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“Akira-san”, I said, “ I must confess that your movies
Throne of Blood and Ran introduced me to Shakespeare. The stories are
compelling, tragic and dark but you masterfully expressed it in the cinemas, in
black and white and in color. In Ran, which is an adaption of King Lear, the
dark , cruel world is expressed in cinematic beauty, highlighted by the colors
of the traditional costumes and the color of blood. Is this more or less how
you see the world?”
Akira-san:
“Tragedy is part of Japanese life which has been frequented
by by earthquakes, tsunamies and wars. The Kanto earthquake was a terrifying
experience for me, and also an extremely important one. Through it I learned
not only of the extraordinary powers of nature, but extraordinary things that
lie in human hearts. The Edogawa river had raised its bottom and showed new
islands of mud. The whole district was
veiled in a dancing, swirling dust whose grayness gave the sun a pallor like
that during an eclipse. The people who stood to the left and right of me in
this scene looked for all the world like fugitives from hell, and the whole
landscape took on a bizarre and eerie aspect. I stood holding on to one of the
young cherry trees planted along the banks of the river, and I was still
shaking as I gazed out over the scene, thinking, "This must be the end of
the world."
I said:
“ In the Throne of Blood, which is an adaption of Macbeth,
there is a scene with the piles of human skeletons forming little mountains. Is
this how it looks like in the aftermath of the Kanto earthquake?”
Akira-san:
“When the earthquake had died down, my brother Heigo brought
me to look at the ruins. The burned landscape for as far as the eye could see
had a brownish red color. It looked like a red desert. In the conflagration
everything made of wood had been turned to ashes, which now occasionally
drifted upward in the breeze. Amid this expanse of nauseating redness lay every
kind of corpse imaginable. When I involuntarily
looked away, Heigo scolded me, "Akira, look carefully now." I failed
to understand my brother's intentions and could only resent his forcing me to
look at these awful sights. The worst was when we stood on the bank of the
red-dyed Sumidagawa River and gazed at the throngs of corpses pressed against
its shores. I felt my knees give way as I started to faint, but my brother
grabbed me by the collar and propped me up again. He repeated, "Look
carefully, Akira." I resigned myself to gritting my teeth and looking.
Later he said "If you shut your eyes to a frightening
sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at every-thing straight on,
there is nothing to be afraid of." Looking back on that excursion now, I
realize that it must have been horrifying for my brother too. It had been an
expedition to conquer fear. “
I said:
“You once said that your brother Heigo has a great influence
in your interest in cinemas. How did he influence you? “
Akira-san:
“Heigo was a professional silent-film narrator. The
narrators not only recounted the plot of the films, they enhanced the emotional
content by performing the voices and sound effects and providing evocative
descriptions of the events and images on the screen— much like the narrators of
the Bunraku puppet theater. The most popular narrators were stars in their own
right, solely responsible for the patronage of a particular theater. Under the
leadership of the famous narrator Tokugawa Musei, a completely new movement was
under way. He and a group of like-minded narrators stressed high-quality
narration of well-directed foreign films.
In matters of both film and literature I owe much to my
brother's discernment. He was addicted to Russian literature. But at the same
time he wrote under various pen names for film programs. He wrote in particular
about the art of the foreign cinema, which was much promoted following the
First World War. I took special care to see every film my brother recommended.
As far back as elementary school I walked all the way to Asakusa to see a movie
he had said was good.”
I said:
“What happened then when the cinema transitioned silent
movies into sound movies?”
Akira-san:
“As the silent films went out, so did the need for the
narrators, and Heigo's livelihood was struck a terrible blow. At first all
seemed well because by this time my brother was chief narrator at a first-run
movie house, the Taikatsukan in Asakusa, where he had his own following.
Then it had now become clear that all foreign movies would
henceforth be sound movies, and theaters that showed them decided as a
universal policy that they no longer needed narrators. The narrators were to be
fired en masse, and, hearing this, they went on strike. My brother, as leader
of the strikers, had a very difficult time.”
I said:
“As what has happened, the transformation of cinema is
inevitable, from silent to sound, from black and white to colors, and from
celluloid to digital.”
