I’ve watched two more movies by Akira Kurosawa over the past few weeks.

The first is Throne of Blood from 1957 which is considered to be the best adaptation of Macbeth for film ever, and many consider it to be Kurosawa’s finest film.   Even Harold Bloom considers it to be the best adaptation of Macbeth.   It is absolutely exquisite.   Much of it mirrors the Japanese Noh theater.

Kurosawa asked Isuzu Yamada to portray her character as though she were wearing a Noh mask.  It’s chillling.  Toshiro Mifune plays the Macbeth character.

The other is Hidden Fortress (1958) which is a comedy and is told from the point of view of its lowliest characters.  George Lucas actually based 3CPO and R2D2 on the two lowliest characters in Hidden Fortress - peasants whose facial expressions and bodily movements are hilarious!  It’s funny to think of the comparison in retrospect.   Toshiru Mifune plays one of the “villains” (but is actually a General) and is absolutely gorgeous.  I love his intensity!

The Lower Depths is supposedly one of Kurosawa’s least liked films as far as public opinion goes, but one of his artistic best.  Funny how that works!  It’s based on Maxim Gorky’s play by the same name.

I’ve never read Gorky’s play but supposedly Kurosawa stays very true to the play, so it is far darker than Jean Renoir’s version.  But it also has a sort of lightness about it - that perhaps we take life far too seriously, even when things are apparently serious? I’m not sure that is what Kurosawa meant to present but that’s what I got out of it.

It was most definitely disturbing and it has me thinking - why is it we are unable to manifest our desires?  Why do we allow ourselves to sink to the depths rather than rising to the heights?  I constantly feel that drag, that sort of inertia, the “oh well” - this is just the way things are.  Especially lately with all of the crazy financial stuff going on.

Donald Ritchie provided an interesting commentary on the Criterion Collection version.  He calls Gorky’s play a wretched comedy that attempts to show the problem of illusion and how illusion conflicts with reality.  This is a consistent theme throughout Kurasawa’s films which makes his films Buddhist, in a way.  Rather than evil being some sort of supernatural entitity that takes us over, it is a natural attribute of being alive at all.   Cruelty is a natural part of humanity as is our need for illusion.  The main sort of cruelty shown in this film is people making fun of each other - the sort of stuff that I grew up with that seems innocuous, but is actually extremely mean-spirited and hurtful.  It’s a form of viscious cruelty.

People make fun of each other and try to strip one another of their illusions even though we all have illusions about who it is we are.   There are two characters in the film who are aware of this need for illusion and the approach it very differently.  One is the Gambler who is very matter-of-fact about everything.  The other is the “old man” who is like a Buddhist monk.  (In Gorky’s play, the old man is a Christian priest.)    Both the gambler and the monk/priest are totally aware of the nature of illusion within humanity, but the gambler wants nothing to do with it while the monk recognizes its benefit.  Without illusion, there can be no hope.

Faith and hope are not based on reality.  Both are based on a disregard for reality.  Yet sometimes hope is the very thing we need - especially if we are living in the lower depths so maybe a little illusion now and then isn’t a bad thing.  Maybe we should allow one another our illusions.

For instance, the actor who is dying of alcohol poisoning, decides he’ll be able to cure himself of his disease by making the journey to a temple that is known to cure such things.   It gives him hope even though it is very unlikely he’ll make the journey.  The protistute holds on to the idea that she has experienced true love and this gives her hope.  The so-called samurai holds on to the idea that he comes from a grand family and this gives him hope.  But all the characters make fun of one another for holding onto these illusions even though they each have an illusion they hold about themselves.  The so-called samurai makes fun of the prostitute for believing she has experienced true love, the prostitute makes fun of the samurai for believing he comes from a grand family.  This is the stuff of viscious cruelty.

