Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center May 1993Among those directors generally esteemed as the masters of world cinema, Akira Kurosawa is unique for the extreme variation of accessibility among his films. How can such a talented filmmaker fluctuate so wildly, at times virtually alternating between works generally regarded as masterpieces and other films that seem mediocrities, or even flops? Some casually dismiss Kurosawa's more recent work as the product of a director past his prime, but this simplistic explanation ignores a major pattern common to his most satisfying and most dissatisfying films.
The variability of Kurosawa's work can be traced to an ambivalent attitude toward his public. This ambivalence, in turn, has generated an increasing difficulty in communicating the fragmentization of Japanese life to Japan. The conflict between the individual and society, oft noted in his films, extends beyond the individual film in question to Kurosawa's own legendary lone-wolf status in the Japanese film industry. Instead of narrowly viewing Kurosawa's films as disparate products of a single individual, we get a more cohesive picture if we broaden our scope to see them as the visible portion of a dialogue with Japan. Kurosawa succeeds and fails precisely because he takes his viewers into account. Furthermore--and most intriguingly--the degree of success is highly dependent upon the actual incorporation of "audiences" within his films. (For this discussion I shall refer to the moviegoing public as viewers and onlooking characters in the films as audiences.)
Accessible--and therefore successful--films such as Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, High and Low, Yojimbo and its sequel Sanjuro, and Dersu Uzala all have internal audiences that observe the major action, register a response, and thus carry continuity. Films I am labeling as impenetrable--and therefore unsuccessful--such as The Lower Depths, much of Red Beard, Dodeska'den, Kagemusha, Ran, and most of Dreams generally lack this audience element. The action is straight on, there is a preachy "message," and the viewer is left cold. (I must admit that Throne of Blood defies such neat categorization; it employs internal audiences only minimally--as in the dramatic mutiny ending--yet is one of Kurosawa's most engaging films.) Rhapsody in August, Kurosawa's latest film to date, represents a partial return to the viewer-oriented mode, and helps illuminate the distinctions drawn above.
To illustrate the concept of accessibility, we could pick virtually any scene from the director's most popular work, Seven Samurai ('54). The clearest example of the function of the internal audience may be the scene of ambushing the spies. This how-to lesson in fighting is simultaneously thrilling and hilarious. Kikuchiyo the "peasant samurai" (Toshiro Mifune) and Kyuzo the ace swordsman (Seiji Miyaguchi) are sent to intercept three enemy scouts. Katsushiro (Ko Kimura), the samurai apprentice, is instructed to observe, and it is through his eyes that we witness the scene. As Katsushiro peers at the ambush site, parted grass trembling in his hands, we see Kyuzo calmly examining a daisy at the base of a tree, not the least concerned about the impending combat. Kikuchiyo--who is literally social-climbing as a samurai--is juxtaposed like a tensed panther in the tree above. When the enemy scouts appear, Kyuzo rises and swiftly slays two of them with a single sword stroke, then calls to Katsushiro that the job is done and it is safe to come out of hiding. Meanwhile, Kikuchiyo is still beating the daylights out of the diminutive third scout, in a messy display of brute force. Katsushiro idolizes Kyuzo, who is embarrassed by the attention, while Kikuchiyo must parade his captured "prey" to gain the recognition he craves. The audience device enables the characters to illuminate each other's roles, and in turn this one scene drives the social drama of the whole film.(*)
Even when the director is having fun, as in Hidden Fortress, his films are essentially didactic and moralistic. In his more recent work, including Rhapsody, the didacticism is hardly subtle and threatens to overwhelm the film. Kurosawa himself denies ideological motives as a basis for his cinema. As he told Marcia Pally in Saturday Review: "Filmmaking is not a matter of treating themes. The idea for a work comes spontaneously and in the course of making it, a theme emerges. Works of art that purport to be made for the sake of a message are the ones I deeply distrust." Indeed, with so much class consciousness embedded in his work, Kurosawa is virtually obligated to defend himself against charges of being ideological (and consequently "Red"), lest he isolate himself even further from the touchy film industry and the public.
