March Director of the Month - Akira Kurosawa

Here today is the third installment in my Director of the Month series. Or would be if I had posted something about an actual director last month. But last month's Donald Ritchie post does help a bit - I wasn't sure what criteria to use for this feature - who to include when? in what order? all that. Well - let's accept the signs - Oshima, Japanese films - and Kurosawa, who's 103rd birthday got a lot of attention this month - I shall take it as a sign, and count down the best Japanese directors. 6 to 1 (unless I decided to go up as well as down).... There you go.

I have written about Kurosawa before - and about the place he has in film history, and in my history with film. This post in particular from a blogathon 5 1/2 years ago lays out a lot of my doubts, but then again, it has always seemed as if I have to explain my reservations about him. He is, you see, a towering figure - a crucial figure in film history. I mentioned it in the Ritchie post last month - the ways Japanese film changed the criticism of films; and in a very real sense, it is Kurosawa that did it. Now - given that importance, given the quality of his films, ranking him 5th among Japanese directors might need some explanation.... Well - maybe the best explanation is that I'd put at least 6 Japanese directors in the top 20 - 3 definitely in the top 10 and 2 more who move in and out depending on my mood.... I am, that is, a fan.

And so? I will turn to the films:

1. Seven Samurai - This is one of the Great Ones. A big sprawling spic that never flags, with a host of clear and distinct characters, with spectacular action scenes that are, themselves, always completely coherent and clear. Technically, dramatically, politically, a magnificent achievement. After all.



2. High and Low - A medical students kidnaps the son of shoe magnate, but gets a chauffeur's son instead. What will the executive do? This becomes many things - a first rate police procedural; a first rate character study, of 2 superbly wrought characters - the student is pathetic and cruel and desperate... But Gondo, Mifune's character, is something truly other than else. He goes from the ruthless businessman of the early scenes to a kind of reluctant hero, until in the end he becomes godlike. Kurosawa's contemporary films were always tightly bound to their places - he used city streets and locations to great effect throughout his career, and this one has some of the best examples of it. But he could also use a set - the scenes in Gondo's house start stagy, but become increasingly deft - the whole film is structured that way - from the claustrophobia of Gondo's house, the the different claustrophobia of the train, to the scenes in the city, on the train, to the streets of Yokohama, the bars and hangouts. One of the most Langian of films - Kurosawa someone who could do credit to Lang...

3. Rashomon - A film that has become the symbol for unreliable point of view and multiple perspectives. (As well as being the strange example of a crime story where all three protagonists confess to the actual crime, in order to exonerate themselves.) Though also a thrilling piece of filmmaking. It is great looking, dynamic and exciting, and Kurosawa here, as in most of his films, uses pacing - the delay/gratification cycle - to great effect. It was the first Japanese film to make a sensation abroad - obviously successful, and a useful introduction, as it brings together a few tendencies in Japanese films. Chambara, women's melodrama, heroic samurai melodrama (for lack of a better term) - and a kind of realistic undercutting of those genres, all in one film.

4. Stray Dog - A cop loses his pistol on the bus - he tries to track it but it is used by a thief, who is a kind of double to the cop, to hurt other people. An extraordinary film, making great use of its setting - the location shooting, the heat, the themes of doubles and pursuit and the poisonous horror of the Gun. Even this early in his career, Kurosawa was a very self-conscious filmmaker - it feels like a precursor to new wave practices, with its documentary sections, its text and divided images, and so on. It prefigures High and Low, with its police procedural story, its urban settings, its dopplegangers - but it;s fully formed more than a decade before.



5. Ikiru - An old bureaucrat learns he is going to die. He does not know how to die, his son is a jerk, hetries partying but isn't very good at it, he takes a shine to a girl, but that is unwise - but she guides him to the idea of making a park, and he grows obsessed and dies happy. It moves slowly, but Kurosawa's style - his use of delay and indirect release - requires space to work correctly, and it does. This is Kurosawa's most Capraesque film, and seems very clearly modelled on some of Capra's works. The theme of the individual vs the system; the structure of the film - (voiceover, flashbacks, the bifurcated structure even), even things like the epiphany in the snow - that conjure up ideas and moments from Capra's films. Though maybe you're getting to Kurosawa's limits, here - he is not quite up to Capra. There is an element of caricature in Kurosawa that isn't quite there in Capra, and things in this film are almost always what they are - good, bad, weak, small. Watanabe's family, say, is not the ambiguous force it is in Capra's films - there is none of the way families or societies sustain and destroy, the doubleness of everything in Capra. (That's the rhealm of Ozu more than any Japanese director of that age). But none of that takes it from being a great film...

