Tag Archives: Takashi Shimura

IKIRU (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

Uncategorized, , , , ,

Inspired by Tolstoy’s THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH, is a simple story of a bureaucrat (the great Takashi Shimura, in his first starring role for Kurosawa) who’s spent all his life in a boring administrative job, avoiding difficult decisions and passing on the buck, who finds out he has stomach cancer, is given only six months to live and seeks to give meaning to what remains of his life. It’s an intimist drama and yet the film is brimming with people. Workplace shots often feature twenty characters. Street scenes brim with life. There are dancehall scenes, beautifully composed with three musicians in the lower third of the frame, and then what seems like thousands of extras dancing in the background. The composition of the shots are pure art, not just gorgeous and striking to look at, but unfolding compositions in time and motion that create and/ or add to the drama. Even the discussions of the protagonists’ life at his funeral, the second and to me less satisfying part of the film, feature about twenty people. It was a big hit and remains a beautiful film.

José Arroyo

THE IDIOT (Akira Kurosawa, 1951)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

Kurosawa’s THE IDIOT (1951), an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel set in post-war Japan, was originally conceived as a 265 minute film with an intermission. That cut didn’t work for the studio and Kurosawa cut it down to 180 minutes. The studio asked for further cuts and this is how we’ve ended up with the 166 minute currently available. When I began watching and knew nothing of its history, my first thought was ‘Kurosawa’s not afraid of length.’ Little did I know. The film was  a critical and box-office failure upon first release and would have sunk Kurosawa’s career but for the international success of RASHOMON. The extra 99 minutes of the original cut now seem irretrievably lost (though one can hope).

 

This history helps explain why the film seems so narratively inelegant, title cards offering so much background, voice-over at the beginning also used to fill in information that could have been shown rather than told. I now realise it probably once was. The story is a complex one with many sub-plots but at its basis is a triangle focused on Taeke Nasu (Setsuko Hara), a woman sold at a very young age to be an industrialist’s mistress and traumatised ever since. The two men in love with her are a) Kinji Kameda (Masayuko Mori), the titular Idiot, once mistakenly convinced of war crimes and rescued at the last minute from the firing squad. He himself thinks this experience affected his brain and  traumatised him into idiocy. The other suitor is Denkichi Akama (Toshiro Mifune), a rich, handsome, self-destructive playboy. Whilst watching it I imagined it as a thirties Hollywood film with Garbo, Leslie Howard and Clark Gable in the roles and the film itself as a juicy, pulpy saga, probably as far from Dostoyevky as you can get.

There are incredibly beautiful moments and sequences. The moment where the two men arrive in Sapporo and see Taeko Suso’s image in a storefront is beautifully conceived. The gorgeous photo is framed, behind a window, their adoring faces frame hers, but only as a reflection in the window itself. It’s a beautifully conceived image, all these hopes, illusions, longings, desires, just a play of light, evanescent, a projection onto an image; an illusion.

There are extraordinary set-pieces; the run in the snow after Kameda leaves Akema with the butchers’ knife, first contemplating suicide, then out to kill him. The whole of the Sapporo carnival sequence with people skating in phantasmagoric costumes as lovers wait to reveal their desires; there’s extraordinary images (black shadows blinking on Taeko Nasu’s face as suitors bid to become her next lover; and like other Kurosawa film, this one makes extraordinary use of the weather and the elements, here snow, ice, cold, blizzards, a flickering stove to ward off all of this so loaded it periodically bursts into flames, surely a symbol of the burning and unquenchable desire they each feel. The first part of the film is titled ‘Love and Loathing’, the second ‘Love and Agony’.

At the very beginning of the film a title card informs us that Dostoyevsky tells of the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world and that ‘In this world goodness and Idiocy are often equated’. This particular film, like Rashomon, also deals with questions of truth but very differently. Here everyone except the idiot lies, tells half-truths, lies by omission, lie to themselves. That the idiot doesn’t is what makes him an idiot but it’s also what makes him good, why even people who want to hate him can’t. Goodness is valued by others even when they themselves can’t achieve it, and most don’t even aspire to it. So like the cliché of Russian Literature, people love, anguish suffer and at they end die too young. It is a mess of a film but one that I loved watching and it has many extraordinary sequences. I would love to see the original cut if it ever resurfaces.

