Akira Kurosawa - Dreams (spoilers)

[Sitaram]

I have just watched Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams on DVD.

I would like to comment about the first of the eight dream episodes.

The following excerpts will give some helpful background to understanding the man, Kurosawa, and his movie, Dreams. I hope to make my personal observations in a second post to this thread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_(1990_film)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau_film

A portmanteau film or omnibus film or anthology film is a film consisting of several different short films, often tied together by only a single theme or premise. Sometimes each one is directed by a different director. Sometimes there is a theme, such as a place (e.g. New York Stories), a person (e.g. Four Rooms), or a thing (e.g. Twenty Bucks), that is present in each story and serves to bind them together. One of the earliest films to use the form was the 1948 film Quartet based on stories by W. Somerset Maugham.

Such Dreams I Have Dreamed — is a 1990 portmanteau film based on actual dreams of the film's director, Akira Kurosawa at different stages of his life. The film is based more on imagery than on dialogue. It consists of eight separate segments.

The first dream segment is Sunshine Through The Rain.

There is an old legend in Japan that states that when the sun is shining through the rain, the foxes have their weddings. In this first dream, a boy defies the wish of a woman, possibly his mother, to remain at home during a day with such weather. From behind a large tree in the nearby forest, he is witness to the slow wedding procession of the kitsune.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune

Unfortunately, he is spotted by the foxes and runs. When he tries to return home, the same woman says that a fox had came by the house, leaving behind a short sword. The woman said that it is meant for the boy to commit suicide because the foxes are angry at the unwanted observer. The woman asks that the boy go to beg forgiveness from the foxes, although they are known to be unforgiving. So, the boy sets off into the mountains, towards the place under the rainbow in search for the kitsune's home...

Wikipedia excerpts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Kurosawa

Kurosawa had a distinctive cinematic technique, which he had developed by the 1950s, and which gave his films a unique look. He liked using telephoto lenses for the way they flattened the frame and also because he believed that placing cameras farther away from his actors produced better performances. He also liked using multiple cameras, which allowed him to shoot an action from different angles. Another Kurosawa trademark was the use of weather elements to heighten mood: for example the heavy rain in the final battle in Seven Samurai and the fog in Throne of Blood. Kurosawa also liked using left-to-right frame wipes as a transition device.

Akira Kurosawa was known as "Tenno", literally "Emperor", for his dictatorial directing style. He was a perfectionist who spent enormous amounts of time and effort to achieve the desired visual effects. In Rashomon, he dyed the rain water black with calligraphy ink in order to achieve the effect of heavy rain, and ended up using up the entire local water supply of the location area in creating the rainstorm. In Throne of Blood, in the final scene in which Mifune is shot by arrows, Kurosawa used real arrows shot by expert archers from a short range, landing within centimetres of Mifune's body. Other stories include demanding a stream be made to run in the opposite direction in order to get a better visual effect, and having the roof of a house removed, later to be replaced, because he felt the roof's presence to be unattractive in a short sequence filmed from a train.

A notable feature of Kurosawa's films is the breadth of his artistic influences. Some of his plots are adaptations of William Shakespeare's works. The Bad Sleep Well is based on Hamlet, Ran is based on King Lear and Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth. Kurosawa also directed film adaptations of Russian literary works, including The Idiot by Dostoevsky and The Lower Depths a play by Maxim Gorky. Ikiru was based on Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. High and Low was based on King's Ransom by American crime writer Ed McBain. Stray Dog was inspired by the detective novels of Georges Simenon. The American film director John Ford also had a large influence on his work.


Despite criticism by some Japanese critics that Kurosawa was "too Western", he was deeply influenced by Japanese culture as well, including the Kabuki and Noh theaters and the jidaigeki (period drama) genre of Japanese cinema.
His movie, Rashomon, not only helped open Japanese cinema to the world but virtually entered the English language as a term for fractured, inconsistent narratives as well as influencing other works, including episodes of television series and many motion pictures.

In English and other languages, "Rashomon" has become a by-word for any situation wherein the truth of an event becomes difficult to verify due to the conflicting accounts of different witnesses. In psychology, the film has lent its name to the Rashomon effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_(film)

Despite international fame, Kurosawa suffered a deep personal setback in the late 1960s and early 70s. After Dodes Kaden (1970), a story about a slum, failed at the box office, Kurosawa attempted suicide - he slashed his throat six times and his wrists eight. His brother Heigo committed suicide in 1933. After an attempted suicide, Kurosawa went on to make several more films although arranging domestic financing was highly difficult despite his international reputation.

