DOSTOEVSKY, KUROSAWA AND THE HEIJI WAR

Akira Kurosawa ( 1910-1998 ) applied Western philosophy to Eastern themes in films that appealed to both worlds, but not always for the same reasons. Kurosawa used a narrative style to recount his stories, a form of cinematic deconstruction that gave a literary and theatrical form to the work. Often, a sense of timelessness is illustrated through an anachronistic assemblage of anecdotes, vignettes, and personal accounts, and deliberate pacing elicits a sense that his stories are unfolding in real-time. The protagonists stories unfold indirectly, in a peripheral manner, enhanced by his use of distancing the cameras from the actors and shooting with telephoto lenses.

Akira Kurosawa, The Lower Depths, 1957

His style contains the kernel of low budget filmmaking done in an excessive, painstaking and detailed manner. He had a tightly woven style, where the scenes follow one another relentlessly, switching abruptly from stillness to action and back again.Kurosawa was a perfectionist. Most of his footage was edited by himself himself and he exerted absolute control over all phases of production.

Comments about rebirth and restitution have been a persistent theme in Kurosawa’s films; and it suggests , along with less tangible influences, the contribution of the director’s early interest in Dostoevsky.Kurosawa read The Idiot and Crime and Punishment over and over again as a youngster. Issues of unresolved despair are common. Often mutual antagonism serves as a parable on the responsibilities of compassion. Kurosawa once said of Dostoevsky, ” I know of no one so compassionate… ordinary people turn their eyes away from tragedy; he looks straight into it”. Kurosawa used cinema as a means of interpreting unresolved despair this often lead to profound reevaluations thhat challenged popular conception; the ambiguity between hero and villain,the subtle similarities between worthless failures and success. There is always a door open for resurrection and rebirth in films about flawed, less than ideal, but good human beings which ran counter to the Japanese tradition of obligatory unhappy endings.

Kurosawa, Ikuru,1952

In the Seven Samurai,also known as The Magnificent Seven, Kurosawa makes apparent that the samurai were fighting only for themselves, fighting for an ideal that those of them who survive came to understand as hollow. the supposed heros were self victimized by an empty, sham heroism fed on ego where the ruling passions are disguised as noble determination and pride.  Samurai and bandits were revealed as one, equally defeated; but the villagers, the enduring people of the world, oblivious to the ”brave” deeds,  planted new rice in the Spring. The film remains Kurosawa’s strongest statement of the moral theme common to all his films, which is that human frailty must be accepted; but not passively , for people may overcome adversity to achieve their own salvation.

Kurosawa, Yojimbo, 1961, Toshiro Mifune

But, aside from the uncanny sense of what audiences wanted, there is a persistent experimental thread running throughout Kurosawa’s work. All of his five films from 1965 to 1985  were potential career-ending gambles, and the Japanese film industry, which was undergoing the first of several transitional periods, was particularly unforgiving toward them.These included Red Beard which took two years to produce so that his actors and sets had the necessary lived-in and used effect that he wanted, and the off-beat unpleasantness of Dodes’ ka-den whose eccentric characters inhabit a garbage dump. Kurosawa was considered so “un-bankable” by Japanese film financiers due to excessive production costs that Kurosawa had to resort to  foreign investment. France’s Serge Silberman financed Ran ( 1985 ) – for what was Kurosawa’s  ultimate statement as an artist, the dauntingly grave transposition of Shakespeare’s King Lear  to medieval Japan. This film stands in Kurosawa’s work as the opera Otelo stands in Verdi’s as a  final, statement of his philosophy and one of the most grand films of the past 25 years.

Kurosawa, Seven Samurai, 1957

One Kurosawa film,The Lower Depths, from 1957,  may be the most consistently underrated.Kurosawa felt emboldened to attempt an adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s play, and it is a major achievement.Not surprisingly, the lack of clear categorization, this inability of the public  to determine the context,and make easy connections, enlists a sense of incomprehension.The juxtapositions were unfamiliar , and rooted in feudal tradition and modern conditions. The historical perspective lifted perception outside the edges of traditional acceptance, making categorization and labelling impossible.

