MoFo MC September: Ran

Revolution has differing connotations to a number of people, wherein one could find the usual pros and cons of a decision, but it is easy to forget the dice will not always roll for some, any, positive outcomes. In Ran, justice becomes arbitrary, at least on the surface, and I certainly thought it, along with its base King Lear, was the most nihilistic thing I’ve ever seen/read. Upon multiple readings of the play, however, a subtle gleam of auspicious light shone unto those endlessly bleak pages, and I saw that not only were all the sources of evil in the play gone, but Lear did reunite with his daughter, Cornelia, the latter of which manifested as a near-promising, yet ultimately false hope to me until I read that Bergman performed the King Lear as an ultimate reconciliation play; he saw the rejoining of Lear and Cornelia, despite all the horror surrounding, as one of the most positive aspects of humanity he’d seen. One might have a much harder time seeing these positive gaps in Ran, but I think it’s almost as applicable.

Even the father of the backstabbers is having a hard time seeing them.





What made Ran a wonderful adaptation was everything Kurosawa changes: the characterization is switched around, the fool has new, hilarious lines - more or less the best of the script, the gods no longer kill but the humans endlessly kill, even more added backstabbing, but especially a most clever change of perspective. King Lear was full of Greek references, so Kurosawa put the audience on Mount Olympus, as if we are the non-intervening gods watching omnipresent tragedy. This is also largely displaced from his earlier work in terms of ferocity of the battle scenes, whereas in Rashomon or Hidden Fortress you would be in the middle of the war but in Ran you are merely spectating, which is almost draining the way he’s done it. Coming out of a nuclear fear, the second for Japan, I also suspect Kurosawa was plainly unhappy with the way humanity was treating itself and thus I think he wanted the battle scenes to portray that.



I thought the use of colors was a brilliant way to symbolize both emotions and, presumably, nationalities. I also just want to say, before I write an essay, the fox analogy was one of the most humorously insightful monologues I’ve ever heard.


Now, questions for people who’ve read King Lear:

What do you think of the positivity of the play vs. Ran?

Do you find the changes more appropriate for a period piece?

Why wasn’t the storm more accented in Ran?


Non-partition questions:

Was the closing shot on the blind man too much to handle?

What do you think of the de-masculinization of Jiro?

Does the fool's analogy of the bird and the snake apply more to Jiro or to his father?

Personal question: Why does this not really feel like an epic even though it has all the elements of one?

I'll be watching it this weekend or maybe prior. Pretty excited for this one

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^It's a truly great film. I watched it several months ago, and it's by far my favorite Kurosawa. One of the grandest motion pictures I've ever seen and Lady Kaede is one of the best of all movie villains.

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I recently said that this was one of my least liked Kurosawa movies but that doesn't mean it wasn't good. Beautiful shot and savagely scripted, there are so many layers to the characters and motivations.

Something very Kurosawa-esque is his insistence to end his film on an optimistic note, despite the grandeur of tragedy his characters endure throughout his movies. Of course, it is almost impossible not to compare Ran with the other Kurosawa films, most notably Throne of Blood since both share similar themes. Both Throne of Blood and Ran seem to exhibit a very poetic style, as if you could tell that Kurosawa was trying his best to do an adaptation of someone else's work (which indeed is the case). Here lies the weakness of Kurosawa's directorial capabilities - Kurosawa wasn't flexible enough to probe deeper into the King Lear adaptation. His movies all overflow with sheer kinetic energy, but just don't expect Kurosawa to be able to handle emotional/morality play without being too heavy-handed. When other Japanese directors were spearheading the Japanese New Wave with bold and audacious movies, Kurosawa's film now feels very "Japanese" (don't forget that back in the 50s Kurosawa was considered the most "un-Japanese" of directors) and tame in comparison.

Spectating is the correct word to describe Ran. I think this answers your final question Why Ran does not feel like an epic despite having all the elements of one (large scale events & a great tragedy)? We must note that Kurosawa's wife was very ill and passed away during the production of Ran. I suspect that it was this tragedy that had the greatest impact on his film Ran.

