159 Red Beard

[Michael Kerpan]

Traditionally, one ryo was equivalent to one koku -- which was equivalent to the amount of rice necessary to feed one person for one year....

[ando]

Oh, well, then 50 ryo was quite a big deal.

Incidentally, Kurosawa's Something Like An Autobiography is available in .pdf.

[Michael Kerpan]

It seems that, in practice, currency values were extremely unstable in the Tokugawa period.

[ando]

I'm rewatching Drunken Angel, K's first collaboration with Mifune (as well as set designer, Takashi Matsuyama and composer/music director, Fumio Hayasaka) tonight. Kurosawa claimed it was the first film (his seventh) where his particular style came through. Perhaps I'll be able to spot the rudiments of a language that would become fully developed, especially with respect to Mifune, in Red Beard.

[Sloper]

In Throne of Blood, Asaji (the Lady Macbeth character) is so enveloped in the Noh style her presence almost seems to come from another film altogether! It's one of the most arresting and distracting aspects of an otherwise magnificent film.

I find her a bit problematic too. The way Kurosawa handles the murder sequence, focusing on the wife instead of the murderer, is kind of chilling and brilliant, and a fascinating way to adapt the equivalent scene in Shakespeare's play, but as in the play (only more so) I feel like we need to spend more time with this character. The 'out of place-ness' you refer to results, I think, more from the way Asaji is marginalised than from the performance style.

I've been thinking a bit about Red Beard in relation to Drunken Angel and The Lower Depths. The really tragic thing about those earlier films is that (slight spoiler for Ran here as well)

Spoiler

redemption seems like a real possibility: there is just enough kindness in this world to offset the prevailing corruption, and to transform these squalid living conditions into something more conducive to...well, if not happiness and contentment exactly, at least a way of life that is vaguely endurable. But the corrupt people are always that little bit too powerful. It's a bit like in Ran, where Hidetora's abuses of power have been too extreme to allow any kind of redemption for the future. At least, in Drunken Angel, the girl cured of TB represents a glimmer of hope for the future. In The Lower Depths, even the camaraderie displayed in the dance at the end turns sour with the news of the actor's suicide, and the cynical, despairing way that empathy is smothered in the final response: 'It was such a great party, and he had to go and ruin it.'

There's something interesting to be said about the different evocations of setting in these three films. Each one establishes the characters' material circumstances with extraordinary vividness and power: you really feel like you can smell the stagnant pond in Drunken Angel, and feel the cold wind blowing through the walls in The Lower Depths. In Red Beard, Kurosawa makes use of a huge and elaborate set to represent the village, and this time we get the impression, not so much of a static, immutable junk-heap, as of a poverty-stricken but still vibrant and multi-faceted community, which unlike the settings of the earlier films could quite easily transform itself for the better, with only a slight shift in the attitudes of its inhabitants (failing a shift in the attitudes of those who govern it). We get to know this setting in a much broader sense than in the earlier films, as though it’s a place we’ve walked through and explored in different moods and in different seasons. So it makes sense that this would be the most hopeful of the three films – it’s set in a living, breathing locale, rather than the (more or less literal) ‘last ditch’ we see in Angel and Depths.

[ando]

Ha, the conclusion of K's The Lower Depths is right in line with the Gorky play. I think Kurosawa grew less concerned with endings, hopeful or even symbolically victorious conclusions by the time he completed Red Beard. The development sections became far more nuanced, far less "sociological" and more challenging to watch. By that I don't mean more difficult to absorb but more to consider (and less to "look-at"). As you allude to with Drunken Angel, the post-war slump of downtown Tokyo is vividly shown and K's impression of the American influence very clear (sometimes, embarrassingly so) throughout (must say, I love the nod to Mizoguchi'so Five Women Around Utamaro, released just a year or two earlier, with the Edo era artist's woodblock prints adorning a bar wall). By the time we get to Red Beard, though, there's less objective criteria with which an audience is able to discipher content and meaning. There is no paraphernalia or decoration on the clinic walls in Red Beard to give character or place like the doctor's office or bars of downtown Tokyo in Drunken Angel. In fact, in the later film, there is no character outside of the storyline who makes a presence within or around the world of the clinic. Course, by then the American "occupation" was over and Kurosawa had, accordingly, moved on to deal with Japanese matters exclusively. Although, in doing this, particularly with themes borrowed from classic authors, he could claim a universal mantle as well.

Red Beard has a peculiar end with regard to the framing of the two doctors:



The low angle tracking shots back to the entrance of the clinic is repeated for the last time but we never get past the thigh level of the actors or see the ground the way we do in the opening shot. A view of the open sky is maintained throughout the sequence and we end with a shot of the top of the clinic gate. It made me wonder what K was trying to avoid by not showing the earth or any structures rooted in it. A last glimpse of the entire facade of the clinic - as he repeated with the facade of the ruined palace in Roshomon - would seem to be in order. Not so. We end with the non-descript but symbolic cross bar top of the clinic's entrance, which is actually, though simpler, a far more powerful last image. It initially struck me as an inverted cross but I wonder if it has some bearing to Shodo (Japanese calligraphy) that would be obvious or immediately recognizable to Japanese audiences.

[Roger Ryan]

...The low angle tracking shots back to the entrance of the clinic is repeated for the last time but we never get past the thigh level of the actors or see the ground the way we do in the opening shot. A view of the open sky is maintained throughout the sequence and we end with a shot of the top of the clinic gate. It made me wonder what K was trying to avoid by not showing the earth or any structures rooted in it...

Since today seems to be my day for purely speculative posts, perhaps the ground was not dressed with the artificial snow seen on the roof of the clinic? My apologies for being presumptuous here as I've not seen the film, but the impression I got from the trailer was that earlier shots of the clinic were without the snow covering. While covering the clinic roof with artificial snow would be relatively easy, covering the landscape around it and in the background would have been more difficult. Framing the shot as a low angle would be a practical solution to avoid showing the snow-less ground/landscape.

[dwk]

Since today seems to be my day for purely speculative posts, perhaps the ground was not dressed with the artificial snow seen on the roof of the clinic? My apologies for being presumptuous here as I've not seen the film, but the impression I got from the trailer was that earlier shots of the clinic were without the snow covering. While covering the clinic roof with artificial snow would be relatively easy, covering the landscape around it and in the background would have been more difficult. Framing the shot as a low angle would be a practical solution to avoid showing the snow-less ground/landscape.

Doubtful. I'm pretty sure if Kurosawa wanted snow on the ground, he'd have gotten snow on the ground.

[knives]

He did switch the direction of flow for a river after all.