Late Kurosawa and Greek Drama

[Michael Kerpan]

> I don't get the hate I've read here for Shinishiro Itebe's Western-sounding music (added for context)

Some of us simply don't care for Kurosawa's post-Mifune artistic "vision" (including music). You needn't share our opinion -- but we will continue to hold it, regardless of your disagreement.

;~} (added -- because I forgot to include it initially)

[Camera Obscura]

Some of us simply don't care for Kurosawa's post-Mifune artistic "vision" (including music). You needn't share our opinion -- but we will continue to hold it, regardless of your disagreement.

Who is "we" ?

Do you speak for all the good folks in New England?

[Michael Kerpan]

Do you speak for all the good folks in New England?

No -- only for those (wherever we may live) who are not enamored of Kagemusha.

[bdsweeney]

Some of us simply don't care for Kurosawa's post-Mifune artistic "vision" (including music). You needn't share our opinion -- but we will continue to hold it, regardless of your disagreement.

Has someone offended you?

[Tommaso]

Hmmm.... the dislike of post-Mifune Kurosawa seems rather widespread here. I never understood it, but am of course willing to accept it. I just don't like the way you put 'vision' in inverted commas, Michael. You may not like his vision, but it is very obvious that Kurosawa had a vision in these films, and it is just as worked out and profound as in his earlier films.

[colinr0380]

Agreed, just looking at those paintings shows an idea that had been gestating for a long time and the way some of the sequences in Kagemusha are captured are absolutely astounding.

I would probably agree with the 'dry run for Ran' comment, but only partially. To me Kagemusha feels like a logistical preparation for the even more impressive Ran, a film which even more elaborate set pieces versus the deliberate evasion of spectacle in the earlier film. But that shouldn't mean we discount Kagemusha entirely as a preparatory exercise, rather I like to think of Kurosawa's two 80s films about the end of a clan as a matched pair - one historical and one literary adaptation and while one narrows events down to the effects on one person's psyche of replacing a leader and their relationship to clan and loyalty, the other is full of grand gestures and characters as archetypes.

[Michael Kerpan]

Hmmm.... the dislike of post-Mifune Kurosawa seems rather widespread here. I never understood it, but am of course willing to accept it. I just don't like the way you put 'vision' in inverted commas, Michael. You may not like his vision, but it is very obvious that Kurosawa had a vision in these films, and it is just as worked out and profound as in his earlier films.

Sorry if I was unclear -- vision was in quotes because I was including the music (which is not usually considered something visual). ;~}

Yes -- I would never disagree with the notion that late Kurosawa expresses a fairly definite artistic viewpoint, but it is one which I (generally) find very unappealing, especially when compared to his previous work. If he had only made these films, he probably would not even get a spot in my top 50 Japanese directors list.

[HerrSchreck]

If he had only made these films, he probably would not even get a spot in my top 50 Japanese directors list.

Nor anyone else's I daresay. I'm with you on this MK until the walls come tumbling down. Visually resplendent in some places, but-- one of many complaints viz his work in this era-- his sense of subtlety completely deserted him. PLaintive obviousness is for atomic age monster movies, not Japanese widescreen arthouse.

(Ducks)..

[Michael Kerpan]

The much maligned Rhapsody In August has lots of wonderful (and subtle) moments -- but then AK spoils it with a ridiculous ending. Sigh.

Still, I (much) prefer RiA to Ran and Kagemusha.

[Tommaso]

The much maligned Rhapsody In August has lots of wonderful (and subtle) moments -- but then AK spoils it with a ridiculous ending. Sigh.

I'm with you here, though I find Richard Gere the greatest annoyance in the film. But yes, the ending is even more preachy than we are used to from some other Kurosawa films.

PLaintive obviousness is for atomic age monster movies,
not Japanese widescreen arthouse.

(Ducks)..

Perhaps I have a different conception of obviousness, but I don't find "Ikiru" or "I live in fear" so much less obvious or less plaintive than "Ran", I'm afraid. You might argue that the main characters of these earlier films still are basically characters, and that you identify them with Kurosawa's viewpoint at your own risk, whereas in "Ran" - as Colin has indicated above, basically - the personnel is indeed a group of 'archetypal' figures, set in motion to convey an expression of Kurosawa's world view at the time as if they were figures on a chessboard. Same already for "Dodeska'den", in my view, though perhaps less convincingly realised. I often think that "Kagemusha" and, to a greater degree, "Ran", are deliberately 'archaic', in the sense that Greek drama appears to us now. But the 'grandiosity' of these films has no relation to the 'modern' grandiosity of Hollywood-style history films; the large canvas is not used to draw us in, but rather to keep us at a distance and to ponder about what we see. We don't 'feel' for Hidetora like we do for Shimura's character in "Ikiru", but we are in awe and terror about what we see is happening to him (and caused by him, partly).