What do you think of the positivity of the play vs. Ran?

The evil events in Ran and the Evil in King Lear happen for different reasons and are often caused by different characters, and the makeup of certain important characters themselves is totally different as well. The two most striking examples are Lady Kaede and the blind hermit Tsurumaru. Lady Kaede has some similarities to Edmund (she seduces both of Ichimonji's elder sons; she espouses a selfish vindictiveness) and Gloucester and Tsurumaru are both blinded (his hermitage also resembles what happens to Edgar so I guess you could call him a composite), but the differences are even more striking.

Unlike in King Lear, both characters in Ran are victims of Ichimonji. This makes Ran both more cynical and less tragic than Lear. King Lear's metaphoric blindness is that he mistakes kingly power for absolute power over love (of his children) and nature (particularly on the heath but it comes up constantly throughout the first half of the play). Another aspect of his 'blindness' is that he thinks his 'king-ness' is inherent and inalienable, or 'natural.' This makes the questions of what's real and what's symbol or playacting of central importance in Shakespeare's play (which is really a novel-length poem). Ichimonji is blind to 'nature' too, but in Ran the focus is shifted to the effects of his despotism, and it's more implied that that's the 'natural' mode for rulers.

The ending of Lear also feels much more ambiguous due to the questions surrounding Edgar. The bit of stagecraft he performs for his father to stop his suicide off the cliff of Dover is one confusing-ass scene that I still don't know how to feel about. What's more blatantly problematic to me is his statement to Edmund at the end of the play blaming his (Edmund's) and Gloucester's downfalls on "the dark place where he was got" (out of wedlock), and calling it just. That made me really distrust Edmund, who is going to be the new ruler.

It's not totally far-fetched to take that as an intended (and horrible) moral for the whole story, but I don't quite buy it. The blinding of Gloucester is the most horrific thing in King Lear and possibly in all of literature. (the murder of Macduff's family comes close). I mean it's almost physically painful to read. I've never seen it performed but I can almost imagine how horrible it would be to watch.

Shakespeare's intention is hard to read in that scene. On the one hand it seems obvious to me that we're not just meant to feel visceral outrage (as one disinterested character in the play does) at the cruelty of Cornwall, Regan and Goneril, but also at the injustice and complete disproportion of it as 'punishment.' On the other hand, I've read at least one paper that draws attention to a strong 'poetic justice' aspect of the scene that seems to invite Edgar's reading it as a symbolic emblem -- Gloucester's figurative blindness is made literal and his libertinism reversed by sexual humiliation -- and points out the (seemingly deliberate) tension between the two interpretations (justice vs. 'justice'). Either way, Edgar's glib moralizing at the end has always bothered me, since it basically aligns him on the 'wrong' side of the worst deliberate act in the play, and it may also show that he possesses an ample portion of the same tragic love of appearance (symbols and signs) over reality that Lear displays in the first Act.

By now I've forgotten who is supposed to be left to take the throne at the end of Ran, or if it simply ends in chaos. I do remember the final scene, in which Kurosawa creates his own striking picture-moral of the blinded victim and the indifferent gods. It's a very bleak image, but it also felt much simpler and more heavy-handed than the ending of King Lear, because it seems more appropriate to take it at face value as a summation of the whole.

On the whole, Ran just feels more arid to me than the play. As incredible as they are (and I consider it almost a great movie just because of them), the set-pieces don't feel like they're supporting as rich a structure as the ones in King Lear. (see also your third question).

Do you find the changes more appropriate for a period piece?

I don't know enough about the period details in Ran to comment on this, but I imagine you have to look at each change separately to determine this. One thing I will point out though is that King Lear is not really a historical chronicle play but seems to be set in some vague mythical past. At one point the Fool makes a reference to Merlin (who he states isn't even born yet!) which just underlines the unreality of the setting. I'm not sure if Ran is experienced the same way by a Japanese audience, but that's an interesting question.