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Kurorosawa, Ran, Tatsuya Nakadai

”With The Lower Depths, Kurosawa found a way to accomplish what had defeated many distinguished filmmakers – namely, how to transpose a stage play to film without betraying either medium. Set entirely within the narrow precincts of a hovel at the bottom of a ravine, with only fleeting glimpses of the world of light above , Kurosawa fearlessly confounds the charge of “staginess” by constantly shifting perspectives, by exploiting his customary use of multiple cameras with a seamless encirclement of the action, subtly intercutting alternating views of a clearly continuous dramatic tableau. Shooting in just three days after 40 days of rehearsals, Kurosawa challenged his splendid ensemble of actors not only with prolonged takes but with an engagement of the action, an unpredictable shuttling between camera angles, which kept them all off balance as to exactly where to focus their performance….Gorky’s play presents a Dostoevskian milieu of downtrodden humanity in a deceptive Chekhovian style. The characters spend all their time either longing for escape – for an undefined, far away “better life” – or else deriding such longing as futile and illusory. Alcohol, which the Actor admits has “poisoned” him, is the only escape for them, and the last scene, in which the remaining tenants (denizens) drink sake and perform an exhuberant musical number without instruments – only their voices –, ends abruptly with the news of the Actor’s suicide. “Idiot!” the gambler grumbles. “He did it to spoil the fun!” ( Dan Harper )

Ikuru is the subtly poignant and heartbreaking story of Kanji Watanabi , a middle aged government bureaucrat who has been diagnosed with terminal gastric cancer. Realizing that he has squandered his life foundering on the morass of trivial existence, he is determined to redeem his wasted life.His first reaction is to spend all his savings on a good time; spending his savings on a wild evening which proves disappointing.In one scene, drunk to the world and cold sober within, he sings, tears running down his cheeks, a faded little song he rememebers from childhood.   He attempts to communicate with his son, who abruptly interrupts him with his own petty grievances. He befriends a young employee  in an attempt to understand her zest for life who in turn, only humors the old man in order to get her exit papers signed. He spends his final days overseeing the construction of a neighborhood playground.Ikuru is a simply told, profoundly moving film about the brevity of life and the search for meaning.

Kurosawa’s obscurities are those implicit in Japanese thought, in the classical Japanese conflict between duty and inclination, which varied somewhat from western interpretations of guilt and sacrifice. He did not subscribe to the Japanese myth of Japanese infallibility, the preference for demi-gods over men, though this led him into the sometimes not quite convincing reliance on the message of hope. Action may define and save a man, but if truth is merely relative, mere hope may not be adequate; just part of the solution. These were the contradictions embedded in Kurosawa’s cinematic philosophy that provided the tension and made most of his work meaningful and provocative.

Kurosawa’s work cannot be considered outside the historical context of Japan under the control of feudal warriors after the Heiji war. A war symbolic of the great, wrenching change Japan underwent in the twelfth century, and it put the country on a different course from the rest of Asia .This is a recurring subtext that anchors Kurosawa as a Japanese artist. The Heiji war was a transition to Feudalism and away from an aristocratic ruling class; a sophisticated aesthetic way of life dominated by literary and artistic expression and gracious living. The shift of control from Emperors and court aristocrats to feudal warriors was completed and is this descent into feudalism which lies at the heart of Kurosawa’s historical introspections, particularly, how this nation was transformed into  a bureaucratic political system within within a basically feudal framework. It was from these seven centuries of Feudal rule that Kurosawa conveyed the sense of duty, drive for achievement,genius for organization and skill in complex personal relations that are associated with Japanese culture today.

Far from having broken with Japanese tradition,Kurosawa made its uniquely Japanese quality undestandable and meaningful within the historical context. The formality of acting style and film structure derives from the classical theater and the elaborate works of photographic beauty are reflections of the stylistic aesthetic of the pre-Heiji period. The cinematic tension arises from the interplay between the aristocratic and feudal periods.