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Akira Kurisawa's 1975 scar winning film, Dersu Uzala, follows the adventures of a trapper from Siberia's Goldi tribe as he journeys from his element, the temperate monsoonal forests of the Eastern seaboard to his bewilderment when he arrives in modern 'civilisation'. As a man of the Taiga, Dersu Uzala had no equal. He could shoot a deer in the eye at three hundred metres, determine a man's nationality and age by his footprint and smell out wild animals or native villages by their own particular scent. Dersu was uniquely removed from modern day society. His concept of money was to value everything in terms of its worth in sable skins. Did Dersu Uzala really exist? Was he just one man or, as has been suggested, a mixture of several hunter-trappers who guided the Russian explorer, Vladimir Arseniev over his three expeditions to map the mountains and forests of 'Ussuria' between 1902 and 1908. Arseniev's account of these expeditions is entitled 'Dersu the Trapper'. Everything we know about Dersu is from the explorer's point of view. |
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