While Kurosawa was filming Red Beard ('65), he told Donald Richie: "The director really always makes his film for himself ... if he says he makes it for the public, he is really lying. If the film is liked by the public and seems made for them, this is because their ideas are the same as the director's and not the other way around." This statement was more applicable to future films than those already made. At the climax of the early One Wonderful Sunday ('47) the heroine brazenly addresses the viewers: "Please everyone, if you feel sorry for us, please clap your hands. If you clap for us I'm sure we'll be able to hear the music." Viewers applauded in Paris, not in Japan, and either way heard Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. Kurosawa subsequently commented in his autobiography: "My intention here was to elicit audience participation in the film by addressing them directly. When an audience goes to see a film, they are more or less participating in it anyway, insofar as they become emotionally involved in the film and forget themselves.... What I wanted to do with this scene ... was transform the audience into actual participants in the film." Essentially, Kurosawa employs this Tinkerbell device whenever he incorporates an internal audience, instructing the viewer how to receive the message. He still wants us to applaud, but mentally.
Commanding the "audience" of actors how to behave enables the director to emotionally manipulate the viewer. A good example is the droll river rescue scene in Dersu Uzala. The soldiers are told by Dersu (Maxim Munzuk) to pick a tree tall enough to reach their guide stranded in the raging flood. They rush along the bank from tree to tree, hugging each in turn and asking Dersu if they've picked the right one. As viewers, we share the frustration of both the beleaguered "director" Dersu and the woefully ignorant soldier-audience. If ever there was an apt metaphor for the director trying to communicate with his viewer/audience, this is it.(**)
The audience concept was embryonic, and far more pronounced, in Kurosawa's earlier work, often pervading entire films. Consider his wartime propaganda piece They Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail ('45): A fugitive samurai leader and his small band attempt to slip through enemy lines by posing as a group of traveling monks. When the "pilgrims" reach the enemy checkpoint, the suspicious captain of the guard insists that the monks perform one of their ritual services. If they are impostors they will give themselves away by missing a hand-clap, bending at the wrong time, or some other telltale failing. Under scrutiny the samurai-in-monks'-clothing keep perfect pace with their leader. Or almost. The enemy captain sees through the ruse, but is so impressed with the command performance that he decides to reward such grace under pressure by letting them pass. The fugitive samurai leader recognizes the noble gesture. The result is mutual respect--a curious twist for a wartime propaganda film!
The interplay of how the camera watches the actors responding to each others' performances runs through every single other successful film in the director's career from then on. Without such mediation, a Kurosawa film fails to make that magical leap that distinguishes the emotional rapport characterizing his best work. Richie noted that in They Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail the "antics of Enoken [the clown character] are so very much those of a spectator ... that we soon identify him with the audience. Not us, of course--we are brighter than this; but perhaps, the man sitting next to us." Examples are legion, yet seldom recognized in commentary on Kurosawa's films. Apparently only the Japanese film critic Tadao Sato observed this device as a recurrent pattern: "The relationship between two persons always features importantly in Kurosawa's dramas because his main characters, usually men, need an observer of their behavior."
This reflects what may be termed Kurosawa's "mirror theory" of personality: the use of others to reflect that which one projects from within one's own self. The self cannot be observed directly; it gains definition only when it exerts an impact on others. It is the function of the internal audience to reflect and amplify the inner character of whoever commits an action. Kurosawa confessed, in his autobiography: "In my class at Kuroda there was another crybaby, a child who was worse than I. The very existence of this child was like having a mirror thrust in front of my face. I was forced to see myself objectively."
For all his concern with the viewer, Kurosawa seems plagued with misunderstanding, especially by Japanese critics. He is accused of being "Western" and "un-Japanese" and has enjoyed only a mixed acceptance by the Japanese public. Reacting to such criticism, he once told Richie: "I hear a lot about foreigners being able to understand my pictures so well, but I certainly never thought of them while I was making the films. Perhaps it is because I am making films for today's young Japanese that I should find a Western-looking format the more practical.... I really only make pictures for people in their twenties. They don't know anything about Japan or Japaneseness, not really." Here is the very motive for the creation of Rhapsody in August.
Rhapsody's opening scene is particularly poignant. In a house in a rural Japanese village a few miles from Nagasaki, four grandchildren are seated on the floor with their grandmother (Sachiko Murase), reading aloud a letter from their father visiting in Hawaii. Kurosawa starts with the audience; the author of the letter is not even present. It is the youngsters' reaction to the glowing tone of the father's description of Hawaii that strikes the keynote of excitement: the developing conflict between history (the war four and a half decades previous) and shifting cultural values (wealthy American relatives). To whom do these kids owe their allegiance? The children do have the ability to choose, as demonstrated by the eldest boy, who decides to spend the summer tuning the organ rather than studying. Viewers see the conflict played out from the point of view of this young audience. The parents (who return later in the film) represent a sell-out; the grandmother is a hold-out.