One of the pleasures in the process of intensifying is that I am now recognising actors, those who appear in Kurosawa’s other films (Mifune, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura) and also those who appear in famous Japanese films of the period, here Setuko Hara and Chieko Higashiyama, who so beaitufifully played, respectively, the daughter-in-law and mother-in-law in Ozu’s Tokyo Story)

José Arroyo

 

 

Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

Last night’s Kurosawa was THRONE OF BLOOD (1957), which made me think of the poetic in cinema, which I take to be something like a complex idea or feeling communicated precisely through a minimum of means that nonetheless reverberates, the initial clarity opening itself up in the viewer to development, change or even contradiction.  Kurosawa’s great and beautiful adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is full of such moments – Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) and Wiki (Takashi Shimura) coming in and out of the fog in Cobweb Forest; Washizu’s wife, Asaji (Isuzu Yamada) advocating for murder, walking into a dark room, with only the sound of her kimono, swishing on the floor, into the darkness, and out of it holding an urn; the final, relentless and inescapable hail of arrows on the usurper at the end. It’s in this sense that Kurosawa reminds me of John Ford, who is one of the greatest exponents of the poetic in cinema.

Throne of Blood is also an adaptation of a play and ‘the theatrical’ is also evident everywhere in this great work of cinema. I know practically nothing of Noh theatre but even I can detect its influence in the design and performance of Isuzu Yamadi as Lady Asaji, the Lady Macbeth analogue in the film, her clothing, make-up, the way of walking, the minimalist movement. There are traces of it too in the design of the spirits in the forest (here not only the make-up and special effects but also the chanting, the music). But the uses of the theatrical in Throne of Blood extends beyond this. Think of the very beginning where battles are won, lost, won again, in a few minutes, all happening offscreen, as they would need to be narrated in a play (though here also so beautifully dramatized visually). The use of space also seems theatrical to me, minimalist, sparse, with figures placed in it in a highly stylised way.

People have argued that it can’t be an adaptation of Shakespeare because it doesn’t deploy the language. But it’s Kurosawa’s Macbeth that we’re seeing here and it has its own language and its own poetry. The plot is taken from Shakespeare but the language and poetry is all sights, sounds, rhythms. I found it beautiful.

 

A last observation is how strikingly Kurosawa uses the elements (fire in STRAY DOG), wind and rain in numerous films, here the fog. The whole film is drenched in it. And the scenes in the forest, where Kurosawa, who’s clearly learned from Ford, films from below, through bushes and trees, where it’s the entanglements that are in focus, and the riders lost, often out of focus in the background, running in and out of the fog, is quite extraordinary.

Clips:

fog

forest and fog:

sound and darkness:

A hail of arrows:

José Arroyo

 

SEVEN SAMURAI (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

Uncategorized, , , , ,

 

Last night’s Kurosawa was SEVEN SAMURAI (1954). At almost 3 ½ hours, much longer than I remember, though it ends up being a brisk watch. It’s easy to see why the film became a template for a particular type of action film, a village in danger, the search for help, the coming together of various ‘defenders’ into a group, the planning of the defence, the final battle. This has been copied in films from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN to THE AVENGERS  films and beyond.  The action here is varied, exciting, brutal, funny: as good as it gets. But unlike so many of the copycats, this one also has unexpected depth. The world of the film is hierarchised. The villagers have been driven to despair by marauding bandits that come after every harvest, take all their food, kill some of their young men and sometimes steal and enslave the women. The villagers and the samurai come together to defend the village – to paraphrase one of the characters, ‘working together, we can protect the individual; acting on individual interest, the individual gets destroyed’. Throughout the film we see a village change, transform, come into being in a different way. But a samurai can never be a villager, as is illustrated by a beautiful and romantically filmed thread in the film.  Thus, beautifully realised character vignettes of not only the major samurai but also some of the villagers – a major difference if I remember correctly from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN which I remember as a series of star turns (Yul Brynner, McQueen, etc) and which focusses on those magnificent, almost supernaturally skilled individuals at the expenses of the collective (I can barely remember any of the villagers though the plot follows the earlier film closely). There are star turns here as well of course, Takashi Shimura’s introduction, Toshiro Mifune in a broad comic role, whose carapace than adds to the pathos when his origins are revealed. It has very romantic moments (the lovers in the forest amidst the flowers) and very moving ones (the villager who upon raiding the bandits’ lair, sees his captured wife, and she is so ashamed that she turns back into the burning building). A very long film that is a surprisingly easy watch. An influential film that remains a great one.

