影武者 (Kagemusha) *

I took Japanese in high school, because it was offered and Spanish, French and German all sounded boring by comparison. Within the first week, my freshman year, they made us choose Japanese names that we would keep for as long as stayed in that program (I and my friends did all four years). Off a list of names I chose Shingen before I could even read it, because it looked easy to write in hiragana. Later our Sensei explained to me that Shingen was the name of a famous Japanese general. When we had to pick fake last names and play-act various language lessons with full names, she practically insisted I choose Takeda, because that was Shingen's name. So for four years, I actually answered to "Shingen-kun" or "Takeda-kun." All I knew was, this was something like the equivalent of an ESL student deciding to call themselves George Washington.

Kagemusha is the story of the last days of the famous Japanese warlord Shingen of the Takeda Clan, and now it's 15 years later but I still think of "Shingen" in the back of my mind as some kind of name associated with me. This has no bearing on anything, other than novelty and coincidence, but I wanted to share anyway, since it was in the back of my mind as I watched Kurosawa's epic. (Also, she did a pretty terrible job explaining to me Furinkazan, but perhaps she should get props for even trying, considering she wasn't a history teacher and was barely a language teacher. I was surprised and excited by how clear Kagemusha makes the concept, and also how central it is to the philosophy of the story.)

The story is an epic war movie, with larger-than-life characters and events, massive battles and hundreds of armor-toting, horse-riding extras, but it's surprisingly philosophical (surprising for a war epic; not surprising for a Kurosawa film). It's also, appropriately, the dramatic story of tragic characters in tragic times -- including Takeda himself, his brother/double, the rescued thief who becomes his Kagemusha ("Shadow Warrior," or professional impersonator), many of his generals, and even his young grandson. Each of them suffers in one form or another for the "greater good" of maintaining the Takedas' strategic foothold in an unending three-way war.

I'm pretty sure you can chalk this up to the drastically alien time and place, but it was interesting to watch a film literally about war and not feel turned off by the war-porn nature of it. In fact, I found the notions of honor as depicted in the film to be attractive, and admired the men in many cases. Takeda's enemies, for one, refused to feel joy at the loss of their most dangerous adversary out of respect for the man, and the loyalty felt by Takeda's generals led them to kowtow to an impersonator for three full years after his death. Then again, even the Kagemusha himself was so moved by the power of the man's shadow that he found himself willingly playing the role and continuing the legacy.

That's, I think, what Kagemusha is really all about: the "shadow of the king," the way a great man's reputation can outlive him and as if by sheer inertia continue propelling people down paths he's willed for them. Their enemy's "bravest general" turned back willingly and unhesitatingly at the very sight of "Takeda" sitting atop the hill, as immovable as a mountain, and his personal guard gave their lives just as willingly and unhesitatingly to the very idea of the man, standing in the way of incoming arrows to protect a common thief who stood only as symbol of the once-great, beloved and feared Lord Shingen.

But on the other hand, we see all too clearly (and anticipate for over half the film, which adds some great tension) how easily that same legacy can crumble the moment your followers lose their faith in your legacy, as in the end (the ruse is exposed by such a fleeting accident, when the lord's horse bucks the well-meaning impostor) Takeda's son Katsuyori seals the fate of the entire clan simply by "moving the mountain." His impetuous need to prove himself more than just an unloved son standing in the shadow of a great man unraveled the quaking fear and grudging respect their enemies had for them, after which each aspect of Furinkazan fell one by one, systematically: the speed of the wind wasn't enough, nor the silence of the forest, nor the ferocity of the fire -- not without the undefeatable mountain behind them. The moment Katsuyori moved the mountain, everyone knew, the magic was gone. There was no shadow to stand within, and that was all that held the Takeda Clan together.

An interesting and somewhat conservative message which I can accept as beautiful and noble within the confines of the story, even without knowing if there was anything the warlords fought for beyond power and borders (that is, ideology doesn't matter here; war is simply the thing you do if you're a warrior). But if you transport this message into twenty-first century terms, it's actually kind of appalling. Honor and pride and military might are things that can be moving when the world feels like a fantasy -- knights and dragons, samurai and musketmen, even the Klingon warriors from Star Trek (who to be honest I found myself reminded of more than once, since I've been watching a lot of Star Trek lately). So really, I'm glad for stories like this, because honor and nobility are such daring and bold subjects, and you would never be able to get me to sympathize with a modern-day story of war and great generals -- at least not in the same way.

This is a great film that runs three hours long and splits its time between massive battle sequences and conferring generals and warlords (real and faux) gnashing their teeth, but it's never boring for a second. Plus it's beautiful, both in its photography and its characterizations. It makes me eager to seek out Ran and Throne of Blood, two Kurosawa samurai "classics" I've yet to see.