The adolescents sport American T-shirts--a second skin, if you will--and could very well have been American teenagers. They don't like Granny's cooking style, probably because they have never been exposed to traditional rural food. Certainly they must be taught to "act Japanese"; they must be reminded of their own historical background (the war, in which Japan and America were enemies). In fact, I wonder if these young actors acted; their genuineness is their greatest asset. Similarly, in a later scene we witness a group of aged Nagasaki citizens who tend the site of the A-bomb memorial: are these people merely actors or actual survivors?
Let's scrutinize one conflict-laden scene from Rhapsody, the Nagasaki memorial service. Conducted at a neighborhood shrine, this ceremony turns into a tense gathering thanks to the presence of a Japanese-American guest, a cousin played by Richard Gere. The aged grandmother was widowed by The Bomb and the entire family is anxious about the attitude of this relative from afar. Suspense mounts as neighbors wonder why the American is present. Yet instead of a conventional climax to the scene, Kurosawa chooses to escape from remembering-the-past mode to focus on the present: a trail of ants leading to a single blood-red rose in a nearby garden. This procession has caught the eye of the youngest grandson, whose distraction from the serious event in progress in turn compels the attention of Gere. We are watching characters watching and reacting to each other. The tension of the service is broken by the rapport between the foreign adult and the native boy. They both smile as they witness a simple drama of nature. Richard Gere, as the outsider, demonstrates that one can still be a decent human being without following ancient codes of conduct. Despite the classic audience setup, the connection forged between boy and man is a private affair missed by the observers around them.
We don't have to dig too deeply into the symbolic significance of this imagery. The grandchildren earlier sang a little ditty, "behold the rose growing in the garden," in celebration of their grandmother's reluctant consent to go to Hawaii (and take them along) to see a longlost dying relative (Gere's father). Now we see such a rose growing in the garden, its pollen nurturing an ant colony. On the face of it, the symbolism is heavyhanded, a visual cliche for optimism. But that's only the half of it.
The reason for the inclusion of this rose episode is quite puzzling, for Kurosawa seems to be deliberately defusing his own drama. We know that such an outcome was simply too tangential to resolve the conflict about the repercussions of The Bomb. The director's logic becomes apparent only at the end of the film, the final pursuit in the rainstorm, with the family members (the ants) chasing the confused grandmother, who bears an everted umbrella (the visual and symbolic equivalent of the rose). As keeper of the collective memory, Grandmother safeguards the heritage of the entire family. She defines them as Japanese and maintains integrity. The song is repeated in the final scene--the true climax of the tensions at play in the official ceremony earlier. Whereas the rose scene had engendered a positive feeling, at the end we are all too aware that Grandmother is an endangered species.
Regrettably for a viewer of Rhapsody in August, the rose-in-the-garden scene was so distant in screentime from the grand finale that it failed to reinforce it. (The connection eluded me through two viewings and did not register until I was actually writing this article.) Far worse, the stormy chase scene was so overdone, mainly due to its length, that the rapport Kurosawa aimed to bridge between viewer and audience didn't work. In a film so dependent upon establishing naturalism, this crucial scene became painfully artificial. Ironically, it was a failure of editing--Kurosawa's forte--that led to this unsuccessful tearjerker. Perhaps it was both more accessible and more convincing to Japanese viewers.
The rose-in-the-garden episode is an anomaly because it calls attention to itself as a symbol, yet fails to connect to the climactic event in the film. Simultaneously it introduces a have-a-nice-day feeling into a highly serious subject. Is there something more here? Kurosawa once admitted: "What I do know is that every picture I've done has come out of something that has happened to me, has happened to me personally. A friend of mine had a son kidnapped and that kind of barbarism upset me so much that I made High and Low."