The monk clearly sees through the illusion and recognizes it for what it is - delusion.  But he maintains a compassion for it.  He doesn’t make fun of the others for maintaining their illusions, and unlike the gambler, does not insist that they strip themselves bare of their illusions.  Just the opposite, he asks each character to step inside the shoes of the other and try and feel what it is like to be the other and why that illusion might be important to them.

At the beginning of the film, there are two characters throwing leaves on what they call a heap.  That upper part of the screen is the world of reality.  What lies below is the world of illusion and we, the viewer of the film, are in the world of illusion right along with the characters that live in the heap.  We are searching for some sort of meaning and some sort of way to invent who we want to be.

Kurosawa wanted to do a very difficult thing - he wanted to show the full horror of life and make it amusing.  Ritchie says Kurosawa’s message is the same as Gorky’s - if we have our illusions, they may be wrong - but it’s necessary for us to have them.  The gambler is the only one who doesn’t believe we need our illusions.  And it is he, in the final scene, who ends our feeling of compassion for the characters by showing us he doesn’t have any at all.   When it is discovered the actor has killed himself, the gambler simply says, “We were having such a fine party and he had to go and ruin it, the Bastard.”  The end.

The monk, on the other hand, represents the gambler’s opposite.  The saintly monk and the cynical gambler are the same in that both know the worst - that illusion is delusion.   But what the monk realizes that the gambler does not is that there is no absolute truth in faith.   The gambler, on the other hand, operates from the belief that there is an absolute untruth in faith.  The problem is one of absolutes.  The monk can be compassionate because of his recognition that there are no absolutes while the gambler cannot because he still maintains a sort of absolute.

This brings us back to the problem of evil.  Evil is not something greater than ourselves, it comes out of our need to boost our understanding of ourselves through the belittling of the understanding others have of themselves.  This is where cruelty comes from.   Everybody turns against everybody else because they refuse to accept the illusions by which everyone else chooses to live.

Ritchie says Buddhism is to Kurosawa as Christianity is to Gorky.  It’s not about a particular faith, but about a system of faith.  Human beings, wisely or not, have the capacity to hope for something beyond their constricted and pitiful selves.   Religion fits well with this capacity because religion is based upon faith.  And again - faith is not based on reality.  it’s based on a disregard of reality.   It is this disregard that animates the gambler who sees through everything and doesn’t have a religious bone in his body.  And it is this disregard of reality that animates the Buddhist priest who realizes we cannot live with our own limitations without some kind of hope.  But this hope can only be based on the sort of illusion that goes with faith.  We have to agree to believe in something which is not realistic - something we cannot see, touch or smell.   Even when the delusion is exploded, faith is necessary because without it, there is no life that is possible to live.  And this is especially true of people who live at the bottom of the societal rung.  They need their illusions more than people who have money.

Ritchie says Kurosawa presents an interesting balance of optimism and pessimism.  On the one hand, Kurosawa fully believe everyone can get what they want if they want it badly enough.  On the other hand, he believes that most people don’t want badly enough to manifest what it is they want.

It’s kind of ironic that his audience didn’t particularly like this film because their dislike speaks to the need for illusion.   We want to see a happy ending (like Renoir put in his version) and we want some hope that things can get better for these people.  But Kurosawa won’t provide it for us.  As Ritchie put it, unlike his audience, Kurosawa prefers to see illusion as illusion.   If life isn’t something to cry about, perhaps we should be able to laugh about it.  But somewhere there exists a balance.  We have to be able to see through all illusions, including our own, in order to be able to laugh at life without becoming cruel and cynical.

I actually watched Seven Samurai last week so am posting out of chronological order.

Seven Samurai is one of Akira Kurosawa’s more famous films.   It’s often listed as one of the greatest films ever made (usually in the top 25 on various lists).  It takes place in Japan during the 1500s.  There is a lot of poverty and people are hungry.  It starts out with bandits who are considering the raid on a farming village, but they change their mind because they had already stolen all of the village rice so decide to wait until fall after they have harvested the barley.  News gets to the farmers and they are panicked and grief stricken because they are already starving thanks to the lack of rice.  They decide to higher samurai to help protect them.

