all the while being shaped by the music himself, who now traces his fingers along the wreckage of a piano drowned by the Fukushima disaster, finding music in what others would call ruin.
The documentary moves with the same unhurried grace as its subject, holding space for attention to dualities: life and mortality, simplicity and restlessness, nature and modernity. Sakamoto reflects on the futility of our battle against time and nature as these two are what creates all that is human, all that is music. His curiosity transforms catastrophe into composition and his wisdom finds the shape shifting permanence of life and music in nature.
What emerges is a film that understands music as an expression of existence. Guided through Sakamoto’s words, and Schible’s lens, we are reminded that to listen deeply is to live fully.
Maide Cebi
