By Patrick Crogan
Translator: Yi Ersan
Proofreader: Onegin
Source: Cinematic (September 2000)
At the beginning of the introduction to Akira Kurosawa's films, I would like to raise the question of cross-cultural viewing or "acceptance".
I'm not Japanese. Also, I can't speak or read Japanese. I must admit this and evaluate Kurosawa's film fairly with a complete and comprehensive critical overview. Non-Japanese and not speaking Japanese placed me in a large, non-Japanese audience and critic group who had seen Akira Kurosawa's films for years and loved or been attracted to them.
The Seven Samurai
An urgent and familiar question arises: To fully understand and appreciate Akira Kurosawa's films, do you have to be Japanese, or can you speak Japanese? This question can be understood as a special case of how one can understand any film, artwork, or artifact from another culture, as people say today in cultural and postcolonial studies.
Since Akira Kurosawa's Golden Lion-winning work Rashomon rose to prominence on the international film scene in the 1950s, this has more or less become an implicit issue and inspired a lot of critical research on Akira Kurosawa's films.
Rashomon
The most common answer to this question points to the "Western" character of Akira Kurosawa's films in terms of form, content, and artistic vision. Akira Kurosawa is often referred to as the "most Westernized" Japanese director. In this context, Akira Kurosawa was influenced by American Westerns, especially the work of John Ford. The typical, lonely heroic Western story reveals social conflict, which is particularly accentuated by Ford's scheduling of characters in the midst of monumental landscapes and dynamic conflicts.
Other evidence of Akira Kurosawa's "Westernization" was found, often drawing on European and American literature, including Shakespeare (Spider's Nest City[1957], Chaos[1985]), Dostoevsky (Idiot, [1951]) and Gorky (Lower Class[1957]), and popular fiction writer Ed McBane (Kingdom and Hell [1963] adapted from Ginger's Ransom).
In addition, his early studies of painting were inspired by Japanese and European modernism, including Vincent van Gogh. Some believe this also fuels his preference for widescreen "landscapes."
At the level of the director's personal vision, in the 1950s and 1960s, Akira Kurosawa was hailed as one of the great directors of universal and enduring significance, because his works were permeated with humanistic and humanitarian themes: compassion for personal suffering, the search for justice through individual resistance to corrupt social structures, concern for the "human" face of existential crises such as death and social pressure, and the meaninglessness of struggle in life.
None of these themes, influences, or inspirations have been denied by Akira Kurosawa himself, though he insists that he did not emulate the style of any director— either John Ford or Sergey Eisenstein (Akira Kurosawa mentions in his book The Oil of the Toad that Eisenstein had a major influence on him as a young fan). But while he doesn't mind acknowledging that Western cinema and the arts are an important part of his own cultural development, he insists that his films were first and foremost shot for Japanese audiences, and that he feels like the most Japanese of Japanese directors.
Whether you agree with Akira Kurosawa or not, it can be seen from this that it is not very clear whether a person needs to be Japanese or can speak Japanese to best understand his films, because in the process of conceiving, making and receiving his films, Western and Japanese cultural practices and normative operations make the whole thing more complicated. To some extent, the emphasis on Akira Kurosawa's "Westernization" by Western commentators (and some Japanese critics and publishers) diverts this issue.
It is widely believed that Akira Kurosawa absorbed enough Western influences to open a "Westernized" window into Japanese stories and Japanese aesthetics, a view that often obscures the problems of the "exoticism" of Japanese culture, language, and traditions that also exist in his films.
Therefore, my introduction to Akira Kurosawa's work must return to this question of how to understand, translate, appreciate and evaluate the Japanese director's films. I can't answer this question for sure at the moment, but I hope to re-activate this question by (re-evaluating) some of Akira Kurosawa's works at the Film Archive.
To complete this preliminary answer to this question of intercultural communication—about what can be communicated across cultural barriers such as language, social structure, mythology, behavioral norms, and traditions—I will quote a remarkable commentary by the famous French film critic and theorist André Bazin for The Desire to Live, in which Bazin discusses the question of how to understand Akira Kurosawa's appeal to Western audiences.
"The Desire to Live"
He initially expressed a view similar to the above, saying that Akira Kurosawa used his Western influences to reflect the traditional and cultural image of Japan that we can easily absorb. However, he further complicates the original claim, revealing his unique vision of the complexity behind the simple explanation of difficult problems. Bazin said that "The Desire to Live" is a particularly "Japanese" film, but just as Fritz Lang's "M is the Murderer" is a "German" film, wells' Citizen Kane is an "American" film, they have both cultural particularity and humanistic universality. Bazin then compares Akira Kurosawa to James Joyce, who "recreated English with vocabulary in all languages—a type of English that we might call pre-translated but untranslated."