Toshiro Mifune plays a crazy, but lovable wild man who used to be a farmer but is mistaken for an undisciplined Samurai (although he is not mistake as Samurai among the Samurai).  Takashi Shimura plays a very distinguished, confident, wise and disciplined Samurai who organizes the seven Samurai.  I loved watching Shimura in this film.   It amazes me that he can go from playing the meek Kanji Watanabe in Ikiru (which I think is probably my all-time favorite movie), to the rambuncious drunk doctor in Drunken Angel to the sophisticated, confident Kambei Shimada in Seven Samurai.  He’s incredibly versatile.  He’s fantastic!   So is Mifune.  But so far, he isn’t quite as versatile as Shimura - the characters he plays all have a sort of jerky, energetic quality about them.  But Shimura had been acting for quite a while when Kurasawa made these earlier films and Mifune was new to the movie scene.

I think it’s interesting that both Bergman and Kurosawa set many of their films in the middle ages.  I think telling modern stories based upon past history allows the viewer to let go their modern day prejudices and engage in the story in a way they wouldn’t be able to do if it were set in modern times.     The middle ages were extreme times for many societies so provide an excellent setting for existential themes.   Japan experienced very long periods of civil wars and the Samurai reached it’s height of glory during these wars.

The Samurai followed the Bushido code which is somewhat analogous to the western understanding of Chivalry.   During WWII, a new breed of Samurai was born, the Kamikaze, which likewise adhered to the Bushido Code.  Because of this code, the Japanese were able to employ much harsher disciplinary methods than any other WWII force.   They were brutal on their own forces because the code taught that defeat was the deepest humiliation.  Military commanders would inflict unbelievably strict disciplinary action on their troops and would also send their troops straight into artillery fire knowing that it was suicidal.  The code demanded loyalty and so the commanders could get by with this treatment of their soldiers.   The code also allowed for the inhumane treatment of American soldiers because according to the code, they weren’t true soldiers.  They were cowards in search of their own glory.   The code allowed for extreme inequality.  It could not create a decent society.  It could only “reflect and reinforce the inequality and brutality of a violent society”.  (See Seven Samurai by Dr. Patrick Cooney.)

I think Kurosawa wants to allow Japanese society some self-reflection and can best do this through use of the past.  The villagers are deeply afraid of the Samurai because during the civil wars, they would take food from the farmers, rape their daughters and kill those who interefered.    When the seven samurai enter into the village that has asked their help, they don’t understand why everyone hides from them.  They finally start to trust each other, but when the Samurai discover that the villagers have killed Samurai in the past, this greatly angers the Samurai who now want to kill the villagers rather than help them.   Mifune’s clownish character tells them that it is the Samurai’s fault that the villagers have acted that way toward the Samurai.  The brutality of the warring class has created extreme hardship for the villagers and they were forced to do extreme things to survive.  The Samurai feel ashamed after they are made to understand the inequality of class distinction by Mifune’s character.

Kurosawa does not view the Samurai as heroic.  At the end of the film, Shimura’s character says that it is the farmers who have won, not the Samurai.  The film ends with the village joyfully singing as they go about their work.  The warriors and the warring way of life is defeated by life sustaining work. From an existential point of view, the individual is victorious over the abstract principles of the Bushido Code.

Wow!

This film was made just after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Toshiro Mifune plays an old man who wants to move his family to Brazil to keep them safe from the effects of an H-Bomb.  His family thinks he is insane and doesn’t want to move.   Really, they don’t want to move because they will lose their ineheritance.  So they declare the old man financially incompetent in order to maintain it and the courts reluctantly agree.

Clearly, the man isn’t incompetent, he’s shrewd.  And if you get right down to it, every Japanese citizen has irrational (but possibly completely rational) fears about the destructiveness of the H-bomb.