6. Yojimbo - Kurosawa may not have admitted it, but it's a transparent Red Harvest adaptation, and a damned fine one. Even more than Seven Samurai, it's a Japanese western (that of course immediately turned into an Italian western...) And as formalized and aestheticized as the Leone's to come - widescreen, dusty streets (or pouring rain) fire and death; people moving in strange dancelike ways - more noticeable than usual, even, for Kurosawa (who likes dancelike movement). With that hard-boiled twist on the western mythos, the stranger coming to clean up the town....

7. Ran - Kurosawa does Lear. Story - a great lord retires, leaving son #1 in charge - son #3 makes a fuss and is banished. However it does not take long for #1 to start bullying dad (egged on by his wife), and not not long after that before the sons are at one another's throats and everything goes to hell. All stunning to look at and maybe even better to listen to. Everyone dies, except a blind boy, perched atop the walls of his family's ruined castle.

8. Kagemusha - A thief is made the double of Lord Shingen during the wars between Shingen (Takeda), Ieyasu (Tokagawa) and Nobanaga (Oda). Shingen is killed not long after and the thief becomes his double. He fools the old man's grandson and concubines, as well as spies and his own men, but he is discovered from trying to ride a horse. He is injured and banished and mocked, while Lord Shingen's son goes to war and is defeated easily. (Guns again.) This is interesting historically, being much closer to actual events than most of Kurosawa's period films - set in the 1570s, the rise of Oda and Tokugawa - ending with the battle of Nagoshino, when 3000 riflemen destroyed the Takeda army, in something like a precursor to Cold Harbor or the Somme.

9. Throne of Blood - MacBeth on Mt Fuji - which Satyajit Ray singled out as one of the things that made Japanese cinema great - those real places... It is a handsome and haunting film, a horror film, as much as anything, with its ghosts and murders and madness and its strange smoky spaces....

10. Sanjuro - sequel to Yojimbo, not quite as tight and clean, but still very entertaining. Here, Mifune is a ronin who joins up with 9 idealists who are trying to undo a villainous superintendent. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the superintendent's right hand man. Very harsh parody of Japanese manners, samurai ethos and the rest, as Mifune constantly outsmarts and outfights everyone as if he's already read the script. And an old woman - who seems silly and weak and caught up in the web of politeness, but who proves consistently to be the only one as smart as he is...

Kurosawa Imagery

Just a quick little follow up to my previous Japanese cinematography post - this time, devoted completely to the "other" Kurosawa.

Who can give you those showy compositions and angles:



Neat depth of field:



And adds some fun editing tricks as well:




And meaning through images:



And doing it all in deliberately difficult circumstances - action scenes shot through obstacles, in the rain and dark - depth of focus in the dark, take your pick:

A Shot from Rashomon

As promised, here's a long bit of geekiness for the Kurosawa blogathon. If this looks like an (imperfectly) edited down version of a paper for school, it is, I assure you.

I want to write primarily about one shot: at the end of the Samurai's tale (told by a medium) - where we see the woodcutter and priest sitting in the background, and see - well - this:



The medium relays the samurai's claim that, after he was dead, someone crept on him and removed the dagger from his heart. Who could that be?

The conceit of the film (which it is famous for) is that it is the same incident told four times, by the participants and a witness. There is a frame story, in which a priest and the woodcutter who witnessed the events tell the stories to a traveler during a storm at Rashomon gate. They have witnessed the trial, where the stories are told, and are perplexed by it all. Kurosawa cuts back and forth between the ruined gate, the court, and the incident itself. In all the scenes at the court, the woodcutter and priest have been visible in the background. They don't do anything in those scenes - the participants tell their stories, answer questions, etc. - the priest and woodcutter just sit and wait.

This shot is different. For a start, Kurosawa cuts in closer - instead of a long shot, with the priest and woodcutter in the background (or a close up of the medium, telling the story) he shoots it so the woodcutter and priest are in the middle distance, the medium something of a frame for them. As she tells the end of the samura's story, we see the woodcutter behind her tensing, blinking, flinching. And when she stops, she collapses out of the frame entirely, leaving Takashi Shimura there alone...



