Resonance: "Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda"

For a documentary on an accomplished musician, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda sure starts out quiet. Granted, a prelude sees Sakamoto - now, at 66, entering into the revered greyhair stage of his career - tapping out notes on a piano found among the devastation of Fukushima ("I wanted to hear the sound") and eventually sitting down before a rapt audience at one of the local evacuation centres to strike up that simple-seeming yet enormously evocative theme from Nagisa Oshima's 1982 drama Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a reminder to any onlookers of just what a gifted composer and performer he is. Thereafter, however, the piano lid is closed, with reason. Director Stephen Nomura Schible joined Sakamoto in 2014, where his attempts to finish scoring the Oscar-winning The Revenant were thrown into disarray by a diagnosis of throat cancer. We thus find the composer amid a pause for thought, reflecting - in hushed tones that speak either to his condition, or an innately sanguine personality - upon his legacy (as both a founder member of the pop futurists Yellow Magic Orchestra and a solo artist) and his hopes for a future work, inspired by nature, that would stand as "a soundtrack for a film that doesn't exist", to be set against his recordings for those that do. Slowly, over the months that follow, the music begins to reassert itself, in an act of creation intended to keep death - and its attendant silences - at bay. Here, then, is a film almost uniquely attuned to process. How does this man reconcile himself with the news he may not be long for this world? And how does he go about making the sounds that may carry something of his spirit forward after death?

The bulk of Schible's film follows this last line of inquiry. Time and again, we find Sakamoto, one of that rare and cherishable breed of sonic collectors, venturing out into the field (be that his back garden, a forest, or a remote African village), microphone in hand, to gather up noises, then heading back to his studio in New York to push the buttons and twiddle the knobs that fold the results of his harvesting into the intense soundscapes that have become his trademark. (As he sets off for the Antarctic to record the ice melting, I couldn't help but hear Half Man Half Biscuit imagining what Brian Eno's outgoing answerphone message must sound like, on their track "Eno Collaboration": "Brian's not home/He's at the North Pole/But if you'd like to leave a/A weird noise...") This methodology - half-human/organic, half-circuits and wires - was, we learn, in place from Sakamoto's earliest recordings: a precious archive clip captures him arriving at the gloriously wonky keyboard riff, played by man yet accelerated and distorted by machine, that drove the Yellow Magic Orchestra's "Behind the Mask" (and was later appropriated by Eric Clapton for his biggest Eighties hit). In the present day, meanwhile, we watch as Sakamoto tinkers with soundwaves while cross-referencing a list of the first thousand prime numbers. Somehow, these diverse inputs come together and become greater than the sum of their parts, and a few seconds of camera time preserves a recording that will hang around on YouTube until the day they pull the plug on the Internet.

This quest for eternity - or at least some small corner of it - can present as a little po-faced. That teasing hint of "Behind the Mask" is all we hear of the poppier end of the Sakamoto spectrum, and though we get a fun anecdote about Bernardo Bertolucci coaxing the composer into rearranging one cue for 1990's The Sheltering Sky moments before it was due to be recorded ("Ennio Morricone would do it"), Coda remains, in the main, a sober, scholarly endeavour. Schible huddles watchfully and protectively over his subject, much as his subject huddles over the keyboard, stopping only to reach for clips - scenes from Tarkovsky's version of Solaris, and from Sakamoto's 1999 opera Life, with its gloomy Robert Oppenheimer quotes ("I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds") - which mesh only too well with the elegiac tone of the music being assembled over this period. Of those two processes mentioned earlier, there is far more of the work - lots of EQ adjustment, some messing around with gongs - than there is emotion, although you sense soldiering on regardless may just have been Sakamoto's way of coping, as it is for many artists. (His cancer, thankfully, went into remission some time in 2015.) Still, if you know these recordings, there is an obvious appeal in seeing the ideas and labour that went into them; the film retains that fascination that follows from watching a master throwing open his doors and laying out his working. Early on in Coda, Sakamoto confesses to becoming obsessed with the notion of "the perpetual sound, one that won't dissipate over time". A technohead such as he is surely can't have failed to note how the cinema offers myriad possibilities towards that end: Schible's film shows us a piano lid being opened with renewed purpose, before enabling the music made there to play on forever.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda opens in selected cinemas from Friday.