It’s silly, perhaps, but those were my thoughts when I was very young.  Why would man create such a thing?  I was of the generation that was taught to “duck and cover”.    I  remember seeing a man shot in the head on a news cast when I was very young.  It must have been something very new because my mother was very upset that I witnessed it.   We hadn’t been immune to that sort of media coverage, yet.

I think that may be the point of Kurosawa’s film.  We become immune to what we should experience as completely outrageous.   Nakajima’s family has become complacent about living in fear and thinks their father insane that he hasn’t managed to obtain this same complacency.  The father can’t understand this complacency.

It is an interesting thought that Nakajima’s family can afford the complacency because of what Nakajima, himself, built.   Kurosawa welcomed Democracy.  What he didn’t welcome was the materialism that came along with the capitalism that came to Japan through Western Democracy.   Life itself was made less important than material abundance.

Think about 9/11.  We are far enough away from it to be somewhat rational about it now.  We gave up our freedom in order to secure our materialism.  Bush told us to go out and shop, go to Disney Land.  Distract yourself from the reality of what was really going on.

How much absurdity are we capable of rationalizing rather than seeing it for what it is?

Still making my way through Akira Kurosawa films and had to back up to his censored Post War films because I somehow missed Drunken Angel.  So glad I noticed I had missed it because I loved it! It stars Takashi Shimura and Toshiru Mifune who have been in most of the Kurosawa films I’ve seen so far.  They are both fantastic, especially Shimura.

Drunken Angel is set the Black Market area of Tokyo.  Supposedly, Kurosawa wanted to have all the action take place in a burned down section of the Black Market but the American censors wouldn’t allow it.  I didn’t fully understand why, but apparently one of the conditions was that the Japanese could in no way criticize the American Occupation.

Despite censorship, Kurosawa managed to get away with far more in this film than he been able to in previous films.   According to Lars-Martin Sorenson, they wanted him to get rid of the title because they believed Drunken Angel was blasphemous.  (That cracks me up!!)  They wouldn’t let him use a German song (Mack the Knife) he had intended to use because the Germans had sided with the Japanese against America.  (No filmmaker was allowed to use German songs in their films).   So Kurosawa wrote his own song (Jungle Boogie) which he did not submit in the script and was much worse than the German song in terms because it much more clearly represented the presence of the Occupation.

In 1948, when Drunken Angel was released, the Occupation had been in place for 2 1/2 years.  Living conditions were still extremely poor, so there was a lot of hostility toward the American occupation and Kurosawa shared in this hostility.   Sorenson tells the story about a strike at Toho, where Kurosawa worked.  There had been several strikes and in order to break it up, American soldiers arrived at the studio with tanks and fighter planes.   The event was totally hushed up in the Japanese press. Kurosawa saw this as extremely hypocritical.  On the one hand, Americans preach democracy.  On the other hand, they break up legal strikes with tanks and fighter pilots and heavily censor the press and the film industry.

Kurosawa wasn’t able to place the action in a burned down sector of the Black Market, but he managed to create a set that feels incredibly dirty.  It’s easy to imagine that the kids playing in the water could very well come down with typhoid.

This was Mifune’s first time to work with Kurosawa.  He plays a gangster who has come down with tuberculosis.  Shimura plays a drunk doctor who wants to help him, but the gangster is unable to help himself because he’s trapped by his Western/materialistic lifestyle.

Shimura’s character is a lot of fun to watch.  He seems to be completely unsympathetic toward his patients, but it becomes obvious that he has a deep concern for their well-being.  He calls himself a drunk angel, and in a sense, he truly is an angel even though he is not what most would consider angelic - not even close.

I’ve never actually read The idiot so can’t compare Dostoevsky’s novel to Kurosawa’s adapatation, but have seen this film several times.