José Arroyo

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

Uncategorized, , , , ,

RASHOMON (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) is one of those films you hear so much about that you feel you’ve seen it, though in my case I hadn’t. The name of the film has come to stand for a type of narrative where one gets different points of view on an event. But Rashomon tells a much more complex and interesting story than this and in a more sophisticated way. Sheltering from the storm a priest and a woodcutter talk about a trial they’d just witnessed. A bandit (Toshiro Mifune) had apparently raped a woman (Machiko Kyō) and killed her husband (Masayuki Mori). We get four versions of this story, each correlating to an extent but differing in important and contradictory ways. They can’t all be true.  Each of the witnesses trying to present themselves as a version of their ideal self. But are they lying consciously? Or is each merely understanding from a different perspective? A combination? And each version is narrated in different ways, so for example the dead Samurai’s story is told by the ghost of the Samurai via a medium as told by a woodcutter. Moreover, watching I was struck by the significance of the woman’s story being a rape – it could have been some other crime — and the way we’re getting a mid-twentieth century Japanese cultural attitudes on an event set in the past but understood from a present perspective where these events resonate in similar but different ways (‘The woman’s story is not to be believed’, says one of the witnesses in the trial). The film begins with the phrase ‘I don’t understand’. At the end the film acknowledges that the full truth can never be known, that ‘objective’ truth doesn’t exist, and yet one of the characters at the beginning says that if people don’t tell the truth life is impossible and we’re mere animals. But of course even telling ‘the truth’ is no guarantee that things happened as told. It’s a film that packs a lot in a short time – at 88 minutes it’s the shortest Kurosawa film I’ve seen —  and poetically: the rain, the light effects with a camera pointed at the sun, that poetic scene just before the rape where the woman’s mysterious beauty and the bandit’s sexual desire are so powerfully evoked, the bandit under a tree, face and body dappled by sunlight, waking up feeling he has a right to everything he can take.

I wonder how the film would play with students today, this meditation on truth relayed over the body of a woman raped, and raped again in each telling with her body available to whomever has the force to take it, her word discounted, being blamed for what happened to her, and in one version, with the husband disowning her from what he could not protect her from. The significance of the crime being a rape is more significant in my viewing than it had come across when I perhaps too glancingly read about the film in years gone by.

To perhaps restate the obvious, a film to see: much more interesting and complex, better, than the most laudatory hearsay would have it.

José Arroyo

Scandal (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

Very enjoyable but perhaps the least successful of the Kurosawas I’ve been seeing recently. Each individual episode is masterfully shot but the film as a whole doesn’t cohere. It begins as a light and glamorous screwball about a famous artist (Toshiro Mifune) who meets a star (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) in a mountain retreat, the paparazzo take a shot of them together and sell them to the Amour magazine claiming evidence  of a secret affair. They decide to sue and hire a lawyer (Takashi Shimura) with a gambling addiction and a tubercular daughter. At this point the film shifts tone and focus, leaving the glamorous couple behind to focus on the moral failings of a good but weak man. The film then shifts again, this time into a Christmas film, with lots of orchestral versions of famous American holiday songs, culminating in Auld Lang Syne and highlighting the redemptive potential of the holiday season itself. Will the lawyer whose sold out his clients to the pulps honour his now dead daughter and do the right thing for his clients? This is drawn out in the finale which becomes a courtroom procedural. So, a film with serious themes —  the limits of free speech in the age of mass media —  but of dual protagonists, various genres, too sudden shits in tone, that doesn’t quite cohere. What I liked best were the montages, first a 30s style one of the pulp press sinking its teeth into the story, then the cycling races affording opportunities for gambling. There’s also an incredible shot of Mifune looking very dashing, riding his motorcycle with a fully decorated tree at the back being followed by children. It’s a film of many pleasures that is not quite good.

