This confession has a certain cultural foundation because of World War II, and Akira Kurosawa's post-war career is not the epic line imagined, but with a distinct legacy of neorealism.
Original text: The Power of Repentance
The author | Southwest University of Political Science and Law Han Xiaoqiang
Image | Network
Smoothly integrate into the international context
1945 was an eventful autumn for Japanese filmmakers: Takashi Tasaka was injured by atomic bomb radiation, Kenji Mizoguchi was at the end of his rope, Yasujiro Ozu was imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore, and Uchida began an eight-year stay in China. Only Akira Kurosawa still ignored the fact of Japan's defeat and gritted his teeth to finish filming "The Man Who Stepped on the Tiger's Tail", even if the film was eventually banned.
This can be understood as a kind of "Bushido" kernel, although this concept was once stolen by militarism, just as Hitler stole Nietzsche's theory of superman. Akira Kurosawa's enthusiasm was once high-profiled by fascism, but it was also the source of his later freedom from ideological shackles and sublimation into a broad humanitarianism.
Excluding the political propaganda film "The Most Beautiful", Akira Kurosawa's remaining 30 films can be called masterpieces. However, because of his changeable style and mixed content, it is not easy to summarize his video style simply. Just as we often say that Akira Kurosawa was a Westernized director, he could clearly see traces of it: Griffiths, Eisenstein, Capra, John Ford, Fritz Lang, and Desika.
Even Akira Kurosawa's seemingly unique samurai films are infused with the DNA of American Westerns and Shakespearean plays. Spielberg's reference to Akira Kurosawa as "shakespeare of cinema" undoubtedly saw the literary and dramatic side of Akira Kurosawa's films, including a large number of later adaptations, including "The Idiot" and "The Lower Class" adapted from Russian literature, and "Spider's Nest City", "Chaos", and "Sweet Dreams of a Bad Man" adapted from Shakespeare's plays.
These fusions and adaptations have brought their works into line with the international context, in other words, Akira Kurosawa is the most open and learning spirit among Japanese film directors throughout the ages. But the crown of "Shakespeare of Cinema," like the familiar title of "Emperor of Cinema," does not accurately define Akira Kurosawa's work and its people.
Direct repentance with action
As fans generally agree, Akira Kurosawa's cinematic power comes from themes, and although these themes have different directions, they all have a clear sense of heaviness. This thickness comes from the "compound eye" creation of elite screenwriters such as Shinobu Hashimoto, Hero koku, and Ryuzo Kikushima, and comes from one problem after another in Akira Kurosawa's films, that is, the French philosopher Deleuze said: "The ultimate problem above the situation." In the face of these problems, the protagonists in Kurosawa's films will not be as wavering and anxious as Hamlet, but will directly face the problem beyond the situation and lead to repentance with actions.
This confession and the meaning of Bushido are integrated, and Akira Kurosawa, who came from a samurai family, naturally understands it, which is the only key word that runs through Kurosawa's more than 30 films. In fact, the spirit of repentance has been in full swing since the beginning of his debut novel "Zi Sansi Lang", in which Zi Sanshiro's sense of justice repeatedly hits a wall in reality, so he tries to escape from the false proposition in front of him and concentrate on staring at a real proposition (reference to enlightenment and forgiveness) of the solution.
This confession has a certain cultural foundation because of World War II, and Akira Kurosawa's post-war career is not the epic line imagined, but with a distinct legacy of neorealism. From "I Have No Regrets about Youth" to "Good Sunday", Akira Kurosawa's themes are close to D'Esika, especially the latter's comedy genre is a special case in Akira Kurosawa's lifelong creation. But from the perspective of the characters, the poverty of intellectual women going to the countryside to farm and the impoverishment of restored soldiers both hint at a certain concept of atonement, and life can be regarded as repentance itself.