Akira-san:
“In the midst of this, one day we heard of my brother's
attempted suicide. I believe the cause was his painful position as leader of
the narrators' strike, which had failed. My brother seemed to be resigned to
the fact that narrators would no longer be needed when film technology
progressed to the point of including sound. Since he knew it was a losing
battle, the fact that he had to accept the leadership of the strike must have
been indescribably painful for him.”
I said:
“ Didn’t he told your mother that he would die before he
reached the age of thirty?”
Akira-san:
“My brother had always said that. He claimed that when human
beings lived past thirty, all they did was come uglier and meaner, so he had no
intention of doing so. I had made light of my brother's words, but a few months
after I had assuaged my mother's fears in this way, my brother was dead. Just
as he had promised, he died without reaching the age of thirty. At twenty-seven
he committed suicide.”
I said:
“Some people said you're just like your brother. But he was
negative and you're positive. You have made good black and white as well as
good color movies, you are the first Japanese movie director receiving
international acclaim.”
Akira-san:
“That time Japanese films all tend to be rather bland in
flavor, like green tea over rice. I watched a woman read a book throughout the
Japan home-grown movie. Japanese films have lost their youth, vigor and high
aspiration. Movies . . . look like the work of tired, old men, who make petty
judgments, have dried-up feelings, and whose hearts are clogged.”
I said:
“Your first international acclaim is
Rashomon which received Golden Lion in Venice Film Festival in 1951. Set in 11th
century Japan, a time of fire, earthquake, pestilence, banditry, war. A period
when the country’s central government were being undermined by the growth of
political and military powers. There were rebellions, fires, earthquakes and
violent crime in the capital city. It was a period where it appeared to be the
end of the law, and the country is on the brink of disaster.
The movie opens at the Rashomon Gate,
the main gate to the city of Kyoto. The gate is in ruins, and so is the city as
well. The rain in black and white
gashing down the Rashomon Gate paints a bleak picture of the world. The destroyed
gate, its apparent grand scale and strong foundation reduced to utter ruins. The
clothing of the men is ragged, dark, dirty
and wet.”
Akira-san:
“The film goes into
the depths of the human heart as if with a surgeon’s scalpel, laying bare its dark complexities and
bizarre twists. These strange impulses of the human heart would be expressed
through the use of an elaborately fashioned play of light and shadow. Light and
shadow, represents not only good and evil, but also rationality and
impulsiveness. The introductory section in particular, which leads the viewer
through the light and shadow of the forest into a world where the human heart
loses its way, was truly magnificent camera work by Miyagawa Kazuo.”
I said:
“The story and the
characters are interesting, involving various characters providing subjective,
alternative, self-serving and contradictory versions of the same murder
incident. Through an ingenious use of camera and flashbacks, you reveals the
complexities of human nature as four people recount different versions of the
story of a samurai's murder and the rape
of his wife.”
Akira-san:
“Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about
themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script
portrays such human beings the
kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better than
they really are. The characters deceive even themselves; they refuse to face or
acknowledge the truth because they fear it. The commoner’s standpoint is that all men and women are like
this, and it is a property of mankind to lie and embellish reality even to
itself. As the priest said, if men dont
trust each other, this earth might as well be hell.”
“ At the end there is the scene of an abandoned
baby whom was crying loudly. At first we
did not understand how did this baby arrive at Rashomon gate, out of the blue. Later I found from readings that other than
being a place to abandoned corpses the Rashomon gate also became known as a
place where people abandoned unwanted babies. Then I can appreciate that this scene is not
as out of place as some people thought.”
Akira-san:
“We see the
Woodcutter accept the abandoned infant to take the child home to be cared for,
although he is poor and already has 6 children. This symbolizes the man
choosing to do what’s good. This is important because the Woodcutter for the
entire film to this point has merely stood by, choosing not to be a participant
in what he sees, “I didn’t want to get involved”, he says. By choosing to take the
child he gives hope to the priest that man is good and that the world does not
belong to the selfish.”
This is an imaginary interview in memory of Akira Kurosawa.
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