José Arroyo

The Scandal Montage:

At the (bicycle) races:

Cool Yule turns melodrama:

An illustration of the mastery of compositions, a triangle structure of paparazzo at the centre as the lawyer on the left speaks, leaving room for another court official on the right, thus illustrating the tension of the theme, the law vs the press:

José Arroyo

STRAY DOG/ NORA INU (Akira Kurosawa, 1949)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

I’d only really been familiar with Kurosawa’s famous samurai films. The post-war noirs in the BFI’s box set have been a discovery: the more I see of them the more my admiration for Kurosawa as a filmmaker grows.

STRAY DOG is a re-teaming of Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura from DRUNKEN ANGEL (1948). Mifune plays a young cop whose knapsack gets stolen on the bus. Inside it is a Colt revolver with seven bullets. It’s now being used to kill innocents. How many will have to die before the weapon is recovered? Will the cop survive his guilt?

Kurosawa is a master of conveying the elements themselves. Here it’s the heat and humidity of a Tokyo Summer, exacerbated by  having a killer on the loose. People perspire, wipe their faces, sigh with tiredness (see the gorgeous montage below).

As the two investigators move from suspect to suspect, we get a panorama of post-war Tokyo society, all the low-lifes, criminals, prostitutes, dancers’ all with  lives that exceed the activity or profession society defines them for; poor people without space; professionals on low incomes and their way of life, a rich lady who shuts her window to a crimes she’s witnessing before returning to her piano, a young dancer for whom a dress has become a symbol for a different kind of life, wished for but forever out of reach. In fact the killer ends up being someone not unlike the young inspector, a war vet whose also had his knapsack stolen, as a result left desperate and derelict, who ends up making bad choices.

The last chase scene is exciting, beautiful and expressive. Both men now handcuffed together, occupying the lower third of the frame, as young innocent children walk in the background at the top of the frame singing, and then the thief begins to weep at the choices he’s made. It’s gorgeous and moving (see clip below), as is the whole of the film. I’ve included frame grabs from some of the compositions to illustrate the variety, originality and expressiveness of Kurosawa’s compositions, which continue to astonish me.

The incredible extended montage from the beginning.

The moving and beautiful final chase scene (above)

Examples of the compositions (below)

José Arroyo

Drunken Angel/ Yoidore Tenshi (Akira Kurosawa, 1948)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

A noir that well showcases Kurosawa’s capacity for film poetry and a young Toshiro Mifune at his most beautiful. Mifune is Matsunaga a small-time Yakuza who runs everything that can be turned to crime in the shantytown of the lower-depths of some part of derelict post-war derelict. At the centre of the neighbourhood is a swamp, a dirty, disease-ridden dump with umbrellas and other waste jutting out, a symbolic setting for all the low-lifes that live around it. Matsunaga has got TB. An alcoholic doctor in the neighbourhood called Sanada(Takashi Shimura), can cure it. If only Matsunaga would listen. But Matsunaga is trapped within ideologies of yakuza masculinity: he’s afraid and can’t show it. The word ‘coward’ is enough to drive him to extraordinary violence. Moreover, the yakuza who ran the neighourhood before him is coming out of prison and will challenge him for his turf. It’s not a good time to be ill and to be scared. Matsunaga is having difficulty living up to socially acceptable ideas of masculinity much less a yakuza code. Mifune looks so beautiful here. Cinematographer Takeo Ito and Kurosawa fill him from below, to show off his long pompadour, lit to highlight the symmetry of his face, a body that once evoked power and is now diseased, the terror that follows the peacocking. But is he the drunken angel or is the doctor who’d have a swank practice if he wasn’t so alcoholic and so fundamentally kind. Kurosawa brings in nightclub number and dream sequences. He uses mirrors and inventive, unusual compositions. He is not afraid to symbolise or to linger over the swamp, or over a song, or over a space that seems dead only to become anticipatory, a setting for action. A very beautiful film.

The Young Yakuza collapses as the old gangleader shows up to be no. 1, through a swamp that is full of junk but surrounded by music. Part of why Kurosawa is a poet.

Lingering over a corridor

 

Images from film that illustrate the above:

José Arroyo