throne of blood (w&d kurosowa, w hideo oguni, shinobu hashimoto, ryûzô kikushima)

Cinemateca blesses us with a brief season of Kurosowa’s Shakespeares. For which one is grateful. Grateful to Cinemateca, grateful to cinema, grateful that we are allowed to sit in a cinema at all. Throne of Blood, the director’s take on Macbeth goes unashamedly epic. There’s a lot of galloping horses, a lot of dust and smoke and mist, some of the greatest costumes ever worn, and a truly brilliant closing sequences as Washizu, Kurosowa’s Macbeth, is pinned with arrows fired by his own men. This isn’t the only radical variation on Shakespeare’s narrative the director employs. The relationship between Washizu and his Lady Macbeth, Lady Washizu, is dark and compelling, as it shuold be, with Isuzu Yamada giving a mesmerising performance. But K introduces the twist that she’s pregnant, a fact which helps to justify Washizu’s decision to murder his old friend, Miki (Banquo). Kurosowa also has Washizu visit Lady Washizu as she frantically washes her hands, having gone mad at the end. Washizu has to confront the result of his actions in a way Shakespeare doesn’t make him. This leads to the closing sequence, where Toshirô Mifune’s, bravura acting feels completely right. This is a heroic, warrior Macbeth, brought down by his own code, in spite of his earthy, military goodwill, seen in the earlier scenes with his friend, Miki. The director relishes the clash between the theatre and cinema. There’s a grand theatricality of the spectacle at work in the film, something one can’t help thinking Shakespeare might have been jealous of. The martial elements of Macbeth operate on a thematic and aesthetic level. In the battle scenes the cinema screen becomes a vast stage; one which is in contrast to the pared down intimacy of the scenes with Lady Macbeth or the banquet. Macbeth becomes someone trapped between the exaggerated grandeur of war as spectacle and the intensity of the reduced palette of domestic life, a tension which overwhelms him. At least he dies spectacularly. A fitting end for a man whose machismo cannot be pinned down in the normal sphere of existence.