Word: kurosawa
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...AKIRA KUROSAWA'S DREAMS Directed and Written by Akira Kurosawa...
Death has always haunted Akira Kurosawa. How we face it and evade it, how we sometimes embrace it, and how we are sometimes granted temporary reprieves from it -- these are matters he has taken up in almost all his movies, no matter what their other preoccupations...
That death therefore haunts his Dreams, his 28th film, is not surprising. In the first of these eight short narratives -- all, according to the great director, drawn from incidents and images of his sleep -- a child, obviously the young Kurosawa, is introduced to the idea of mortality. On a day both sunny and rainy, his mother warns him not to leave the house. In such weather foxes hold their weddings, and they take a terrible vengeance on those who spy on their secret ceremonies. Of course, the boy must see this woodland spectacle (wonderfully realized by masked dancers...
...final episode, a lovely pastoral set in a village of water mills, a 103-year-old man explains the secret of longevity to the figure (Akira Terao) who is Kurosawa's surrogate in six of these tales. In essence, he tells him to live in harmony with nature, avoiding the tempting conveniences of technology. But the night is so dark without electricity, the young man complains. "It's supposed to be dark," says the old fellow, who is last seen benignly dancing in a funeral procession...
...flourishes in Tokyo is even cleaner and more utopian. Yet even as the Japanese version reproduces virtually every feature of its American models, it turns them into something entirely Japanese. Melvin, Buff and Max, the antlered commentators at the Country Bear Jamboree, speak in the grave basso profundos of Kurosawa samurai. Alice in Wonderland has Oriental features. Frontierland has been turned into Westernland ("The Japanese don't like frontiers," explains a park official), and Main Street has become the World Bazaar...