Word: kurosawa
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...mythic birth and noble retelling, and we are far from the inert reverence of the typical movie adaptation of a classic. Indeed, in Ran (which means "chaos" in Japanese) we venture into a territory where the very word adaptation distorts and diminishes both intention and accomplishment. For what Akira Kurosawa has done is to reimagine Lear in terms of his own philosophy, which blends strains of Western existentialism with a sort of elegiac Buddhism, and the imperatives of the movies. If Shakespeare's poetry enters the mind through the ear, Kurosawa's enters it through the eye. But the imagery...
...impulse, and you may only bring forth empty images, beautiful and static. It is on the ground that lies between melodrama and abstraction that the most haunting figures in film history--Griffith, Eisenstein and Abel Gance among them--have both lost themselves and found themselves. It is this terrain Kurosawa confidently bestrides...
...source of his triumph is his viewpoint. Great tragic figures generally demand close-ups as a divine right, so that the audience can read the play of noble emotions in their features. In Ran, that shot scarcely exists. Kurosawa's cameras (he usually covers each scene with three) are always pulled back into godlike positions, and they provide a new perspective on the rages and the ultimate madness of Tatsuya Nakadai's Lear figure. From above and beyond, we perceive him not as a great man falling but as a fragile, all too human stumbler. Distance lends an analogous irony...
...Kurosawa visualizes his great battle scenes similarly. They begin in heartbreaking beauty, the banners and uniforms of the soldiers vivid against the dark ground where they maneuver for position in patterns as stylized as chess moves. This naturally intensifies the horror of the ensuing carnage, the mad tangle of flailing, falling bodies, of spurting blood and hacked-off limbs, in which the question of whether a man lives or dies is entirely a matter of chance. In what is perhaps his greatest coup, Kurosawa plays much of the film's central battle in a total silence infinitely more terrifying than...
...veteran star of 126 films and Japan's most famous actor, but Toshiro Mifune, 63, is still known to American audiences by only a handful of movies, among them Kurosawa's Rashomon and the TV mini-series ShŌgun. In spite of his relatively low profile in the U.S.-or perhaps because of it-Mifune was honored last week at the Japan Society in Manhattan, which was beginning an eight-week-long, 40-film retrospective of his work. He surprised his New York audience by appearing at the gala opening in the costume yabusame, a centuries...