"The cost of doing a Kurosawa Akira feature is about equal to 10 Kubrick exhibitions." At the end of 2018, the China Film Archive offered the public the first time to present a special screening of Akira Kurosawa's films, which lasted for nearly 2 months and more than 60 screenings, making every weekend at the end of the year particularly worth looking forward to. Among them, many kurosawa classics such as "Tsubaki Thirteen Lang" and "Heaven and Hell" are the first time to land on the big screen in Beijing. This luxurious thematic screening not only made fans addicted, but also made Akira Kurosawa and his works become the focus of hot discussion again.
Kurosawa
"Zhou Yi" Ge Gua Yun: Gentleman leopard change, villain leather face.
Although the gua is talking about "change", it is more related to a person's "virtue". No matter how the torrent of the times "changes", there will always be some "unchanged" beyond the melee, such as the sense of identification with the "gentleman". That's why it is said that the gentleman leopard changes, and its Wen Wei is also - the gentleman's "Wen Wei" is the result of continuous polishing, and it will not be a wall-riding faction; only the "villain" will "change his face" and turn his face like a book.
Therefore, there will always be some respect for those artists who have a consistent attitude towards art, such as Jean Luc Godard, who is still a stormtrooper at the age of 88.
And Akira Kurosawa may also belong to this list.
Akira Kurosawa's paradox
However, aren't Akira Kurosawa's various manifestations full of contradictions and various paradoxes? For example, his films are full of populist intellectuals who "ask for the people's lives", but from time to time satirize the peasants, revealing a critique of "gangsters"; for example, from "I Have No Regrets about Youth" in the 1940s to "Dreams" in the 1980s, his films always seem to haunt the theme of "anti-war", but he later spoke highly of his "The Most Beautiful" filmed in World War II, which was a "women's stand-up team" in the context of militarist ideas.
The Record of the Living
Kurosawa's evaluation is even more full of sharp antagonisms. Whether in Japan or the West, the controversy surrounding him has always been heard. A little collection, the "crimes" of the "movie emperor" are really hard to read.
Even with bad reviews, one still has to face the fact that Akira Kurosawa's films create a powerful and powerful artistic image. In general, works of art that fall into this category are accompanied by pain, contradiction, and even error.
In this regard, perhaps an analogy can be made between the two writers whom Kurosawa most admired, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Kurosawa maintained a love of Russian literature throughout his life and directly adapted the Russian writer Arsenyev's In the Wild Forest of Ussuri (i.e., Delsu Uzara), Gorky's At the Bottom, and Dostoevsky's The Idiot. To fault Tolstoy or Dostoevsky would be "overwhelming", but this did not in any way detract from the strength of the artistic image created by the two masters. To paraphrase George Steiner' point of view, if Tolstoy and Dostoevsky far surpassed the other great writers of their time, it was because their revelation of the "real" (including the individual truth and the group truth, the psychological truth and the historical truth) exceeded the level of experience. Commenting on Akira Kurosawa's films, it can also be viewed as such.
"The Idiot"
Delsu Uzara
"On the Ground Floor"
"Fox" type artist
It is true that there is still a gap in the depth of Kurosawa's thinking compared with another great director who loved to adapt Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the French film master Robert Bresson, but he undoubtedly received rich artistic nourishment from these two great Russian artists, especially Tolstoy. Just as Tarkovsky said, "War and Peace is my art school," Akira Kurosawa believes that even a small, inconspicuous passage of War and Peace can serve as a model of art. His type as an artist is also close to Tolstoy's, the "fox" type of artist (the ancient Greek poet said: the fox knows a lot, the hedgehog has a great knowledge), perhaps he is just a "porter" in terms of thought, loose and lacking depth, but witty and dexterous, full of artist creativity. All the directors who imitated him (many of them) without exception appeared clumsy in front of the original.
But as one of the biggest "foxes" in the history of world cinema, Kurosawa's diligent study is still very solid: for example, in Dostoevsky's "Idiot", it is written that the protagonist, Duke Myskin, meets Nastasia Filippovna for the first time, and the Duke does not catch the coat that Nastasha threw over (she treats him as a servant), he turns his head, Nastasha can't help but smile, and the Duke also subconsciously laughs, but stammers.
In the film, the performances of Hara Setsuko and Masayuki Sen perfectly reproduce this detail.
This is the so-called "deep skill" and where it comes from.