In his autobiography the director speaks of the death of his "Little Big Sister" when he was about 10 (the same age as the boy in Rhapsody). The young Akira was greatly attached to this sister--but at her funeral he broke out in laughter; the ceremony struck him as idiotic and irrelevant. Hence, in the rose-in-the-garden scene in Rhapsody Kurosawa has reimagined an event from his own life, one in which the traditions of Old Japan simply did not coincide with his needs as a 10-year-old mourner. While he rejects the outmoded conventions, Kurosawa establishes the ghosts of Japan's history haunting the present in the form of the bomb-twisted jungle gym at the memorial. Similar naturalistic devices are the two trees struck by lightning that symbolize a pair of lovers, and the snake in the cascade as the spirit of the crazed grand-uncle. Of course, as viewers we could not possibly be aware that Kurosawa's own ghosts are still haunting him in this film.
Rhapsody's classic confrontation of truth versus conventional expectations also fizzles on screen. During a heated debate over the wisdom of letting the American relatives know how the Nagasaki bombing impinged on the family's own history, Grandmother blurts out: "What does it matter if they learn that my husband was killed by the bomb? It's simply the truth." This moment of truth lacks the force of similar breakthroughs in other films. While the shock of Grandmother's truth leaves the children's parents shamed (they had been blatantly expedient in their hopes of exploiting the economic potential of their newfound American connection), the focus on the children--so crucial from the outset of the film--has become hazy at this point. Kurosawa reserves the impact for the melodramatic finish: the family that would have denied Grandmother her true historical identity now rallies to her support.
Unfortunately, Kurosawa fails to bridge the gap between the wisdom of the dying generation and the curiosity of the generation of tomorrow. At one point the grandmother and an aged friend sit silently communing with each other. The kids don't know what to make of this, and regard Granny as a bit daft. Ironically, the two old women are merely engaging in an exchange similar to that between Gere and the youngest boy, but the connection eludes the children--and us. While Kurosawa longs for the connectivity of a cohesive Japan, and retains much of the strategic format of his earlier films in an attempt to convey this, he actually conveys the impossible nature of this quest. He is undone by the privacy of his visual vocabulary.
This is a particularly ironic failing, in that privacy, in the sense of separateness, willful or otherwise, is a recurring theme in the director's work. In the earlier films, not even the most private thoughts were safe from public scrutiny. In Ikiru ('52) we have X-ray vision of both body and mind, thanks to the ever-present audiences within the film. In a painfully self-revelatory scene. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) concludes a night of celebrating the pleasures of the flesh with a solo performance of his bittersweet theme song: "Life is short, fair maiden; enjoy it while your lips are red and hair is still black." The drunken audience of nightclub revelers is stunned; he's ruined their fun with his sincerity about hedonism. But their vacuousness serves to point up that he really cherishes life, whereas they seek to escape it. As in Rhapsody, the song sums up the life of the hero in reprise.
Red Beard ('65) marks a halfway point in the director's career, not only chronologically but with regard to the increasing impenetrability of the films. In a reversal of roles, the young doctor (Yuzo Kayama) recuperating from illness is furtively nursed by the abused girl Otoyo (Terumi Niki). But she will not act if she knows her doctor is witness to her caring in his behalf. Therefore, he pretends to be unconscious, protecting her shell. Gradually we see her tentatively reaching out to love, until she publicly expresses her concern for the poisoned waif.
Likewise, in Dersu Uzala ('75) we see signs of isolation: the hermit in the snow, the remembrance of Dersu's dead family, and the soldier's ignorance of the woodsman's sign of "No ginger here." In conquering the natural world, modern man has lost the ability to understand how it operates.
This trend toward privacy has gradually supplanted the common language typical of earlier Kurosawas. Dodeska'den ('70) is essentially about the isolation of the individual from society. Deluded people cannot even communicate with potential audiences, something Kurosawa underscores by providing a vestigial audience of women congregating around the slum water tap. In Kagemusha ('80) the hero must act out a role of pretending he is something he is not. The situation is identical to that of They Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, but the very premise of Kagemusha's plot dictates that his conflicts cannot be shared with anyone else. He is totally alone in a film about the complete reversal of notions of comradeship, loyalty, and duty. In Ran ('85), Kurosawa deliberately selected the androgynous character actor Peter to play the role of the Fool, the lone audience for the Great Lord, thereby ensuring that we viewers could not identify with him.
