Kurosawa and Shakespeare

Originally written December 10, 2014

There is quite an extensive list of filmmakers Akira Kurosawa inspired. George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and John Sturges top the list. Perhaps equally as impressive is the list of people who Kurosawa himself was inspired by. John Ford was certainly a huge influence, as was Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. He was part of a group of artist that were particularly interested in literature. Another man who shows a great impact on Kurosawa’s work is William Shakespeare. 

Kurosawa adapted several of Shakespeare’s works into films set in Japan. His first was Throne of Blood, in 1957, which is based on Macbeth. Three years later The Bad Sleep Well, an adaptation of Hamlet. Finally, in 1985, he made Ran, based on King Lear. He used the original plays as more of a guideline to create his own thing, rather than a set script. His films all use basic character and plot points from the films, however they take many liberties with the story; after all Kurosawa is not trying to tell the exact same story as Shakespeare was.

Shakespeare used beautiful words to communicate with the audience. Kurosawa evokes many of those same emotions, but instead of prose he employes visual things to connect with his viewers. An review from a 1961 copy of the Time magazine stated : “Kurosawa's Shakespeare inevitably—and fortunately—involves more Kurosawa than Shakespeare. With blunt and vital irreverence, the director has translated Shakespeare's words into Japanese images. Shakespeare's lords into Japanese barons [...] the spectator scarcely has time to realize, as the images deafen and the noises decorate his imagination,that he is experiencing effects of cinema seldom matched in their headlong masculine power of imagination.”

In both Throne of Blood and Ran, Kurosawa made use of Japanese Noh theatre. Noh is a very stylized, motion-centered art, which added an extremely theatrical element to his films, and contrasted typical western naturalism. This is particularly interesting because Kurosawa usually eschewed traditional Japanese film techniques, so for him to use an ancient theatrical form in his films forces one to think about what it was he didn’t like specifically about Japanese filmmaking.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, one of the themes is versions of reality. This is a theme that was definitely echoed in Kurosawa’s film Rashomon. “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” say the witches at the beginning of the play. Floating daggers, severed fingers, and perpetually blood-stained hands are all things that we are told happen in the show, however it’s up to the audience to decide how much of this is hallucination or imagination. In Rashomon, the different versions of reality are also explored, but this time by contradicting stories. Again, the audience has to sort out the truth from fiction. Whether Kurosawa was directly influenced by Macbeth when he made Rashomon, or he was just a fan of the playwright’s work, it is easy to see parallels between the two artists.