The pursuit of the "nobility" of human nature
More importantly, "virtue" is an issue that Akira Kurosawa's films have been exploring from beginning to end. As Russian thinkers explore, the subject is usually "sublime."
The implication of the question posed by Akira Kurosawa is that in an era of "change" (think of the sentence in "Rashomon", the human heart of the world has really become bad), can we maintain that bit of "nobility" in human nature? Akira Kurosawa's answer is not complicated (much like Tolstoy's), and even if the bad guys gain power, people still tend to be "good." For example, almost the entire film of "Rashomon" talks about the complexity of human nature and the abyss of human nature, but at the end of the film, the actions of the woodcutter played by Joe Shimura represent the final choice of "goodness". Although "Sweet Dreams of Evil Men" says that the wicked always call the wind and rain, we should still choose justice and choose to be a truly noble person.
Rashomon
"Sweet Dreams of evil men"
Of course, the word "noble" is a bit too general. Or "virtue" is more appropriate. In the big picture, this is the ultimate concern for human beings, and it can be said that it is a virtue that transcends ordinary moral standards. Plato believed that the virtue of the heart, that is, justice, is also. A purified, ideal soul should include the four virtues of wisdom, bravery, self-denial, and integrity. In Kurosawa's case, none of these noble virtues are numerous, if not more: they combine the "bottom" perspective of left-wing literary and artistic thought with the expectations of elite intellectuals for the ideal "aristocratic spirit" (rather than the aristocratic class).
In the near-perfect film masterpiece Tsubaki Sanjuro, these two seemingly contradictory paradigms blend together perfectly. The film is quite comedic, and the big noble lady Mukita, who is not alarmed and has a light wind, can be seen as the most perfect CP with the lower samurai Tsubaki Sanjuro played by Toshiro Mifune. They have a striking similarity in social status: sharp teeth and soft and compassionate hearts; calm and calm in the face of things; keen insight into people and things; extraordinary tenacity and determination; and a sense of justice. They have the same noble qualities, and they feel sorry for each other across ages and classes – but this does not mean the reconciliation of class contradictions. Kurosawa was concerned about another class: the ronin who were abandoned or ignored by the great times, but who adhered to classical virtues and virtues.
《Sanjuro Tsubaki》
Even lowly thieves will be able to achieve spiritual ascension because of this virtue, such as the "Shadow Warrior" in "Shadow Samurai". Of course, this is due to Akira Kurosawa himself coming from a samurai family, but this choice is all the more so that he thinks about "Japanese modernity". As we see, the wild hair in "I have no regrets about youth", the police in "Wild Dogs", nao tigers and crazy Ami in "Chaos" and the loyal samurai who do not abandon Hidehu, the civil servant Watanabe in "The Desire to Live", the military doctor in "Quiet Duel", the community doctor in "Drunken Angel", the red beard in "Red Beard", and the Kwon Fuji in "Heaven and Hell", they are all idealized characters, and they are both ancient "soldiers" like the lower samurai played by Toshiro Mifune. Combined with the ideals of modern populist intellectuals, note that they are not the "mainstream middle class".
Shadow Samurai
Therefore, I am afraid that kurosawa films cannot be simply viewed from the Western perspective of "Bushido spirit", although in comparison, the criticism of him for "pandering to the West" in Japan may be more unreasonable. After all, Akira Kurosawa's films are a product of Japanese modernity. His criticism is also related to the problem of Japanese modernity. And his criticism is precisely based on the Western frame of reference.
The hero and heroine of "mixed race"
It is not difficult for us to find that the male protagonists of Akira Kurosawa's films all give people a sense of "mixed blood". Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakayo, Yuzo Kayama, and even Yuki Yamazaki, all of them, without exception, have a high nose, deep eyes, and a clear silhouette. Of course, Akira Kurosawa himself was also very "mixed-race", joking that his family's eyes would turn blue when they were old; his height of 1 meter 81 was very eye-catching among Japanese people at that time. If the female figure in Naruse's films honestly records the changes brought about by Japanese modernity, the male image of Kurosawa's films has an idealized color on the background of modernity.
《War》Kaiya Nakadai
Sanjuro Tsubaki Toshiro Mifune
Even the women under Akira Kurosawa's lens are quietly changing, although his films are almost all male perspectives, and the main aura is added to the male actors, who are usually only supporting roles. But Hara May be an exception, her height and appearance are very "mixed- among Japanese actresses", so she starred in "Idiot" without a sense of violation. Akira Kurosawa is her mentor, because starring in "I Have No Regrets about Youth" saved Hara Setsuko, on the one hand, Kurosawa Akira through the devil's training, so that she grew from a "vase" to a real actor; on the other hand, it was "whitewashed" for her, because Hara Akiko starred in the Japanese-German co-production of the militarist film "New Promised Land" during the war. The New Promised Lands, Manchuria also.