But that's just a different type of filmmaking, then, which I wouldn't rate higher or lower than the 'characters as fully realised characters" approach in his earlier films. At least not if the results are equally mindblowing, though in different ways (and I can't see such a large difference between "Throne of Blood" and "Ran" anyway).

I do find the three very late films somewhat problematic,too, because they tend to be sentimental; but again they are flawlessly realised (with the mentioned exception of casting Gere), and beautiful to behold; and sometimes this is enough for making a film worthwhile, even if the director is Kurosawa.

[Michael Kerpan]

I found Gere far less annoying in Rhapsody than I expected. Ultimately he wasn't all that important a character -- compared to Grandma and the Kids. And his character was, by design, rather doofus-esque.

[HerrSchreck]

Perhaps I have a different conception of obviousness, but I don't find "Ikiru" or "I live in fear" so much less obvious or less plaintive than "Ran", I'm afraid. You might argue that the main characters of these earlier films still are basically characters, and that you identify them with Kurosawa's viewpoint at your own risk, whereas in "Ran" - as Colin has indicated above, basically - the personnel is indeed a group of 'archetypal' figures, set in motion to convey an expression of Kurosawa's world view at the time as if they were figures on a chessboard. Same already for "Dodeska'den", in my view, though perhaps less convincingly realised.

Well you've partially set in motion the aspect that explains what you see as a contradiction by talking about the issue of statement blatancy (quote unquote), and the aspect of real characters vs simply glyphs.

The truth is that Kurosawa was always prone to overstating.. but Ikiru is far from my favorite AK film; so the invoking of his most roaringly obvious b&w films does little to minimize the difference-- that terribly obvious difference-- in the kind of cinema on display pre and post Redbeard.

When I say "plaintive obviousness" I don't only mean hammering home his moral theme. The themes in all of his films have a tendency to be driven to the splitting point. What I feel deserted him was his immense skill in rendering incidental detail, of understanding the tenets of storytelling pace, in how to communicate the spiritual essence of natural places-- wind, rain, water, fog, the subtle effect of birds chirping on the soundtrack while light trickles down through leaves, of human beings experiencing fear, exacting vengeance, elucidating frustration, .. of setting these elements off in combination at flagging and increasing tempos, potentiated by the punctuation of mood, etc. His palette was beautiful in many of these films.

In his post-Dodes films he seems to abandon the terrain of the natural world for an overblown artifice that is nice to look at, and in narrative terms has moved to a place that reads clumsy to me. B&W Kurosawa's shots for the most part, as beautiful as they are, are rarely lingered upon (although they are often very lovely)-- in fact they're often tossed off like they're nothing at all. The self-consciousness of his later cinema feels very stilted and for me ineffective-- to me his talent was never in the zone of expressionism or artifice. As far as the tales themselves go, the transformation of his characters from breathing human beings to pawns on a narrative chessboard-- this is all part of the higher volume nature of his later films. The loss of skilled co-writers like Shinobu Hashimoto was a big problem for me.

[Mr Sausage]

the aspect of real characters vs simply glyphs.

the transformation of his characters from breathing human beings to pawns on a narrative chessboard

I don't know that this kind of rhetorical imbalance is accurate. You describe the one in high and positive terms ("real" and "breathing," ie. possessing life and genuineness), but you describe the other in deliberately low and dismissive terms (they are "simply" glyphs, ie. a reduction to the uncomplicated; or "pawns" on a chessboard rather than, say, kings and knights, which would be more appropriate). You've set up a high vs low distinction that I don't feel is helpful.

Regardless of one's preference--and one may reasonably prefer one to the other--Kurosawa's later characters are not failures of representation or reductions of real characters. There is nothing small or slight about them: they are grand embodiments. They are not "breathing human beings" because they are supposed to be larger and grander than regular humans beings, to the point of becoming perhaps archetypes, or at the very least the embodiment of comprehensive states of human emotion at its highest. They should be understood on the same level as Achilles, or Odysseus, or Oedipus, in terms of characterization, rather than as simple or lifeless. Their more-than-human quality does not make them less complex as characters any more than Achilles' or Odysseus' more-than-human quality makes them, somehow, less complex as characters. It's a different mode, but not necessarily a lesser one, whatever your preference.

[HerrSchreck]

the aspect of real characters vs simply glyphs.

the transformation of his characters from breathing human beings to pawns on a narrative chessboard

I don't know that this kind of rhetorical imbalance is accurate. You describe the one in high and positive terms ("real" and "breathing," ie. possessing life and genuineness), but you describe the other in deliberately low and dismissive terms (they are "simply" glyphs, ie. a reduction to the uncomplicated; or "pawns" on a chessboard rather than, say, kings and knights, which would be more appropriate). You've set up a high vs low distinction that I don't feel is helpful..

