Word: doomward
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Dates: during 1961-1961
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...structure of the film is stark but never static; Kurosawa impels his drama with demonic drive. From its first frenzied episode of plunging stallions and roaring knights, the film hurtles doomward like a great black boulder flung from a catapult. The spectator scarcely has time to realize, as the images deafen and the noises decorate his imagination, that he is experiencing effects of cinema seldom matched in their headlong masculine power of imagination. Among them...
...seconds, he has chopped a few feet out of the film, patched it together again without transition. The story can still be followed, but at each cut the film jerks ahead with a syncopated impatience that aptly suggests and stresses the compulsive pace of the hero's doomward drive. More subtly, the trick also distorts, rearranges, relativizes time-much as Picasso manipulated space in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. All meaningful continuity is bewildered; the hero lives, like the animal he is, from second to second, kill to kill. A nasty brute. Godard has sent him to hell...
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