Unlike Stray Dog, this movie is cold, cold, cold!!  The origination of the plot for the film is given to us in various ways: some of it is written in third-person narrative; some of it in spoken third-person narrative; and some of it we figure out through the actions of the characters.  I’m not sure I’ve completely followed the purpose of the various forms, but it’s interesting - kind of like reading a novel while simultaneously watching the action unfold in front of you.

The film starts out in written narrative: “Dostoevsky wanted to portray a genuinely good man.  It may seem ironic, choosing a young idiot as his hero, but in this world, goodness and idiocy are often equated.  This story tells of the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world.”

I’m laying out the plot just to try and get it straight in my mind…

The idiot, Kameda, was accused of war crimes he didn’t commit and was sentenced to death.  At the last minute, the sentence was revoked, and he went crazy from the shock of the pardon.  He developed epileptic dementia and had so many fits he eventually became “an idiot”.  He can’t recall what life was like before his idiocy.

Akama befriends Kameda and tells him about Taeko Nasu, whom he fell in love with because he had been repressed as a child and took one look at Taeko Nasu which immediately released all of those pent up passions.  He stole money from his father to buy her a diamond ring and this so outraged his father he disowned him.  But his father died and so Akama has recently come into his fortune.  Both he and Kameda are headed to Sapporo.  Kameda is going to see Mr. Ono, his only relative, who is tied up in some ugly business regarding Kameda’s ranch, I think.  The military had reported Kameda as officially dead, and it seems that somehow, Mr. Ono sold the ranch through Kayama?  But that has me a bit confused.

Taeko Nasu is apparently a woman of ill-repute.   Supposedly, she’s been Tohata’s mistress since childhood.  Fearing for his reputation, Tohata has offered a dowry of 600,000 to marry her off, but doesn’t really want to let her go.  Taeko Nasu, like Akama, feels like a caged animal.  Akama feels this way because he was forced to repress his emotions, Taeko Nasu because she has been a kept woman since childhood and has likewise has had to repress who she is.

Kayama is about to marry Taeko Nasu in order to get the 600,000 yen dowry and this somehow involves Mr. Ono - maybe because he sold the ranch through Kayama?  I’m not sure.  According to the film, Kayama isn’t really a scoundrel, he’s just an unassertive coward.  Secretly, he’s in love with Ono’s daughter Ayako.

There are lots of twists and turns that keep twisting and turning.

SPOILER WARNING!!

So, Akama ends up with Taeko Nasu, but it isn’t pretty for either one of them.  They look like the Adams Family but with hateful passion rather than joyful, loving passion. The doors creak of their large home creak and everything is dirty and dark.  Really dark.  Kameda ends up in love with Ayako who is likewise in love with him.  But she can’t let go of her jealously toward Taeko Nasu who Kameda also loves, but not in the same way he loves Ayako.  Ayako promises she won’t let her impetuosity get in the way, but of course it does.

Desire, rather than reality, rules the outcome of everyone’s destiny.  Nothing is allowed to be what it is.  Instead, everything is judged on image.  Emotions are repressed and come back to bite in a big way.

Like I said, I haven’t read, The Idiot.  But this sounds a lot like what I know of Dostoevsky’s story.  He was sentenced to death and somehow managed to escape and likewise suffered from epilepsy.   Dostoevsky had some sort of mystical experience during his imprisoned days that made him feel connected to all that is.   He de-magicalized the sacraments and re-framed them within existential terms.   You see a lot of those re-framed sacraments within this film.

The idiot represents Christ and the isolation that is experienced by someone who is “good”.  People recognize the “good”, but they can’t accept it because to accept it requires too deep of a look at their own lives.   Akama’s love is solely based on passion, and this eventually kills Taeko Nasu.  But Kameda’s love for Taeko Nasu is based on the Christian ethic of forgiveness.

This sort of turns the norm around - where the upper class thinks of itself as “good” while the lower classes are “bad”.  This thinking was true in both Japan and Russia (and in the U.S. although the U.S. doesn’t like to acknowledge class differentiation.)

