Word: kurosawa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pardon the sermonizing. But Akira Kurosawa's new film is, among other things, a parable about the importance of tradition in holding back the natural tendency toward disorder. Yet the film doesn't play like a parable. Although the boundless agony of the film's finale has a certain invevitability, the characters are not Kurosawa's puppets. Much of Kagemusha is intimate--the scope of the movie does not become apparent until the last half hour. Before that it proceeds matter-of-factly, with a subtle but pervasive irony, the compositions not only beautiful and delicate, but brimming with thematic...
...Kurosawa undercuts the very idea of meaningful action by consistently cutting away from it. His camera looks over the sleeping army when Shingen is mortally wounded (shot, we later discover, by a tubby little sniper who simply into the dark). Before Ieyasu, Singen's snarling enemy, leaps onto a horse, Kurosawa cuts to the smirking face of his servant, and we only hear the man mount and gallop off. The vigorous sound-track, in fact, gives us amplified, overly heroic sounds--thundering hoofbeats, ringing shots, and a lush score by Shinichiro Ikebe that frequently reminds one of Star Wars...
KAGEMUSHA Directed by Akira Kurosawa Screenplay by Akira Kurosawa and Masato...
...27th film by Akira Kurosawa, 70, Kagemusha sounds like tricky, plot-laden political melodrama. Indeed, there is a lot of story here. On the other hand, there is a lot of film here too, more than 2½ hours of it, even in a truncated "international version." The considerable pleasure of Kagemusha tends to be of the stately visual variety. The old master of Japanese cinema (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo) may merely allude to material that in younger hands would be the stuff of a passionate play. But Kurosawa's mood now is autumnal and dispassionate. What really interests...
...also plays the man he is doubling for) grows into his leadership role, acquiring the wisdom that should accompany leadership. In due course he is undone through ironic circumstances. And after that, one must witness the undoing of Shingen's clan through the misrule of his successor. Kurosawa contemplates ruin as he contemplates glory, with an objective thought as to what can be salvaged from disaster in the way of a momentary beauty, the accidental congeries of color and composition that men create as they go about their often bloody affairs. It is not much. But it is clearly...