Beginning with 1948's "Drunken Angels," Akira Kurosawa's series of films took on a typical noir style. In it, there are pure genre explorations such as "Wild Dogs" and "Scandal", as well as humanitarian-oriented melodramas such as "Quiet Duel" and "Desire for Life". At this time, Akira Kurosawa was undoubtedly influenced by American film noir, and the repeated occurrences of alcoholism, tuberculosis, and syphilis in post-war works also became the infinite signifiers of post-war traumatic crimes. From this, we can see why Akira Kurosawa is so obsessed with those strange doctor-patient relationships, such as the attitude of unfulfilled vows in "Drunken Angels" and "Duel of Quiet Nights", which proves Akira Kurosawa's clever intention to use film as a medical skill.
Akira Kurosawa repents of himself through modern dramas and also attacks reality, and his subtext points directly to the poverty of the people and the ineffectiveness of governance. More than once, in the eyes of a healer, Kurosawa pointed out the crux of the problem: nine times out of ten patients stem from poverty. Therefore, the repeated ruins, poor streets and alleys and the people at the bottom of the film reflect the social conscience. In this regard, Akira Kurosawa is not a high-ranking movie emperor, but a benevolent healer who understands the details of society, and his role in the film seems to be some kind of executor - just like the chief of the citizen section of "Desire for Life", no matter what the previous situation, he can repent and benefit society with his own practical actions.
One might say that Akira Kurosawa's modern dramas are far less beautiful than samurai-era dramas, which is not accurate. In terms of quantity, Kurosawa's real samurai films are probably only eight such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Spider's Nest City, Sengoku Heroes, Heart Stick, Tsubaki Santenro, Shadow Samurai, and Chaos, accounting for only a quarter of his career works. Their fame abroad is more due to ethnic and cultural differences.
In the Seven Samurai and Tsubaki Sanjurō, it is this true proposition that connects the samurai. "Spider's Nest City", "Shadow Samurai" and "Chaos" use the blueprints of Shakespeare's plays to pursue problems that belong to Bushido. As for Rashomon, Warring States Heroes, and Heart Stick, although they are texts that influence the world and feed back the West, they are not other works at the level of the theme of confession. Of course, these films are more entertaining and feature audiovisual language, which can leave a place in the history of cinema.
A painted rewrite of past movies
Akira Kurosawa in the era of black and white films is already a master of absolute significance, but the purple-red smoke presented in the black and white of "Heaven and Hell" makes people see the possibility of Akira Kurosawa continuing to break through himself. In fact, Akira Kurosawa's involvement in color movies is extremely recent, that is, in 1970's "TramMania", when he was 60 years old. This was followed by a displeasure experienced by Hollywood and a box office failure that led to a suicide the following year—which can be seen as some sort of samurai cutting the abdomen, the most radical form of repentance. The form of the abdomen cut was only practiced by Yukio Mishima, the director of "Worried Country" (1966), but that time it was more as a radical political manifesto.
However, Akira Kurosawa continued to choose film as a medium of repentance, and in the era of color films, his films were more like a painted rewrite of past films. Just as "Trammania" is a rewrite of "The Lower Level", "August Rhapsody" is a rewrite of "The Record of the Living", "Sunset Love" seems to be a rewrite of "I Have No Regrets about Youth", and "Dream" is a comprehensive rewrite of past movies. These rewrites prove that Kurosawa is still concerned about the social problems, nuclear explosion wounds and political decay he confessed in past movies, but uses a certain metaphorical stroke, but inadvertently reveals the burning pain of memory, which proves that Kurosawa has always maintained the peak level and has not slackened.
Kurosawa's film career stops at the countless scene sketches he drew for The Sea Testimony (2002), but his confession stays on the professor Uchida In "Sunset Love", and the gray-haired old man will look at the children and say, "Please find what you really like and what is really important to you." Once you've found it, work hard for this important thing. Needless to say, this is the embodiment and self-condition of Akira Kurosawa, who lives a lifetime, repents without sorrow, and can flow like a clear spring.
The article was originally published in the 8th edition of the 1709th issue of the Social Science Daily, and its reprint without permission is prohibited, and the content in the article only represents the author's views and does not represent the position of this newspaper.
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