EA 190 Shakespeare & Kurosawa Week 9 Outline (Spring 2015)

From last week's outline:

I. Comparison of opening scenes in King Lear and Ran

A. King Lear (review)

1. Lear wants power and respect without the weight of responsiblity that comes with it ("crawl unburdened to death")
2. Places conditions on his love (tell me how much you love me and I'll give you land), but wants unconditional love in return
3. Believes that you can place an economic value on love and respect (still arguing about valuation of love with Regan and Goneril later in play: "oh reason not the need" )
4. Wants his daughters to marry but wants them to remain his daughters. Cordelia is being auctioned off, but clearly Lear doesn't want her to go to France, because then he wouldn't be able to live with her?
...
5. Gloucester subplot sets son against son because of the rule of primogeniture. It is a structural inequity that Edmund deeply resents and Edgar (and his father) seems oblivious to it.

B. RAN Opening Scene

A. What do we know about the characters from this opening scene?

1. Hidetora?

2. What do we know about the brothers and their relationshp to their father?

3. Fujimaki and Ayabe?

4. Is Kurosawa clearer than Shakespeare about the good guys and the bad guys?

B. Animal Imagery

1. Boar

2. Kyoami's comic (kyogen) piece with Saburo's comment

a. What was kyogen? Images

As in Throne of Blood Kurosawa is using contemporaneous theater traditions to locate the film in a particular (medieval) moment, and having Kyoami be a kyogen actor allows Kurosawa to insert elements of Noh and Kyogen theater into the film.

b. Kurosawa's comment on Kyoami's role in the story

c. on the plain when Hidetora sees spirits of those he's killed -- similar to a Noh play

d. Story of the Tama-no-mae fox. The story is itself an allegory for how women who try to rule from behind the throne are always negative influences.

Video: around 1:50

C. Weather/natural landscape

1. Use not always straightforward

D. Use of Sound

1. Kurosawa:

"From Drunken Angel onward I have used light music for some key sad scenes, and my way of using music has differed from the norm--I don't put it in where most people do. Working with Hayasaka I began to think in terms of the counterpoint of sound and image as opposed to the union of sound and image."

2. Use of diegetic versus non-diegetic sound.

a. cicadas

b. flute

E. Kurosawa's Use of Color

Ran vs. Throne of Blood
In Ran doesn't use color realistically at all. So what does Kurosawa do? Uses deeply saturated color, that becomes symbolic rather than realistic.

CHARACTER COLOR CODING:

Names of characters:

Hidetora

Taro

Jiro

Saburo

Fujimaki

Ayabe

 

Look at Scene in which Hidetora loses the 3rd castle. (59:00)

Kurosawa said he based his use of color on images from medieval scrolls depicting famous battles, such as the destruction of Sanjo castle (see also Kurosawa's extremely colorful storyboards, accompanying the English translation: part 1, part 2).

How do the colors indicate the shift of dominance in movie from Hidetora at the beginning to Ayabe at the end? How does color-coding characters affect our perception of them as people?

F. In Ran we see:

1. A society in which concepts such as "kill or be killed" and "the low overthrow the high" have set the moral framework that Hidetora has followed most of his life, and which he now hopes to end by relinquishing power to his sons. (Compare the phrase "the low overthrow the high" to Rotus Fortunae Fortune's Wheel.)

2. A society in which primogeniture is used to consolidate power within the family, which leaves second and third sons out in the cold (similar to King Lear)

3. A society whose social chaos is considered symptomatic of the degenerate age of Buddhism (an age in which we must rely on the interventions of Buddhas and Bodhisattva’s to achieve enlightenment)

G. Assuming that Ran is an allegory of the contemporary situation, what might Kurosawa be saying?

1. Shakespeare is not questioning the system, the structure of government. He may have serious questions about the monarchy, but he does not make them obvious.

2. Kurosawa seems to be making the point in Throne of Blood and Ran that the system itself is flawed, and that any individual who is placed into the samurai system will be unable to escape from its structural violence.

So what are Kurosawa's main themes?

1. The cycle of violence: Who is in control? Is a "limited engagement" war possible?

Kurosawa: "When I look at Japanese history what I see is how man repeats himself over and over again."

How is this vision of violence the same or different from Throne of Blood? Does the introduction of guns (the arquebus was introduced to Japan in 1543) change the level of violence?

2. Faith versus skepticism

Who believes? Who doesn't believe? Does this line up with good versus evil?

How is the treatment of the supernatural (Buddhas, foxes) dealt with Ran versus Throne of Blood?

Is there any sense of redemption or hope at the end of the movie? What might break the cycle of violence?

Forum Question:

Does Hidetora learn anything from his suffering?

Review: When does Lear go mad/obsessive? When does he (at least temporarily) become capable of reason?

At what moments does Hidetora go mad? How is this different? When does regain his sanity?

Video: 2:06

How does his suffering and "journey of discovery" compare to Lear's?