It's absolutely helpful and accurate-- it's helpful and accurate in getting across to you how I feel about the film. I'm not trying to say, for example, that one form of character rendering vs another (or narrative style) is "better" in and of itself vs another (surely you know this); what I'm saying is that I have an opinion regarding the kind of character development I think is better suited to AK's skills as a storyteller. It's the effect of his storytelling skills on these narrative styles-- not the styles themselves.

And in your response to his storytelling in these films, you're fully entitled to disagree.

They should be understood on the same level as Achilles, or Odysseus, or Oedipus, in terms of characterization, rather than as simple or lifeless.

Lol I know what AK is trying to do with these tales. The tales wear their pedigree on their sleeves-- scream them to the heavens. The problem for me is that I think he fails wholly.

[Michael Kerpan]

I find Homer's Achilles and Odysseus (or Sophocles' Oedipus) far more "real" than any of Kurosawa's late film archetypes. This is one reason I find Homer and the great Athenian dramatists so appealing. With all due respect, Late Kurosawa is not remotely within the same realm.

Bottom line, I dislike archetypes in my plays, operas, movies, novels (and so on).

[Mr Sausage]

I'm saying is that I have an opinion regarding the kind of character development I think is better suited to AK's skills as a storyteller.

Yes, unfortunately you phrased it as tho' the mode in general was the problem, being a step down from the usual, rather than being unsuited to Kurosawa's skills, as you say. But you raise an interesting notion in your earlier post:

What I feel deserted him was his immense skill in rendering incidental detail, of understanding the tenets of storytelling pace, in how to communicate the spiritual essence of natural places-- wind, rain, water, fog, the subtle effect of birds chirping on the soundtrack while light trickles down through leaves, of human beings experiencing fear, exacting vengeance, elucidating frustration, .. of setting these elements off in combination at flagging and increasing tempos, potentiated by the punctuation of mood, etc. His palette was beautiful in many of these films.

You're absolutely right about all of the above: in an earlier Kurosawa film clouds would be an incidental part of the landscape observed by Kurosawa's camera, but in Ran clouds are neither incidental nor really clouds: they are portents, symbols, part of the machinery of the film's meaning. What's interesting is how that very tendency in late Kurosawa makes these films far closer to his revered Dostoevsky, who was never much interested in the incidental details of life or nature, than any of the movies he'd made until then.

I wonder if the more Kurosawa's eyesight waned the more he retreated into purely imaginative worlds.

I find Homer's Achilles and Odysseus (or Sophocles' Oedipus) far more "real" than any of Kurosawa's late film archetypes. This is one reason I find Homer and the great Athenian dramatists so appealing. With all due respect, Late Kurosawa is not remotely within the same realm.

Well, whether it comes off or not is another matter. I was only concerned with placing Kurosawa's characterizations in their proper mode. I wouldn't actually say Kagemusha is a comparable artistic acheivement to the Iliad.

Bottom line, I dislike archetypes in my plays, operas, movies, novels (and so on).

They're rather impossible to avoid. But I'm curious: how can you dislike archetypes and yet like Sophocles and co. The characters in those plays were so archetypal that they were represented on stage by masks with a giant emotion etched on them rather than by an actual human face, to say nothing of the fact that the plays all deal in myth, which is the most archetypal genre of...anything.

[knives]

I find Homer's Achilles and Odysseus (or Sophocles' Oedipus) far more "real" than any of Kurosawa's late film archetypes. This is one reason I find Homer and the great Athenian dramatists so appealing. With all due respect, Late Kurosawa is not remotely within the same realm.

Bottom line, I dislike archetypes in my plays, operas, movies, novels (and so on).

I'll agree with this and go so far as to say Homer and all the rest were able to work with archetypes as people, possibly because they weren't trying to make Odysseus 'modern day neurotics', but they were able to make these archetypes people. While the goals were smaller Lucas was able to use archetypes and still have them be people in the first Star Wars movies. Even Kurosawa did so in Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Seven Samurai, and many more. It just feels to me that Kurosawa in these later films didn't feel the need to go beyond the archetype, but was unwilling to change his stories to fit this new sensibility. Salo was working in less then archetype,yet still feels successful because Passolini was making a story that allowed these non-characters to exist. Kurosawa just wanted to make the same stories, with different characters.

[Michael Kerpan]

But I'm curious: how can you dislike archetypes and yet like Sophocles and co. The characters in those plays were so archetypal that they were represented on stage by masks with a giant emotion etched on them rather than by an actual human face, to say nothing of the fact that the plays all deal in myth, which is the most archetypal genre of...anything.