It's an important shot - it sets up the possibility that the woodcutter has been lying so far. But it's interesting for another reason - where does this information come from? Kurosawa cuts from back to Rashomon gate, with the woodcutter pacing back and forth. An immediate reminder that we are seeing things that are being told by the woodcutter and priest (and before them, by the people at the trial.) Everything we see, whether from the trial or the stories told at the trial, is a visualization of something they tell the commoner. Everything in the film, from the trial or the woods, comes from a discreet source within the film. It's true that the camera doesn't take the literal POV of the characters, or even maintains a constant identification with them. Kurosawa often shoots from impossible angles, or uses camera movement that can’t be reduced to the perception of the narrators. There are even subjective shots from someone else’s point of view. During Tajomaru’s story, for example, we see shots of the sky, the sun through the trees, from the woman’s point of view. But, even with these shots, the high angles, the “wrong” points of view show events that are being related by the narrator in the story. The woman’s POV shots of the sky in Tajomaru’s tale show what he thinks she is thinking, not what she is thinking. We never really step outside the perspective of the person telling the story.

Except here. That shot of the woodcutters' reaction at the trial is not something anyone tells anyone else. Neither he nor the priest would mention it - the priest doesn't suspect him, and he certainly isn't going to incriminate himself. On the contrary - this bit inspires him to start telling his own version of the story, with the dagger playing no part. The shot of the woodcutter’s reaction can only come from the director. It cannot be traced to one of the diegetic narrators—it can only come from the author’s narration. There is almost nothing else like that shot in the film, certainly not in the embedded stories. Kurosawa does not let us outside the stories being told - he gives us nothing else to let us judge them, pick between them. Except here. He shows us something only the woodcutter would know, and he wouldn't tell.

Not that he doesn't give his agitation away, back at Rashomon, pacing back and forth and immediately launching into his own "true" version of the story. This version is set up, in a lot of ways, to resolve the story - to show what really happened. We've heard from the three participants in the incident in the grove, all peddling wildly incompatible and self-serving tales. Now we see a version from someone who was not involved. And we get it first hand: the woodcutter himself, not through an intermediary. This increased "realism" is reflected in the style - the sound for example: this is the only embedded story not to use music, sticking to the natural sounds. We are primed to see this as the "real" version of the story - the placement of this version of the story, the style and sound, the woodcutter's agitation at the gate, all seem to privilege it, mark it as being more reliable.

But it's a rhetorical trick - undercut before it starts by that shot of the woodcutter at the trial. Kurosawa sets us up to want a resolution - then sets us up to think one is coming - but gives us just another story, told by an interested party. He's told us that the woodcutter is not exactly a paragon; he's also rather pointedly intervened, giving us, for the first time, information not contained in the embedded stories. And when the woodcutter's story gets going, it soon turns into something different than the What Really Happened account we might expect. The stylistic elements (like the elimination of music) that privilege this section are almost immediately countered by other devices. Kurosawa quickly establishes a pattern of repeating details from the other accounts ironically. We see, again, Tajomaru urging the woman to run away with him - but this time ridiculous, wheedling and trite, promising to reform, like countless outlaws before him. She responds by trying to get the men to fight for her - but this time, she is bitter and ironic herself. Her husband reacts by denouncing and abusing her - which is both very conventional, and mostly a bid to save his neck. Everything becomes more stylized as the section goes on - the acting, the characters’ reactions, the direction. The close ups become more insistent; the geometric patterns (the triangles and ostentatious camera angles) become more intrusive. This builds to the mid-point of the story, when the two men fight. And the film has become almost a straight parody of a swordfighting movie.

There's another post to be written about Kurosawa's use of genre in Rashomon. [Actually, that was the other half of the paper I'm repurposing here.] The four segments of the incident in the grove are told in four different styles - Tajomaru’s version is a chambara, full of adventure and derring-do; the woman's is a melodrama; the samurai's a tragedy/horror story. You hear it in the music: Tajomaru’s story has exciting martial music, with hints of sensuality (the harp that emphasizes the wind that he says started it all). The woman's has that Bolero imitation, giving it an exotic, sensuous, melodramatic, tone. The medium’s trance has Japanese music, drums and chanting, and the rest of the Samurai’s story uses dark, foreboding music suggestive of tragedy or horror. The fourth section doesn't so much resolve the "truth" of the stories that came before as it criticizes and parodies the film genres they represent. (And represent something like the future of Japanese films - it points to the Japanese new wave, which shows a lot of the characteristics noted below.) It sets itself up as a "realistic" alternative to them, but soon becomes more of a parody, a deconstruction, of the earlier versions of the story. The style of this section reminds us of the importance of style throughout the film. It exaggerates the generic elements of the other accounts by parodying them; it underlines the role of music by eliminating it. It emphasizes the compositional and editing patterns used throughout the film by exaggerating them. It repeats shots and set ups - the angle used in the penultimate shot of the sequence, showing the clearing through a web of trees, is a repetition of a setup from Tajomaru’s story, used to frame the first shot showing the three principals together in the frame (in the fateful grove.) The use of such overt devices reminds us of the authorial voice in the film, and reminds us that the filmmakers are also interpreting the story. All the reasons we might give for considering the final version of the story more real than the others come from the director, are all elements of his style.

