ran (w&d kurosowa, w. hideo oguni, masato ide)

I had two thoughts whilst watching the glorious spectacle that is Ran. The first, pure nostalgia. The peppered memories of watching the film at the Lumiere on Saint Martins’s Lane, a great lost London cinema, a time when watching a film from Japan felt like watching a film from Mars, so rich and strange, such a remove from the England of the eighties with the grim purview of Thatcher, unemployment, strikes, a country which felt as though it wanted to kneecap its youth. Youth, nevertheless can’t help but maintain its enthusiasm, its curiosity, the lust for life is insatiable, the need to experience the new, discover that which lurks on the other side. Ran was part of this. Part of this discovery, part of this unfolding of the world.

The second thought, which occurred to me in the closing half hour, as the final battle is painted on the cinema wall, was that Shakespeare himself would have loved watching Ran. It would have delighted him. He who robbed and rewrote the plays and stories of others, including King Leir, would have delighted in Kurosowa’s gender flips, the upgrading of the Fool, the development of the brilliantly scheming Goneril/ Regan role, Lady Kaede, who is given perhaps the greatest scene in the whole film. Shakespeare would have wondered at the use of cinema to realise the battles that existed in his imagination, he would have been thrilled by the way in which another culture appropriated this story, his story, which is one he himself appropriated. For a while, as I watched the horses charge, the awesome choreography of battle, I imagined I was Shakespeare, watching my play brought to another life, and I could feel his excitement, his wonder at the legacy he has left, allowing artists from other cultures, other times, to ransack his work for their inspiration.  

akahige (redbeard) (w&d kurosawa w. masato ide, hideo oguni, ryûzô kikushima)

One of the joys of cinema is the gradual process of discovering a filmmaker’s works. I saw Ran twice when it came out, the second time with Sedley, as we had promised him we’d watch it with him, so we never told him we’d already seen it, unable to resist, in that fine old cinema on St Martin’s Lane which was later turned into a gym. Watching Ran for me (not so much for my companion for obvious reasons) was a leap into an unknown world. The overarching vision of the filmmaker, pinning Shakespeare’s art to a culture which still seemed wildly remote, Martian. 

Since then I have signally failed to engage with Japanese cinema. A brief flirtation with Teshigahara, but no Ozu and little Kurosawa. Cinemateca might allow me to put that right. Perhaps for this reason, even though some critics suggest it is a minor work, Redbeard struck me as an astonishing piece of filmmaking. A director working on both a cinematic and philosophical scale which few can have matched. 

Cinematically, the use of light is a constant wonder. People who know always talk a lot about the use of light in cinema. I’m part-phiilstine, so rarely feel the impact. But in Redbeard, the chiaroscuro is frequently breathtaking. Eyes are perfectly framed in a tiny pool of light, surrounded by shade. The play of light and darkness speaks to the moral world the film explores. At times you feel like it would be possible to switch off the sound and subtitles and bathe in the film’s texture.

Philosophically, the complexity of Kurosawa’s vision is in stark contrast to the simplified moral world so much Anglo-Saxon cinema occupies. The film is in some ways a meditation on education; how rigid social codes close down the capacity of those who feel themselves outside those codes to develop a moral education. A thief becomes the most sympathetic character in the whole film; an angry girl is taught how to love by being shown love, rather than discipline. Through all this, the arrogant young doctor himself, Yasumoto, is educated through being exposed to the realities of the world beyond his immediate social circle. Kurosawa uses the broad stage of the charity hospital as a model of social existence. In the face of death or disease, we are all equal. This uber-democratic motto gives a philosophical force to the director’s humanist message, which resonates above and beyond the geographical context of his film.