Well, to tell the truth, I prefer Euripides to Sophocles. But all of the great Athenian dramatists used myths to tell human stories (at one level or another). They did not turn human stories into myths.

Moreover, the wearing of masks in ancient Greek drama no more deprived characters of their individuality than it does in Noh theater in Japan. It takes more than a mask to turn a live character into an abstracted archetype.

[Mr Sausage]

Well, to tell the truth, I prefer Euripides to Sophocles. But all of the great Athenian dramatists used myths to tell human stories (at one level or another). They did not turn human stories into myths.

Very well put, Michael, and that is no doubt true. But it is not where their greatness lies. There is still something powerful and wonderful in the mythmaking faculty, which is part of why John Ford is such an attractive movie maker. But as to Kurosawa, I don't think he is trying to be a mythmaker with any of his movies, let alone Kagemusha and Ran. However grand the emotions run, I still feel he is attempting some kind of human story. You feel he fails, and I have far too much respect for your knowledge and opinions on the subject of Japanese cinema to make any sort of argument with you.

Moreover, the wearing of masks in ancient Greek drama no more deprived characters of their individuality than it does in Noh theater in Japan. It takes more than a mask to turn a live character into an abstracted archetype.

Talking about "individuality" in terms of the ancient Greeks is problematic because they had a completely different and alien view of self-hood than we do. For starters, they did not conceive of the human self as being internal. There was no such thing. Your individuality was created in the community, among other Greeks, not alone by yourself. You did not understand your 'self' as being apart from how you were seen: your identity came from your actions and from the actions of your parents and their parents and the household (oikos) to which they belonged. There was no sense of having an internal, private self-hood. There were no internal beliefs: whether you personally believed in the Gods was irrelevant, you were simply expected to perform the rituals and that was the extent of your spiritual self; the word atheist meant not a person who did not believe in the Gods, but a person so outrageous that the Gods had forsaken him. Ancient Greece was an external culture, a shame culture. There was no personal best, or meeting your own goals: in the Olympics there was no second or third place, you were either the winner and treated like a hero, or the loser and had to sneak home in the dark for shame. There was no reading silently to oneself: there is a story that Alexander the Great received a message in his camp, and his onlookers were astonished to see him read it silently. The evidence suggests that the Greeks did not understand reading as a silent activity going on in one's head, but outloud (fits an oral culture), and that libraries were noisy places.

Greek masks did not deprive characters of their individuality (in fact, I recommend picking up a copy of Anne Carson's recent book of translations, An Oresteia, which constructs the Oresteia out of three separate playwrites: Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Elektra, and Euripedies' Orestes. The plays and her headnotes really highlight, I found, the way each writer constructed their own unique versions of the template). The masks are the character's individuality. There is no internal emotion, no internal character: the mask externalizes the character and their emotions, as do the words of the play: everything is laid in the open, each wail (and the Greeks had very specific sounds for certain kinds of wails), each speech, there is nothing, no bit of the character, that is not played before the audience. And then there is the problem of fate.

I love the Greek dramatists, and I would gladly spend a lifetime studying them, but when reading them one has to realize: they wrote 2000 years before the invention of humanism.

[colinr0380]

And there I was thinking of ending my last post with the easy but perhaps unfair zinger that at least we could all agree on Richard Gere in Rhapsody In August, who turns up for the obligatory "Hey, it's Richard Gere and he's stumbling through some Japanese!" scene to please the money men and then almost entirely disappears from the film! (Though it has been fourteen years since I last saw it, in the BBCs season of programmes and films on the 50th anniversay of Hiroshima, so I may be hazily recalling his performance or missed some metaphorical purpose behind the Japanese-American character drifting around in the background in a little bubble separate from the other characters).

I would also feel that these are just films from an alternative viewpoint rather than a complete break from the past as it may seem. Many of the themes were present in the earlier films, except that in the earlier films there was a focus on indviduals being able to have some effect on their environment and be able to change their circumstances somewhat. I think the reason why Red Beard is my favourite Kurosawa film is that it neatly straddles the line previous 'heroic' films and the later 'didactic' ones (and even that makes a good matched pair with Rashomon, which is perhaps the most pessimistic of all Kurosawa's films that I've seen - with a truly cynical view of 'human nature' and individual perception being purely self interested).

In the later films predetermined fate seems to hang over all the characters (the double will be unmasked sooner or later - it just happens it was sooner than hoped for) once the events are set in motion by human hubris, and a lot of the pleasure I get from the 80s films comes from seeing people knowing that they are trapped in a downward spiral but unable to do anything other than play out their parts or in Lady Kaede's case in Ran capitalise on it for revenge before her own inevitable comeuppance.

