“It’s true that even Shakespeare didn’t dare give his clowns hot blood to drink.

But Kurosawa dares.” — Pauline

Ran is a shin-hanga woodblock film, swarming between Monet-esque light saturated landscape, Homer’s bold
lines and stark watercolors, and Goya-like poetic violence: stationary soldiers on horseback, overlooking an
endless mass of green — bright as an Irish smile, misleading as the suspenseful hogaku — beneath an even
greater pulp of nimbus and the light aqua which it eclipses; from bottom to top, one shade paler than the last.
Humans in wide shots look like playset figures placed there by an infant of a runaway imagination: “human
deeds seen from heaven”. In the widest of these shots, the title card reads “Akira Kurosawa”.

Kurosawa’s painterly eye often went unacknowledged. He started as an artist, modelling after Van Gogh,
Cézanne and Chagall. His early films, the best of which were Rashomon (1950), The Seven Samurai (1954), and
Yojimbo (1961), had an extraordinary dynamism and drive that his care for details was about the last thing you
noticed. By 1980, Kagemusha saw him finishing the step that Eisenstein had taken from the compulsively
inexorable Battleship Potemkin (1925) to the inhumanly languid Ivan the Terrible (1944), and now it’s hard not
to notice the elaborate set-ups and framings. In Ran, engraved stillness hangs over every image, and when
something dares move, all hell breaks loose. “Ran” in Japanese (as in Chinese) means “chaos.” More exactly,
it’s movement.

I’m talking about numbers. Rivers of cavalry sweep open the gates, in a rush of formation, through aegean blue
mist and the piles of corpses — drenched in scarlet, bodies full of arrows and spears — that mount beside the
stampeding, meandering streams; long clean lines of beautiful rose madder flashes in the distance, and at close,
the blurring gaits of galloping horses and the bodies falling therefrom. The crowd size had always been the most
reliable measure of power, unlike wealth and ideology: simply cover this entire side of a mountain with men,
banners and weapons, and the effect is overpowering. Before the atom, it was the deterrence measure, hence the
relentless buildup of great powers. Militaristic campaigns and union strikes are nothing without it, and
Kurosawa had commanded it nimbly and loftily, with great relish. It’s a ballet of primary colors; blood was its
pirouette, fire its arabesque. An ironic celebration of power and grandeur, of controlled chaos.

That it’s bowdlerized of Shakespeare’s soliloquy, rhythm, and complexity is of no great importance: who goes a
Kurosawa film for the Shakespeare? Who goes to a Shakespeare play for the Shakespeare, without Olivier or
McKellen or any of those rare dramatic talents you care to name? Shakespeare’s Lear is a stubborn old schmo
who rediscovered the kiddy pleasures of homelessness, of howling at the lightnings and cursing the gods after
he kicked his third daughter Cordelia, loyal but no-nonsense and irreverent, out across the English Channel to
the alien arms of France, and after his other pussyfooting daughters Goneril and Regan, who won his
inheritance and land by waxing lyrical, left him to drown in rainstorm with a fool and a nude Tom o’ Bedlam.
We hear his “marble-hearted fiend!” and “monster ingratitude!” and understand that, though he brought it onto
himself, he’s the victim of those he never harmed, of socialized avarice and ageism.

Kurosawa’s Lear deserved all the injustices that befell him. Surrounded in a fortress, the armies of his two sons
at the gates, slaughtering away at his samurai and concubines, Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai) lost his wits almost
in a snap, went out literally in a speechless trance. The only time his dumbfounded mouth remains closed is
when he’s asleep. Kurosawa had taken the fable of the great feudal lord Mōri Motonari breaking the three
arrows to his three sons that it’s
Nowhere in the text has Shakespeare indulged in the prissy anti-war foolery that Kurosawa has been hammering
his audience for the better part of his late career. Lear the fool .

At age 13, young Akira witnessed the aftermath of Kantō Massacre, the ghastly sight of which he was unable to
look away: corpses of leftists and civilians on top of another, blood seeping into everywhere, the smell
impossible to escape from. Starting with Yojimbo, his depictions of violence, gleeful as it was, had the trauma
built in right from the start, not unlike Sam Peckinpah. In his 20s, he abandoned a short try at an artist’s life
after he lost an elder brother to illness and another by suicide, and the dramatic harrowings of Lear must’ve
struck him.

Kurosawa hasn’t lost the dramatic sense that his peers did when they turned middle-age, if it’s only the desire to
do right by Shakespeare (it isn’t as apparent in his other late films).

When King Lear

Shakespeare’s soliloquy

Lear the schmo

“T. S. Eliot has pointed out that a number of Shakespeare's tragic heroes have this trick of looking at themselves
dramatically; their true identity, the thing that is destroyed when they die, is something outside themselves —
not a man, but a style of life, a kind of meaning.” –– Robert Warshow, “Gangster”

Men bad because women bad; women bad because men bad. Full of gallows humor and slapstick of violence,
anti-war didacticism, and Japanese over-acting. Unlike money, faith, and knowledge, the size of the crowd —
whether of striking unions or the overpowering look of men and weapons that cover this entire side of a
mountain — will always be the most reliable measurement of power, and no western (or eastern) director had
ever commanded it as nimbly and loftily as Kurosawa. I’ve read King Lear, I know King Lear, I even went to
King Lear, but until now, I have never seen it (though to be fair, it’s a mistake to see it as a Shakespeare
adaptation that it seemingly is: if you expect a psychological study, you won’t latch onto very much). Never
seen it this obsessive, this immense, this high on the endless rivers of men and horses, of gunshots and arrows,
of landscapes and colors, of blood and fire — an ironic celebration of power and grandeur, of controlled chaos
(this movie’s actual title).