"I have no regrets about youth" original section
I don't know if there is a reason for this, Hara Setsuko performed very hard in the post-war anti-militarist "I Have No Regrets about Youth". But the role is not convincing enough, and this Miss Senkin, a professor at Kyoto University, would do the same as the wife of a Decembrist and willingly become a peasant woman outright and out-of-the-box: her actions are more like atonement or a symbolic sacrifice, and she is obedient to male teachings, a "noble object of ideology", lacking the experience of female subjectivity.
Another example is the dance hall, which is a space that Japanese directors will talk about after the war. Because the dance hall is probably the most equal and contradictory place, American soldiers, dancers, drug dealers, frustrated people, college students all come here. Dancers (or Japanese women who perform pornography or soft pornography) are the main objects of viewing. But what we see in Keisuke Kinoshita's "Carmen Homecoming" and Akio Naruse's "Maihime" is an expression of compassion and female subjectivity, while in several of Kurosawa's contemporaneous films (the most representative of which are "Muddy Angels" and "The Desire to Be Born"), dancers are often simple-minded and shameless. The unbeautiful female staff in "Desire to Live" and "Good Sunday" who support themselves with a meager salary are responsible for taking the male protagonist out of negative emotions. But in 1958, Akira Kurosawa's Sengoku Heroes created the image of a princess Yukihime, a heroic, structured independent female figure, and when she heard that the samurai had sacrificed her sister of the same age as her in order to save her, she couldn't help but say angrily: I really hate your loyal look. Rare.
"The Desire to Live"
Reflections on the problems of modernity transcend the times
The question of modernity discussed in Akira Kurosawa's films often spills over his time. For example, "The Record of the Living" is a film that Akira Kurosawa has been criticized a lot. This story is about the background of the US-Soviet nuclear hegemony, the Japanese factory owner played by Toshiro Mifune first repaired the basement for defense, and then heard that nuclear dust would drift to Japan, so he decided to immigrate to Brazil with his family. Everyone around him thought he was surprised, and he set fire to the factory to cut off his family's back road, but this led to a large number of workers losing their jobs, and he himself was sent to a mental hospital by his family. Finally he saw himself on another planet and witnessed the earth burned to ashes. The film failed miserably at the box office, and critic Tadao Sato unceremoniously called the film a "failure." Leftist realist film criticism can easily draw such conclusions. However, according to today's fashionable view, it is still shallow to think of it as an environmental theme or ecology.
We may still be able to compare this film with the Tarkovsky films of the same period: Stalker, Nostalgia, Sacrifice. They can both be seen as a kind of "eschatological" film, and Russ von Trier's "Melancholy" is an upgraded version of this sequence and a subversion of this so-called "religious" theme. "Eschatological" narratives (including most sci-fi narratives), usually responses to the "Great Other," are closely related to the world order, but from a certain point of view, it is also the loss of modern people's "soullessness," emptiness, and the ability to love that is anxious. Modern man seems to be a slave to money, but he has no idea what true nobility is. So we see that Akira Kurosawa and Tarkovsky's protagonists think and act the same way.
"Trammania" is also a far-forward movie. A mentally handicapped young man lives in the illusion of being a tram driver, driving a "tram" every day on time next to the garbage heap in the slum (how similar is the idea of Chen Kaige's short film "The Depths of a Hundred Flowers"). His sense of happiness stands in stark contrast to his tearful mother, with fictional trams, real ruins, glamorous cities, and Munch-style hand-drawn drawings. The group portrait of the characters in it seems more meaningful today. This is called a movie called "made for the next century." Beggars, miners, craftsmen, thieves, girls, and old people weave together a mottled weave of modernity syndrome around this story of "madness."
"TramMania"
Although the word "hell" is used very often in Japanese (such as "hell ramen"), no other director like Akira Kurosawa has lines like "This is hell" in almost every movie. The "hells" in his shots are "real problems", and these "hells" are always accompanied by the appearance of bodhisattva images or Buddha trumpets, which is too merciful compared to the real hell that Ras von Trier set up in his new film "This House is Made by Me".
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