Why wasn’t the storm more accented in Ran?

Like I implied in my answer to the first question, I think it's a symptom of the difference in depth between Ran and Lear. Kurosawa's storm is a visionary set-piece (like the storming of the castle) both visually and sonically (also like the castle). Shakespeare's is also a place for discussion about nature and reality and adds more to the development of Lear as a character.

Was the closing shot on the blind man too much to handle?

See my answers to the first and third questions.

What do you think of the de-masculinization of Jiro?

I thought it was pretty funny, partly added to by the fact that the genders of the 'analogous' characters in the play are reversed. Also Kaede is definitely one of the standout creations of the movie.

Does the fool's analogy of the bird and the snake apply more to Jiro or to his father?

Not sure I understand this question or remember the analogy properly, but I imagine it applied to both since it was about their relationship.

Personal question: Why does this not really feel like an epic even though it has all the elements of one?

I don't know about you, but I feel this was because of the lesser tragedy of the main character in Ran and the fuller development of themes and characters in King Lear. I also just felt little 'surprise' at the ending or any of the tragic events in Ran. I can't remember how strongly I reacted to it the first time I saw the movie (before I had ever read the play) though.

Right, I'm familiar with his western leanings and would agree this is much more Japanese in that sense, despite having a Fool which has no equivalent in Japanese history. I think Dodeskaden may have been his return to that style actually. It's interesting you mention his heavy handedness in juxtaposition with the Japanese New Wave since Branded to Kill or In the Realm of the Senses are also incredibly heavy handed in their own ways, but with Kurosawa, and specifically Ran after the wave had passed, he seems to be working with a sort of hindsight-contempt, and the phrase bitter old bastard kinda fits in a way, yet that's all I can think of to explain it. In comparison Ikiru wasn't heavy handed I don't think, so it's not that he's bad at projecting emotion into his direction but moreso the time of his life led him to be a lot more aggressive. As you say below, his wife died, I had no idea, but that's going to factor into how depressing he makes the film.

I've not read the play, so ' will field the second set of questions.


Non-partition questions:

Was the closing shot on the blind man too much to handle?

Yup. Just unrelentingly bleak, grim, and harsh. I have had folks get physically angry at me for showing them the film and not warning them that is was so grim. The man is forever waiting, and now totally alone after dropping the scroll.

What do you think of the de-masculinization of Jiro?

I need to think about this one a bit more.

Does the fool's analogy of the bird and the snake apply more to Jiro or to his father?

Uh, both? We can probably coin scenarios with each character in regards to the various decisions they made in the film. But if I have to chose which one it fits the best...I have to say the father with his blind spot for members of his family.

Personal question: Why does this not really feel like an epic even though it has all the elements of one?

You've answered it in the question - it's too personal on too many levels. It's an anti-epic. Compare it to Lawrence of Arabia. Although that film draws a fairly personal picture of Lawrence, I always come away from the film feeling as if I didn't really get to know the guy on a personal level, but more so gained an understanding of what he did and achieved, and also a bit of insight into what makes great men great. Ran just brings the pain. I agree that the viewing is a spectator, but the scenes surrounding the interactions of the characters are all done on a very personal, sort of exposed way, which in effect thrusts you into the middle of things as a silent observer. Kurosawa focused more on viewer interaction and manipulation (to some extent) while Lean focused on the events and the main character's trajectory in a more clinical and academic way. The result is that Lawrence is THE epic, and Ran slips the knife in, and then turns it (See above answer to blind man).


Just quickly: Take note on how Ran has a downward trajectory, thematically and physically. Note how the locations descend as the film moves along, starting on a mountain and ending in the valley of death.

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Interesting final comment, Seds. When I think of Ran, I think of the opening scenes with the father meeting with his sons which are very formalized. I keep remembering the camera practically being down in the grass shooting up to the men, who for the most part were sitting in the grass or walking through it. It was a very unusual (and sedate) way to introduce the film and the characters. Of course, from that low-angle perspective, the camera revealed the white, billowing clouds and blue skies. Everything seemed calm and peaceful, both in Heaven and on Earth. Later, during the spectacular, color-coded battle scenes (the most-impressive ones being presented silently), everything seems dark and grimy, especially the dark smoke filling Heaven with Man's wrath and selfish pollution.