They are not films where the audience is overwhelmed by the shock of the events but by sorrow for the inevitability of them, a feeling that can only grow on repeat viewings. We do not care so much for invidiuals and their small heroics (saving a town from bandits for another year; building a playground; treating patients etc) but for the more abstract concepts of a whole structure of society disappearing mainly brought about by bad decision making by its ruling classes (Rather than feeling Kagemusha is a paen to the ruling elite I feel it is rather more ironic, suggesting that the role of a leader is relatively simple and could be performed by anyone as long as you perform the right rituals and keep the chair warm at battles to be an inspiration. The figurehead is needed for show but the less power they have the more power the people behind the throne can wield. Once that inspirational figurehead is gone though, so is morale)

[Michael Kerpan]

I make no judgment on the "artistry" of Ran or Kagemusha. I don't think these were too popular in Japan when released, but neither the general lack of enthusiasm then -- or even my disapproval -- affects the value of the films. My rejection of them comes from the fact that -- good or great or otherwise -- I simply don't have any appetite for cinematic mythologizing (whether done by Kurosawa -- or Mizoguchi or anyone else). I like films that present very particularized depictions of characters (and leave any abstracting to one's own brain, usually to be performed after the fact).

In any event -- and for whatever the reason -- I see little similarity between what Kurosawa does in these two late films and what the Athenians did. And I love the latter -- and not the former. Such is life. ;~}

(I re-read all (or most) of Euripides every 2-3 years -- alll the others have to make do with a longer re-visitation schedule).

[Tommaso]

It's absolutely helpful and accurate-- it's helpful and accurate in getting across to you how I feel about the film. I'm not trying to say, for example, that one form of character rendering vs another (or narrative style) is "better" in and of itself vs another (surely you know this); what I'm saying is that I have an opinion regarding the kind of character development I think is better suited to AK's skills as a storyteller. It's the effect of his storytelling skills on these narrative styles-- not the styles themselves.

That's interesting, but I'm not sure whether I get the particulars of your point of view here. Why exactly (or just an example) do you think the 'mythical mode' - for lack of a better word- clashes with Kurosawa's storytelling skills? I know, the absence of the 'details' and the empathy for nature, as you've pointed out already; I'm not sure whether Kurosawa would not have been able to include such aspects in these later films as well (he surely has them in the last three films, though, but then these are again in a different style). But unlike Michael in his post above you don't seem to be against that mode per se; so why doesn't it work for you here, whereas I suppose it works for you in "Die Nibelungen", for instance. I always regarded "Ran" and the Lang film as not dissimilar at all, both thematically and directionwise. And in "Die Nibelungen" you have the 'characters on the chessboard of fate'-theme layed out as in few other films.

And Colin, I think your words in your last post are spot-on; not just on "Kagemusha" and "Ran", but also on Gere. "Stumbling through" hits the nail, I'd say; and I don't think it's just his role and the insecurities of the character he plays; I find that whole performance utterly wooden in an uninteresting way. I cannot recall other Gere films I may or may not have seen, but if that's an average performance by the guy I really wonder how he could get so famous; unless it's only his good looks, of course.

[HerrSchreck]

Talking about "individuality" in terms of the ancient Greeks is problematic because they had a completely different and alien view of self-hood than we do. For starters, they did not conceive of the human self as being internal. There was no such thing. Your individuality was created in the community, among other Greeks, not alone by yourself. You did not understand your 'self' as being apart from how you were seen: your identity came from your actions and from the actions of your parents and their parents and the household (oikos) to which they belonged. There was no sense of having an internal, private self-hood... There is no internal emotion, no internal character:

I'm far from a Greek scholar, and it's been some time since I've read the texts in question, but wouldn't you say that this is somewhat of an exaggeration, Sausage? Or at least a mistake to extend this description of Greek narrative to Euripides in particular? There is of course much to support what you say as far as the narrative paradigm as it existed in the time and place in question is concerned. But in the case of Euripides (every time I hear his name I think of a really dry joke my dad told me & my bros when I was about eight years old, involving the great writer, and a tailor.. Euripides is bringing his best weekend disco duds to an Italian tailor for a stitchup after a slight tear, and the joke ends with the Italian tailor saying-- the prognosticator must affect a real NYC Italo-immigrant accent-- "You-rippa-dese, I fixxa dese..".. rain of tomatoes.), I'd say that the above is not true. To quote any of many references:

Euripides's plays caused great controversy from mythodology, just as other playwrights did, but shocked audienceces by representing them as real people instead of symbolic heroes. He tried to show what it would be like for real people to find themselves in the extreme circumstances of the mythological stories that were so familiar.
Writing Structure and Theme
Euripides is primarily known for having reshaped the formal structure of the traditional tragic plays by showing strong women characters and intelligent slaves. He also satirized many heroes of Greek mythology.