Kurosawa is compassionate toward the suffering of those who get stuck in situations they had little control of but maintains that human beings still control their destiny through the choices they make.  It’s the existential malaise:  we are responsible for who it is we are - no matter our circumstances.  And, what we think of as good and bad has been socially conditioned - it isn’t absolute.   Those who consider themselves to be “good” and superior to those who are “bad” have no right to claim that superiority.  Those deemed “bad” by society remain worthy of compassion and are very often “bad” thanks to the actions of the “good” who refuse to acknowledge their darker sides and what it is they have contributed to the actions they deem unworthy.

Stray Dog is considered to be one of Kurosawa’s first great films.

It’s about a rookie policeman whose gun is stolen and used in several crimes.  The policeman recognizes his existential connection to the criminal early in the film and feels responsible for the crimes that are being committed.  Many more similarities between police man and criminal are presented further into the story.  But, there is one thing that differentiates the men and that is choice.

It is existential choice that defines us as human beings.  No matter how bad the circumstances (and the circumstances are terrible in Post WWII Japan!) we still have the ability to make choices and it is through our choices that our destiny is created.

Excellent film.   Somewhat reminiscent of Crime and Punishment - the heat is excruciating and the mental anguish experienced by Yusa is similar to that of Raskolinikov’s.

The Quiet Duel kept me on edge! I liked it much better than Scandal. I suppose I’d agree that it is extraordinarily sentimental, but it’s a great story…

A young, virgin (pure) doctor contracts syphilis through a cut finger while operating on an infected patient during the war. He has to deal with the stigma associated with syphilis and the fact that he could pass it on to the woman he loves. He tells her he won’t marry her but never tells her why because he’s afraid that if he tells her, she’ll stay with him anyway but that staying with him will compromise her future.

I’d like to believe there are people around like Kyoji Fujisaki (played by Toshiro Mifune - very attractive in this film even if his character is far more uptight than the character he plays in Scandal.) But it still completely pisses me off when a man withholds the truth because he thinks he’s protecting a woman! Of course, we’re talking 1949 so I suppose we must be at least a little bit forgiving.

Scandal by Akira Kurosawa was quite enjoyable even if a little hokey. I loved Toshirô Mifune’s character as a rebellious motorcycle riding artist and thought Yoskio Yamaguchi was very convincing as the scandalized singer. Takashi Shimura was fantastic in Ikiru but his character in Scandal was extremely irritating. Excellent acting all around, however. Even by the minor characters.

Maybe this isn’t one of Kurosawa’s better works, but I enjoyed it.

I thought One Wonderful Sunday was, well, Wonderful!!

This movie is post WWII. Yuzo has come back from the war and has no money. His fiance Masako likewise makes very little money and has shoes that are extremely warn. But unlike Yuzo who has been changed by the war, Masako has a way of spinning something positive into everything seemingly negative. The holes in her shoes, for instance, allow for easy draining when the roads are wet.

Masako does get very down every now and then, especially when encountering the suffering of youth. But she shakes it off for the sake of a fun Sunday with her fiance.

It is a Wonderful Sunday only by sheer determination. Yuko only has 15 yen and Musako only 20. At one point, they are excited to discover they have just enough money to see a Schubert concert. But just before it is their turn to buy tickets, scalpers buy all of the tickets in their price range and sell them for twice as much.

Their spirits turn downward when they focus upon materialistic gain or lack thereof. But Musako somehow manages to steer the couple toward a more simplistic, far less materialistic focus.

At one point, Musako “breaks the fourth wall” and talks directly to the audience, asking us to clap in support of a young couple who wishes to marry but doesn’t have the money to do so. A bit hokey, but not overly dramatic.

At the beginning of the film, Musako claims that it is far better to imagine possibilities than give into stark reality. By the end of the film, she seems to have a definite point even though the film remains extremely realistic and there is no Hollywood ending making all dreams come true in the end.