That's about all I can add now since I was going to wait to discuss the film after another rewatch. I first saw Ran at the San Jose Camera One when it first played. Watching it in the theatre, it fully qualifies as an epic. It begins and ends "small", but the middle has the "cast" of thousands, the locations and castles are spectacular, and the battle scenes are gigantic and almost unparalleled in scope in film history. Maybe you think that's a simplistic view and a cop-out, but those are the things I think of when I think "epic film".

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What you bring up is particularly interesting compared to Shakespeare's trilogy of King Henry VI where all the same elements reside but in everyone else instead. This is just an assumption, but I feel that Kurosawa read a lot of western theater and, as he said himself (somewhere), he started in this era to make every film as if it was his final, including every ounce of philosophy he could cram in and so on, thus I think Ran is not simply an adaptation of King Lear but more uses Lear as a backdrop - he said he never set out to adapt it but things fell into place. In Ran the despotism is a main focus, yes, but why wouldn't it be the natural mode to suffer from it? It's not just about a king but anyone with power, and as we know there is a hierarchy, but no matter where one is on that hierarchy a lot of people delude themselves into kingship.

The faux-suicide in the play is a LOT harder to work around than in Ran where he literally does fall...far, I actually breathed in when he fell. I can't really answer it since Gloucester wasn't insane like Lear unless Gloucester was absolutely beside himself to the point of unfeeling. As far as your other qualm, I interpreted differently. He says wedlock cost Gloucester his eyes because Edmund interprets the act as such. He also says the gods are just, and maybe that's what you meant, but it was a Christian ruled era.

I don't know why it would be the moral of Lear though. Gloucester's blinding and the reuniting of Lear and Cornelia are, to me, the major events.

The throne is an eidolon, Ran is chaos, and thus its name is misleading - or at least to me, but I referenced that in my first sentence. I still have no idea how I feel about the final shot. I know the play's conclusion was a bit of a crawl so by the end I felt totally empty anyway but Kurosawa emptied me before he showed that shot, so that was quite bold and maybe for Kurosawa simply intrepid in the sense that it didn't alarm him that's how it ended. I get the impression you didn't like this much?

Well just like the play he's half nonsensical, so it was probably a purposeful joke.That's exactly what I want to know, too. Yoda, hire more Japanese people!

Yes and yes. Kaede is definitely ferocious, but I think she was wholly dismantled from the fox analogy. I still am taken aback by that monologue.

Mark also touches on this a bit, I feel I can't add:
I heard he had to import horses because of how many extras there were. I'm glad you mentioned the small/large/small ratio though, I didn't really consider that.


Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't he the one who basically said "screw Buddha"? I almost feel like he gave up on his life because his sister gave him that scroll. I hate his sister because of that.


Interesting. I can definitely agree with that. I remember exactly what you mean about Lawrence too, and you finally made me realize why I didn't like it as much as I was supposed to.

Well this thread is over, here's your cookie

Set to see this again over the weekend. In the meantime, here's the prettified Movie Club page all Ran-ed up.

I'll be tossing a special notice up on the home page, too.

And for good measure everyone, here's the link to Ran on Netflix Instant.

winter: I'm not that familiar with Henry VI. Are you saying the characters in that resemble Lear or that they resemble the victims of Lear (Ichimonji)?

I'm also curious about:

Does anyone know what (if any) research Kurosawa did in his adaptations of Shakespeare? What language he read it in?

I don't disagree with any of this. My point was simply that the focus on despotism and the interpolation of the two victim characters is a big change and makes Ichimonji as much of a Macbeth as a King Lear. That seems to me to be a shift in kind and not just a shift in shade (in answer to the question about comparing 'darknesses'). I still think that making Lear more of a villain is a cynical move.