A pre-translated but untranslated language. It was invented by Joyce, and Bazin likened it to Akira Kurosawa's film Desire to Live. This description is reminiscent of the fact that "The Desire to Live" is not only a Japanese film, but also can be universally understood and translated to some extent. But this formula captures the paradoxical, paradoxical element of the idea, which is that something specific to one culture, one language, can be simply and clearly translated into another or more.
This is the paradox of translation itself, always assuming that this clear, universal element exists in translation and can be conveyed in translation. But different languages do exist, and their differences precede any translation: as Jacques Derrida tells us, "Language precedes language." That is to say, before the concept of language appeared, there were multiple languages, differences, incomprehensibility, irreducability, heterogeneity, and language as a communication system has different instances in all languages of the world, just as it acts as a potential, unified correspondence that makes translation from one language to another possible.
However, translation is constant and inevitable, and it exists within a committed framework, i.e. faithful, complete and adequate translation. Akira Kurosawa's films can be seen as translations, not only for Western filmmaking and narrative forms, but also for Japanese cultural practices and traditions that contradict them.
The central issue of Akira Kurosawa's concern is Japanese identity, which has been the focus of Japanese attention since at least the Meiji Restoration in the mid-nineteenth century, which set Japan on a positive modernization of its social, political, industrial, and economic systems and practices. Until World War II, the fate of Japanese identity in this "Western" style of modernization and industrialization remained a widespread and ongoing concern in Japan. The postwar occupation of Japan by the U.S.-led military until 1952, and the rewriting of Japan's political, economic, military, and social model under the occupation regime, only heated up, or even exacerbated, these fears.
According to some, this was the time of the birth of Akira Kurosawa's greatest work, and it invariably touched on these issues, even in the period dramas produced in the 1950s and 1960s (four of which will be screened at the Film Archive' festivals).
Let me summarize the introduction to cross-cultural issues, if Akira Kurosawa's films are translations, then the efforts of critics and fans are also translations. A translation of a so-called "pre-translated but untranslated language". Between "pre" and "un" is translation, or the effort of translation. In a sense, translation is always "pre-existent" because the laws, forms, and traditions borrowed always give meaning before they are used in any particular film, adaptation, or story script. But after it is completed, this particular film is somehow impossible to translate, because there are elements that are specific, single, and unique to a film, work, and translation.
When we talk about the West's acceptance of these Japanese films, we find ourselves in this situation. But it is for any film, or work, or audience from a "nother" language. Indeed, as Derrida pointed out in a recent article, even one's own language, always coming from the "other," is not entirely one's own. However, a person is destined to translate, there is no other way.
Well, the question is, what to translate and how to translate it best. This is always an ethical issue, even if it seems like a simple case of finding the most "correct" or aesthetically appropriate word, image, or edit. Akira Kurosawa understands this. His films can be understood as a continuous effort to translate stories—both Japanese and non-Japanese sources—exploring and questioning the ethical possibilities of group and individual behavior in the course of class and social structures as well as specific historical and cultural developments and destinies. His diverse aesthetic references and experiments need to be viewed from this perspective.
Spider's Nest City adapts Shakespeare's Macbeth with noh stage and performance traditions; the reconstruction of Gorky's social satire novels in the nineteenth-century Japanese Lower Class; the encounter between absurdist literature and the Japanese New Wave in Trammania (1970); The Seven Samurai's representation of Ford's astonishing scene scheduling; Toshiro Mifune's combination of western lone wolves and ronin in Heart Stick (1961) and Tsubaki Sanshiro (1962); and Eisenstein's dialectical montage from beginning to end Influenced by European Post-Impressionism and Modernism and the Japanese painting and calligraphy tradition; all the formal choices and experiments of Kurosawa's films need to be thought through the challenges he has set for himself in order to make his artistic translations a profound and complex question of the possibilities of the Japanese and human beings.
Trammania (1970)
If, as many critics and admirers in the West asserted in the 1960s, Akira Kurosawa's films were one of the greatest humanist film sequences, I think what really matters about this humanism is that his films powerfully question the problematic but inevitable assumption of humanism, namely the fundamental characteristics, social needs, and values that we share deep within.
In Akira Kurosawa's films, the risks of being different, "other", and "untranslated" will disappear because this same assumption is never forgotten in Akira Kurosawa's films. That's why, as Gilles Deleuze says, Akira Kurosawa's film is first and foremost a film about a problem, a film about questioning, and certainly a movie about action—but a movie about action in question.