The plays of Euripides seem modern when compared with those of his contemporaries as he focused on inner lives and the motives of his characters were much considered unknown to Greek audiences. His best plays have a strong, passionate woman as the central character. Medea is an example.

Wiki:

Euripides has been compared to Rousseau in being too modern for his time. Euripides focused on the realism of his characters; for example, Euripides’ Medea is a realistic woman with recognizable emotions and is not simply a villain. In Hippolytus, Euripides writes in a particularly modern style, using the theater to demonstrate how neither language nor sight (the main elements of theater) aids in understanding in a civilization on its last leg. Euripides makes his point about vision both through the plot (Phaedra makes repeated references to her inability to see clearly and her wish to have her eyes covered), and through the sparseness of his staging, which lacked the dazzling elements that other plays often had. The same was true of his commentary on the use of language. The misuse of words played an important role in the storyline (Phaedra's letter, the nurse's betrayal of Phaedra's secret, Hippolytus' refusal to break his oath to save his own life, and his refusal to pay lip-service to Aphrodite), but in addition, the actual language of the play was often purposefully verbose and ungainly, again to show the ineffectual nature of language in comprehension in Euripides' age. [5] According to Aristotle, Euripides's contemporary Sophocles said that he portrayed men as they ought to be, and Euripides portrayed them as they were.[6]

Euripides' realistic characterisations were sometimes at the expense of a realistic plot; he sometimes relied upon the deus ex machina to resolve his plays, as in Ion and Electra. In the opinion of Aristotle, writing his Poetics a century later, this is the worst way to end a play. Many classicists cite this as a reason why Euripides was less popular in his own time

Other references:

The Presentation of the Inner Self: Euripides' "Medea" 1021-55 and Apollonius Rhodius' "Argonautica" 3, 772-801
Thalia Papadopoulou
Mnemosyne, Fourth Series, Vol. 50, Fasc. 6 (Dec., 1997), pp. 641-664
(article consists of 24 pages)
Published by: BRILL
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4432788" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I know Cambridge journals exist on the topic too. I have a book I could dig out about the ancient Greeks that gets into this as well, but I think the subject is fairly well known enough that the above should establish the point.

There was something else you mentioned above, Mr s that I wanted to touch upon-- the use of for example natural elements in his composition and their effects-- sunlight, birds chirping, leaves, wind rain fog etc. And the difference to me is the level of emphasis and the artifice of their presentation, not the fact of their use neccessarily as metaphors and narrative road signs, which was not unique or new in his work by the time he made Kage and Ran. In b&w AK you'll find environment used as harbingers, as external manifestation of character and situational emotion.. wind and rain and fog appear during moments of conflict, of crisis, etc: you'll find this in B&W AK just as you would in later AK. But the artifice in later AK, this dabbling with a form of expressionism, doesn't work for me. It feels stilted and simplistic-- it lacks the natural sense of perfection that I get from his earlier works. His effects in his b&w films could be very pronounced: there are some very striking effects in Red Beard for example... the imagery reaches crescendoes that are well nigh operatic in their effect. They feel like the punctuation of a master filmmaker. There's a similar use of environment as metaphor and punctuation in many of these pre-1970's films.. Seven Sam, The Idiot, High & Low to name a few.

I'm not sure whether I get the particularities of your point of view here. Why exactly (or just an example) do you think the 'mythical mode' - for lack of a better word- clashes with Kurosawa's storytelling skills? Unlike Michael in his post above you don't seem to be against that mode per se; so why doesn't it work for you here, whereas I suppose it works for you in "Die Nibelungen", for instance. I always regarded "Ran" and the Lang film as not dissimilar at all, both thematically and directionwise.

I don't know why, viz my own personal response to the films, he wasn't able to wield this narrative pedigree with the same surety-- why one man is good at one thing but not at another is tough to answer particularly when you don't know the individual in question. But surely just because two films are in the same general genre doesn't mean that, liking one, one is obligated to like the other. And I see only slight similarities in the cinematic styles-- Lang's film is pure heroic fantasy-adventure, whereas a films like Ran hews to it's tragicomic roots, with expressionistic visual touches. My response to Lang's films is one of awe and wonderment, adrenaline and a sense of the fantastic from vignette to vignette; my response to Ran is to try and identify with the situations onscreen, to locate the narrative balance in human terms, emotional terms viz the characters.

[Mr Sausage]

I'm far from a Greek scholar, and it's been some time since I've read the texts in question, but wouldn't you say that this is somewhat of an exaggeration, Sausage? Or at least a mistake to extend this description of Greek narrative to Euripides in particular?

No, I don't think I'm exaggerating.

Euripides's plays caused great controversy from mythodology, just as other playwrights did, but shocked audienceces by representing them as real people instead of symbolic heroes. He tried to show what it would be like for real people to find themselves in the extreme circumstances of the mythological stories that were so familiar.
Writing Structure and Theme
Euripides is primarily known for having reshaped the formal structure of the traditional tragic plays by showing strong women characters and intelligent slaves. He also satirized many heroes of Greek mythology.