Kurosawa was a notoriously lavish gourmet, and spent huge quantities of money on film sets providing an uneatably large quantity and quality of delicacies, especially meat, for the cast and crew.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_(1990_film)

http://www.heroic-cinema.com/films/akira_kurosawas_dreams.htm

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000041/bio

 

[Sitaram]

The first dream segment lasts eleven minutes.

It is very much like the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise.

The boy is told of something he must never do. Curiosity leads the boy to disobey. His disobedience is detected and he is banished.

Adam was banished from a garden paradise and sent out into a world soon to have homes and cities. This boy is banished from a home, and sent out into a garden paradise.

To see is to be seen. To watch is to be watched. To understand is to be understood.

The boy can neither resist watching the procession of the foxes nor avoid being discovered.

Upon his return, the adult woman has the knife literally up her right sleeve. She withdraws the knife from her sleeve with her left hand, and the boy receives it with his right hand.

Question: Is the adult woman a katsune? What is her connection with the katsune? Whence comes her intimate knowledge of katsune?

The knife is to be used to commit ritual suicide.

The boy is a spectator; an audience of one.

This movie is very much about spectators and audiences.

Our lives are a portmanteau of bricolage, in which we are both actor and audience.

This dream leaves us with no answers; only questions.

Answers are subjective, to be found by each of us, within.

 

[NotTheDoctor]

I fell asleep halfway through the one about Van Gogh, I wanted to stay awake so badly but it was on very late, almost 4.30am. However, I absolutely loved the ones I got to see, especially the one about the orchard and the doll festival. I'm not as articulate as you are and I would never attempt to describe anything as beautiful as a Kurosawa film, all I can say is that as I watched, I felt like I was inside his dreams and it was a wonderful (and sometimes scary) experience. Have you seen "Dolls", by Takeshi Kitano? It's one of my favorite films ever and it kind of reminded me of "Dreams".
I'm looking forward to reading your comments on the other segments.

 

[Sitaram]

Rashomon

Today I watched Kurosawa's excellent B&W movie, Rashomon
on DVD. The DVD version which I rented had the option of dubbed
English as well as English subtitles. I found each moment very exciting and tense with anticipation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akutagawa_Ryunosuke

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa ( Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, March 1, 1892 - July
24, 1927) was a Japanese poet and writer, regarded as the "Father of
the Japanese Short Story".

Akutagawa wrote no full-length novels, focusing instead on the short
story as his main medium of expression. During his short life, he wrote
over 150 short stories, including The Nose, The Spider's Thread, The
Hell Screen, Autumn, The Ball (Akutagawa story)The Ball, In a Grove,
and Kappa. Akira Kurosawa directed the film Rashōmon (1950) based
on Akutagawa's stories; the majority of the action in the film was
actually an adaptation of In a Grove.


At the crest of his popularity, Akutagawa interrupted his writing
career to spend four months in China, as a reporter for the Osaka
Mainichi Shinbun. The trip was stressful and he suffered from various
ills, from which his health would never recover. Shortly after his return
he published his most famous tale, In a Grove (1922).

Towards the end of his life, he began suffering from visual
hallucinations and nervousness. In 1927 he tried to take his own life,
together with a friend of his wife Aya, but the attempt failed. He
finally committed suicide (by taking an overdose of Veronal) on July
24 of the same year. It was Saito Mokichi who gave him Veronal. His
dying words in his will were (Bon'yaritoshita fuan, meaning "dim
uneasiness"). In 1935, his lifelong friend Kan Kikuchi established

Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, in his
honor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_(movie)

 

[Kenny Shovel]

Rashomon prompted one of my favourite Simpsons gags:

Marge: 'You liked Rashōmon.'
Homer: 'That's not how I remember it.'

I'm currently half way through re-watching Ran, due to time pressures I'm having to spread it over two nights.

Out of the dozen or so Kurosawa films I've seen I'd say Ikiru (Living) and Dersu Uzala (The Hunter) were the most moving.

I've got this biography of Kurosawas relationship with his most famous leading man Toshiro Mifune (my vote for greatest screen actor of all time). I need to make time to read that as well as his autobiograthy "Something Like An Autobiography".

 

[Shade]

A volume of stories by Akutagawa (Rashomon and other stories) has just been issued in Penguin Classics in the UK. Needless to say, up till then I had no idea the film Rashomon was based on a story.

As for Kurosawa, I've only had a close encounter of the first and second kinds, ie looking at his films in the shop and then buying one of them (Seven Samurai). This was in a phase of enthusiasm last year for the BFI Classics series which also brought into my possession Visconti's The Leopard and Renoir's La Regle du Jeu. So far all remain neatly stacked by my DVD player, awaiting a close encounter of the third kind, ie actually watching them. There's something about the prospect of a three-hour b&w Japanese epic that just bypasses all the excitement sensors in my MTV-generation brain.