Part of the reason I called the ending 'ambiguous' was that that line felt out of character to me. I could easily defer to you on this, I've only read the play once and I might just have completely misunderstood any number of lines. I'll try and explain what I meant better though. (skip down past your next quote).

About the Christian implications of King Lear I'm also not sure, but the 'gods are just' comment seems very Old Testament to me. (Part of why it seemed out of place was that Edgar is one of the more nuanced characters in the play. Doesn't Lear call Edgar his 'natural philosopher'?). I imagine that any Christian reading is also complicated by the three (at least) competing versions of Christianity in England during this period, but I don't really know that much about it.

Sorry, that's not what I'm saying. I meant that if 'the gods are just' is the moral, the play itself contradicts that for exactly the reasons you cited. Looking it up, the full quatrain is:

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.

Having the emblematic readings of the Gloucester scene that is captured in Edgar's line (what I called a 'picture-moral' in my previous post) pointed out to me did add to my questioning of Edgar, but also to my reading of the play as a whole. I also learned while researching Prospero's Books, that there was a large readership for books of symbolic emblems when this play was written. (I don't know much about what sorts of emblems these would be, but I assume many were either religious or moral/both). Given that a major focus of the play is on trying to distinguish between the outward forms or signs of a thing (love, power, loyalty etc.) and 'the thing itself', it does not seem impossible to me that Shakespeare would build in these sorts of 'picture-morals' ('our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us') that interact with the 'deeper' meanings and actions of the play in complicated ways. By now people probably want to talk more about Ran, and I don't want to try and push this interpretation too far without knowing the text a lot better anyway. Hope that clarifies what I meant though.

I'm sure it's totally obvious that I think less of Ran than I do of King Lear. I also don't quite agree with Sedai's estimation of the character and thematic development of Ran (especially compared with Lawrence of Arabia!), but that could also just have to do with the experience of 'sympathy' for me and thus a greater eagerness to respond to Lear and Lawrence. In particular though, I think the 'silence' of the battle scene and the storm, while it's an interesting contrast particularly given the visual intensity of those scenes, doesn't really do much to develop the theme or character.

Perhaps this is just logo-centric of me. It often seems unfair that we get to interpret books in words and not movies in (moving) pictures, so I wouldn't be quick to call mark's or sedai's (or my) appreciation of Ran 'simplistic'. (For one thing, Kurosawa's mastery of cinematic storytelling and images is anything but simple). To me a lot of the values of the movie are things that I can't interpret in words though. There's not just the huge leaps of scale in action and landscape, the color patterning, but also the way the wind rustles the enclosure in that first scene, or how Saburo shades his father. There's a lot to love about Ran.

Acting-wise that was my favorite scene to watch this last time.

I don't really have a full review maybe I'll post one later in movietabII

I thought the use of colors and Cinemetography were dead on. Kurowsa did a wonderful job at directing.
I thought it was very boring though, like most of Shakesperian adaptions.
Unrealistic, when the father wa gettig shot at everything but him was hit.
If it was toward the 90 minutes and not edging 3 hours it might've worked

2/5

The fact was that he couldn't be killed, or more to the point, wasn't allowed to be killed. Maybe you should watch Polanski's Macbeth or Kurosawa's 90-minutish version, Throne of Blood.

I've heard about Macbeth and its in my netflix Queue, and I'll Definently give the other one a try.

I'd echo what Mark said but also add that he couldn't get hit because he had not suffered yet. Call it karma. Also if it was 90 minutes it would make so little sense.

Question, have you read any of the plays of these very boring Shakespeare adaptations?

^ not this one but I have read

Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet, didn't like either

Currently on Hold....hope to get it soon.

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Suspect's Reviews

Just watched this today and I loved it. The color palette blew me away, especially the blood. It looked inauthentic but it was thematically consistent with the look of the overall piece.

The cinematography and battle scenes and use of colors were outstanding.
I also loved Kagemusha.