The plays of Euripides seem modern when compared with those of his contemporaries as he focused on inner lives and the motives of his characters were much considered unknown to Greek audiences. His best plays have a strong, passionate woman as the central character. Medea is an example.

What's your source for the above? You'll find these kinds of comments all the time, and I see nothing here that sheds any particular light on Euripides. The writer claims that Euripides made his characters "real people instead of symbolic heroes," but "real people" in whose sense? As I pointed out, the notion of self-hood in ancient Greece was much different than our own. This also: "Euripides is primarily known for having reshaped the formal structure of the traditional tragic plays by showing strong women characters and intelligent slaves" sounds much like a clumsy attempt to make Euripides seem modern by somehow sharing our values. And this: "The plays of Euripides seem modern when compared with those of his contemporaries as he focused on inner lives and the motives of his characters were much considered unknown to Greek audiences." Modern to whom, and in what sense? This writer's motive is to reclaim Euripides as a "modern" writer, and part of that means insisting on things that aren't there. The "internal" lives of Euripides' characters are still external characteristics, as happens in Greek drama; their motives are not hidden. They do not change. They are not "real" people as you or I are "real" people.

Wikipedia is a bad source. Again, quotes like this: "Euripides has been compared to Rousseau in being too modern for his time" don't reveal much. Ok, he was too modern for "his" time, but again, whose vision of modernity are you using, your own or the Ancient Greeks? Moreover, anyone can claim anything, so the mere fact that someone claimed Euripides is like Rousseau doesn't mean much. Or this: "Euripides focused on the realism of his characters; for example, Euripides’ Medea is a realistic woman with recognizable emotions and is not simply a villain." Again, "realism" in what sense? Ours, or the ancient Greeks? Euripides may have seemed more "real" to his audience, but only in comparison to other dramatists at the time, and to us he is still heavily, heavily artificial. I submit the writer has no idea what he means by "realistic," especially given the most he can say about Euripides' realism is that Medea has "recognizable emotions," something vague enough to be true of all the athenian dramatists.

I know Cambridge journals exist on the topic too. I have a book I could dig out about the ancient Greeks that gets into this as well, but I think the subject is fairly well known enough that the above should establish the point.

Yes, you'll find there is always someone who will claim something about this or that text. Reclaiming the Greeks as moderns is not a new project. I have never found Euripides' characters to have a Shakespearean inwardness, and given the scholarship that indicates the Greeks had a much different sense of self than we do, I'm willing to bet any such considerations are anachronisms.

There's a similar use of environment as metaphor and punctuation in many of these pre-1970's films.. Seven Sam, The Idiot, High & Low to name a few.

No, I don't believe environmental effects were used as symbols or metaphors in Kurosawa's pre-late works. A driving windstorm in Kurosawa contributed to the mood and the emotion of a scene, but it never became an abstract, outward manifestation of an emotional state or a bit of meaning as it does in Ran and Kagemusha. The driving rain at the end of Seven Samurai is a nice emotional counterpart, but is not a representation of "battle" or "anger" or something general like that.

[Sloper]

My response to Lang's films is one of awe and wonderment, adrenaline and a sense of the fantastic from vignette to vignette; my response to Ran is to try and identify with the situations onscreen, to locate the narrative balance in human terms, emotional terms viz the characters.

Interesting; I respond to Ran in the way you respond to Die Nibelungen. It's a magnificent, doom-laden pageant. That shot of Hidetora descending from the burning castle, to pick just one example of many, bears comparison with anything in Lang's filmography. Indeed, Ran is the only Kurosawa film I like unequivocally, and I've been quite shocked by its negative press on this forum. Three things, in my view, compromise his earlier films: first, their sentimentality, which I guess is plain for all to see, and almost completely absent from Ran; second, their quirkiness, the moments of humour which are so unfunny they make me want to crawl under a rock (Kikuchiyo in Seven Samurai epitomises this for me; there's a lot of cuteness in Yojimbo and especially Sanjuro, of course; and in Ran you have Peter, but he's quite marginal); third, and hardest to pin down, is a kind of didactic obviousness, a wilfully simple-minded approach to his, in many respects three-dimensional, characters. So, in Stray Dog, you have that exquisitely painful and unsettling showdown, followed by this numbing coda in which Shimura tells Mifune to get used to it; or in Ikiru, you have a beautifully complex and nuanced tale about a man trying to invest his life with meaning, diluted and smothered by a knuckle-headed voiceover and the eccentric narrative switch in the last fifty minutes, where everything that was subtle is blown up and embossed.