And back at Rashomon gate, what do we know about the incident? we can't trust the woodcutter's story - we've seen how he reacted to the medium's mention of the dagger, but his story contradicts that detail. The commoner certainly doesn't believe him. But more than figuring out what is happening in the story, I think Kurosawa is pushing at the edges of the nature of fiction. By intervening in the story (with that shot of the woodcutter at the trial), giving us information not related in the film, only to allow the woodcutter to contradict this information; and by making his own manipulation of the material more overt during the woodcutter’s story, Kurosawa makes explicit the ways he, as the narrator of these narratives, is imposing his interpretations on the story as much as the characters. In the end, I think the theme of the film is not so much the lack of a stable truth as it is the inextricable entanglement of narrative and interpretation. Each character presents as truth what they think the story means: and so does Akira Kurosawa. He sets up the woodcutter’s story as a resolution, only to undercut it. He comments on the story through the form and style of the final segment. The moments he privileges - the woodcutter’s reaction at the trial, notably - are themselves formal devices, which serve as much to show his interpretation of the story as to show a reality behind the interpretation.

Kurosawa week

A week of Kurosawa posts have started, hosted by Film Squish. As usual, I've been lazy - but Akira Kurosawa is a director I have written plenty about in the past for various purposes, so I can certainly add my two cents - or dollar fifty - to this endeavor.

He's an odd case - one of the directors I picked up on before I really committed to "cinephilia" as it were. Along with Kubrick and Lynch and Eisenstein, back in the 80s - and my opinion of him eroded a bit when I did really get into film. (Which I wrote about, some, for last spring's Altman blogathon.) But it didn't erode far - I never wavered in my love for Seven Samurai - or High and Low, when I saw that, or Yojimbo and Sanjuro - and when I finally saw it, Stray Dog, which still seems to be an underrated masterpiece - not far off his best films (Seven Samurai and High and Low, with Rashomon in there as well.) I've wavered a lot more about Ikiru and Rashomon and Ran, though they are as likely to count as masterpieces as not.

I find - and this is certainly relevant to my ability to generate prose on the subject - that Kurosawa is, and has always been, one of the most stimulating intellectual directors around. His films are infinitely interesting to think about, to write about, to analyze and play with. For all his powers, though, I am not always convinced by his artistry: his films, even at their (almost) best (not in Seven Samurai or High and Low, anymore), have patches of dullness, slip into stridency, obviousness - he loses control of the material in a lot of his films. But this seldom comes hurts their effectiveness as philosophy - only as art.

As art: I think his strength and weakness is in his synthetic style. He uses everything, all the means at his disposal: long takes, fast cutting, acting, compositions, everything - but he lacks, I think, the sense of timing that the (really really) great directors have. With the very best - the Ozus, Capras, Godards, Mizoguchis, Renoirs of the world - scenes never seem to falter or lag; with Kurosawa, there are quite a few scenes that don't quite work. They feel wrong - too long or too short, repetitive, something like that. He lacked rhythm, sometimes. There are sequences in almost all his films (maybe not at the top) that feel stiff and awkward, too stagy, too static, too posed. He sometimes (and this happens even in High and Low, though I don't remember any in Seven Samurai that don't work) seems too fond of his compositions, careful, meaningful - almost turning them into tableaux. Though one of the interesting effects of this is that the "problem" tends to disappear the closer you look at the films: slow them down, watch them on DVD, jumping around, stopping, slowing, speeding up and so on, and their meaning and function becomes more effective. Again - he rewards analysis more than most of his peers: though perhaps at the expense of the organic flow (as well as some the sheer beauty and surprise) the best of them have.

I'm sorry to seem to dwell on the negative. It isn't negative, quite - it's more of an explanation of why I tend to react to him analytically more than emotionally. He doesn't leave me with a sense of awe - more one of inspiration. And probably an explanation of why I am more likely to write about Ikiru and Rashomon - great films I waver on, and have to convince myself of their greatness, rather than Seven Samurai, which is obvious. In any case, it's late tonight, so I have to leave you with a teaser (and Stanley Cavell is speaking tomorrow, with one of my favorite films of the decade) - but with a week to do it, I should be able to get a couple posts up for this blogathon. Starting with rehashed old papers, edited down to workable lengths - maybe moving beyond that. And of course - I look forward to the wealth of material I hope will appear in this blogathon. Kurosawa was a giant of the film world, and one who has had the great good fortune to be pretty widely available in many formats through the years. I am looking forward to it.