Rhapsody in August is a special case: here, the subject itself is almost too private, but there is an attempt to reach the viewer through the internal audience. At first viewing I thought a disclaimer should read: RATED FOR JAPANESE ONLY. The film deals with such a sensitive issue that it seems a violation of privacy for Americans to see, let alone judge. Yet this is the one film by Kurosawa that Americans especially need to see. I am afraid that it will be "read" by American viewers as a sort of bittersweet elegy (along the lines of Mizoguchi's Autumn Geese) rather than the forbidden political meaning I believe Kurosawa initiated, then backed away from as being too controversial.
A clue to what may be an ulterior agenda of Rhapsody can be found by turning to the film's other major symbol: the "atomic eye" that looks through a break in the hills separating the rural home from Nagasaki. In an otherwise naturalistic film, one wonders why Kurosawa chose to represent The Bomb as a gigantic eye. It stands out even more than the rose and is certainly a potent image for a director with failing eyesight. We know that the crazed great-uncle repeatedly drew an eye as a reference to the blast, but what sense does this make on a symbolic level? The obvious suggestion is that, to Kurosawa, vision is equated with knowledge and power, so this all-powerful event must be equated with an omnipotent eye. Its surreal quality interjected between the surrounding familiar hills describes just how "unreal" The Bomb was to people who had no idea of what was happening. In a world where people still thought of ghosts and spirits, a real monster was unleashed.
That is a conventional explanation, perhaps the "correct" interpretation of a split-second image. But the atomic eye may harbor a darker connotation if we ask: where does it come from? The most appropriate answer imparts a sinister logic: the reverse side of a U.S. dollar bill. Is not The Bomb the ultimate symbol of expediency? The official justification for its use was that it saved (American) lives by abruptly bringing the war to a halt. The sacrifice of two Japanese cities was more "efficient" than a protracted war--an issue Kurosawa avoided by having Grandmother simply blaming The Bomb on war; as if the question could not bear further scrutiny.
In his autobiography, Kurosawa remembers the Emperor's call for surrender:
I will never forget the scenes I saw as I walked the streets that day.... The shopping street looked fully prepared for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million. The atmosphere was tense, panicked. There were even shopowners who had taken their Japanese swords from their sheaths and sat staring at bare blades.... If the Emperor had not delivered his address urging the Japanese people to lay down their swords--if that speech had been a call instead for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million--those people on that street in Sochigaya probably would have done as they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life.
On an intellectual level, then, Kurosawa really does not reproach the United States for its decision to bomb; he recognizes that in effect Japan fell victim of its own militaristic culture. But on the level of "commercialism" in its broadest meaning, of doing that which is most expedient, Kurosawa condemns actions done on this basis as strictly amoral. Honor, loyalty, bushido--all are irrelevant in the Atomic Age; the only thing that matters is power and expediency. The Masonic all-seeing, blazing eye surmounting the pyramid of the Great Seal of the United States on the back of the dollar bill could hardly be more apt for a symbol of American expediency obliterating traditional Japan. Today it is commercialism--as portrayed by the opportunistic parents in Rhapsody--that reigns in Japan, and everywhere else. In this imagistic fusion of eye/Bomb/expediency, Kurosawa has plucked a "rosebud" with a very long half-life.
This sinister and submerged interpretation is the film that I saw, not necessarily the film Kurosawa made. What is undeniable, however, is that the director is engaged in a struggle to communicate through private rather than shared experience. Rhapsody in August marks a partial return to the "audience mode" characteristic of earlier films while simultaneously addressing the more contemporary issues of separateness and expediency as the condition of the modern world. Such a dilemma practically demands that Kurosawa develop his own syntax to bridge the gap between personal feeling and public statement. By reintroducing the audience, Kurosawa offers us a more penetrating reflection of our isolation.
Alex Seltzer has a Ph.D. in art history.
* By contrast, in Ran, the surprise knife attack by Mieko Harada's Lady Kaede, while certainly the dramatic highlight of that film, is emblematic of momentary "unmasking" that punctuates an otherwise private world of greed, revenge, and quest for power.
** Likewise, in Kagemusha Kurosawa presents a subtle metaphor for having lost his viewer/audience by staging the assassination of the commander as a "shot in the dark." Though ingeniously planned, the assassination puts the sniper in the position of not knowing whether he has struck his mark. Like his clever marksman, Kurosawa can no longer be sure where his viewers are figuratively located.
My Research