All of these annoyances, however, seem to me to be manifestations of Kurosawa's interest in, and love of, human beings; also of a kind of optimism which dips into, and then draws back from, any really troubling ambiguity, always striving to connect with people - both the characters and the audience - in a positive, progressive spirit. With Red Beard and especially Dodes'kaden (still haven't seen Dersu Uzala), it felt to me like Kurosawa was taking this 'human' aspect of his filmmaking to its utmost limit, to the point where the sympathy and the optimism felt more strained, if not actually insincere, than ever. I know it's an axiom of AK scholarship that he became more pessimistic in these later years, and lost faith in the idea that humanity or the world could be redeemed, especially by anything he had to say in his films. Much of Kagemusha, especially the ending, I find to be grossly sentimental, but I think this has a lot to do with Takemitsu's awful score; as far as I remember, the film itself is bleak in a way that seems to eschew tragedy in favour of sheer despair and nihilism.

The only precedent in Kurosawa's work, that I know of, is Throne of Blood, and just as in that film AK showed even less sympathy for, and even more detachment from his characters than Shakespeare did in Macbeth, so in Ran he takes the already unedifying and too-dreary-and-unheroic-to-be-tragic material of King Lear and accentuates that nihilism into something very pure, detached and beautiful - reflected this time in Takemitsu's score, one of my favourites. Macbeth and Lear are probably my least favourite Shakespeare tragedies, precisely because they lack that sympathetic engagement with human nature which, more than anything, made him such a great writer. But I think the material is perfectly suited to Kurosawa: it's not really a human story, more a vision - it's significant that the film begins with the protagonist awakening from a nightmare, into another nightmare - a long hard look at the truth about human nature, specifically its mindless, grasping violence. The good characters are perfunctory and ineffectual; the real moral centre of the film, such as there is one, is Kurogane, which says something about Kurosawa's perspective here. And how could anyone not be chilled to the marrow by the ending?

I find Ran as richly detailed as any of his earlier films; if he stands back more, and lingers over the images for longer, that has perhaps to do with his age, but more, I think, with the real missing element, which is sympathy - or love, or whatever wet term is best applied here. I wonder if that’s what really puts some people off? In any case, since I’ve always found the sympathy rather alienating (with Mizoguchi or Ozu it’s a different story, of course), the spectacle of Ran, and its bracing violence and nihilism (as I think AK said, it’s as if seen from the perspective of a weeping Buddha, at once mourning humanity and writing it off as a lost cause), make it this director’s least compromised masterpiece, for me.

The discussion of Greek tragedy is fascinating. I think that characters in Sophocles – such as Oedipus, Creon, Antigone – are no less complex and ‘real’ than in Euripides. Oedipus has been slightly compromised by Freudian associations, but the play itself is a brilliantly structured character study, in which Sophocles brings out the hero’s tragic flaw – which, to put it simply, is his impatience and bad temper – with the kind of deft touch you only get from a writer who understands his characters inside out.

Euripides, whom I adore, is kind of an antecedent to Christopher Marlowe: he has the same fearless exuberance, imagination and humour (God help me but I find Medea every bit as laugh-out-loud hilarious as The Jew of Malta, especially in Michael Townsend’s translation; I can’t help but hear a little of Norma Desmond in the heroine’s voice…), but yes, perhaps a more mature and nuanced approach to character. There was a comment somewhere above about how he portrays mythical figures as real, down-to-earth human beings. In some ways I think this is true of Homer as well, but certainly The Trojan Women is one of the greatest and most shocking pieces of iconoclastic literature, comparable to Ran (though much greater) in the way it takes everything grand and heroic about warfare – in this case the Greeks’ destruction of Troy – and shows it in all its brutal, cowardly and sordid truth. (My memory fails me, but I’m sure this was partly a protest at the Greeks’ appalling treatment of some foreign land at the time Euripides was writing.)

The issue of whether we impose anachronistic ideas about human identity onto ancient writings is a prickly one. It does drive me mad when, for instance, critics attempt to attribute postmodern concerns and values to medieval texts, but this business of making an ancient text 'mean something' to the modern world is both problematic and necessary. I tend also to be sceptical when too sharp distinctions are drawn here, and my gut feeling, when I read the works of Sophocles, Euripides or Plato (or to a lesser extent Aeschylus) is that they could have been written yesterday, and that neither human nature, nor our perception thereof, has essentially changed in the last 2500 years - which is to say that it is still infinitely varied, as I think Sausage is partly suggesting when he asks whose conception of modernity is in play here. I don't find Euripides (or Marlowe) at all artificial, for instance, but I can imagine Mr Sausage has different criteria to determine what is or is not artificial.

It all seems so unimportant when you're actually reading these wonderful plays. Let's hope that our own culture is producing something as timeless and enduring.