Soon, maybe.

Seen at Cinema 21.

七人の侍 (Shichinin no Samurai / Seven Samurai)

This got watched in two parts with almost a week between, split in half right at Intermission, but I had the pleasure of watching it with someone who'd never seen it before. Plus, it'd been a long time since I'd last seen it, so all in all I was watching with fairly fresh eyes. The movie splits easily into three parts, each roughly an hour long: act one is rounding up the samurai, act two is preparing the village for attack, and act three is the battle itself. For the most part it does well keeping clear its large cast and crucial-to-the-story geography, though I admit a couple of times someone would get shot and one of us would turn to the other and say, "Wait, which one was that?" (It was almost always cleared up for us in the next scene, however.) Much of this is due to Kurosawa's choice to stay wide during fight scenes, even when it's a single character out of the crowd we are meant to be concerned with. I'm not criticizing this choice, because keeping it wide allows the sheer physicality of the performances to carry much more excitement than cutting into close-ups could sustain, but the result is sometimes all those frantically moving Japanese men in period outfits blur together. So it goes.

I also really enjoyed how clumsy both sides got during the final battle -- the attempt to waylay a horseman would fail, and the villagers would have to chase desperately after a bandit into the village, but then the bandit would have trouble controlling his horse because of the chaos of the battle. It felt kinetic and unrehearsed and gave both sides an amateurish quality akin to realism. And of course Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) proving with every scene exactly why he'd never be a samurai and yet why he deserved that honor just as much as the nobler, better-trained warriors he fought alongside. That he was given a samurai's gravesite without a single word spoke more to the respect that he'd earned than any long monologue ever could have. Allowing the story's biggest beats to be conveyed visually in the background of a scene is a strong choice for a film of any era, but it pays off because it challenges the viewer to put it together himself: it all goes back to the old adage that showing is more impactful than telling.

I know I just focused entirely on surface, fairly obvious cues from one of cinema's most famous and thematically rich films, but it's late and I haven't watched it in a while, so forgive me that. I actually intend to return to the two Criterion commentary tracks (something I don't do often enough), and if I feel like I have enough to say about it, perhaps I'll make a post about their viewing as well.

羅生門 (Rashomon)

I've been reading about Kurosawa all week, so it was only a matter of time before I started watching his films again. Amazing that this has been my first complete Kurosawa film all year. Obviously the story here is pretty well known, but it was a joy to think about this untraditional narrative from a script standpoint and not just what it means in a grand sense. The order of the events, the details of each lie, fall in a precise order to maximize suspense. In each telling, for example, we know that the samurai is killed, but with each telling the how and why is drawn out with several twists along the way. In the medium's (the samurai's own) telling it appears that Tajomaru is going to kill him at the behest of the cruel, taunting wife, but Tajomaru (in that telling) proves honorable, offering to kill the wicked wife if the samurai just gives the word. In the woodcutter's telling, the protacted amateur sword fight between the two men leaves Tajomaru swordless and the samurai still armed, leaving us to wonder how possibly the tables will turn; followed by the samurai's sword being lodged in a tree trunk at a precarious angle (blade out), teasing the audience that it might even be purely an accident that befalls him. Plus, some details conveniently match up, like Tajomaru's chucking his sword into the bushes to kill the samurai, which occurs both in Tajomaru's own and the woodcutter's versions.

Moreover, it's smart of the story to have each suspect accuse themselves -- confess essentially -- of/to the same crime. Had the wife accused Tajomaru, or Tajomaru claimed the samurai had committed suicide, it would have looked like self-preservation, the most obvious (and understandable) kind of lie there is. Instead we are left to wonder why any of the three would lie to take responsibility. Fortunately the characters are developed enough that we can infer at least possible motives (Tajomaru for the glory, for his pride and reputation; the wife to save face and/or as an expression of her guilt and shame for any collusion, implicit or explicit; and the samurai to save his wife's neck and/or out of shame for his own desire in the moment to do so).

The story is famous for not telling you what happens, and it's difficult to not want to work out some kind of mental graph, a sudoku puzzle of which parts are true and which lies and get to the bottom of this. I'm reasonably sure there is no such solution. But where a lot of scholars and film historians (that is to say, bloggers I've been reading lately) seem to claim that the story's contribution to cinema is to trick us, to leave us back where we started and to prove that no answer is possible, I think Kurosawa may have been a little more holistic than that. I think the answer here is that everybody's right, to a degree, and that truth isn't the same as fact. I like to look at this and not see three or four liars, but three or four imperfect, self-aggrandizing interpretations. Everybody is looking at what happened and telling you the version they want to be true, partially as a series of conscious selections (lies) and partially as a simply skewed set of memories (misremembering), because that's the way everyone's memories are. Memory is hardly infallible, and memory is the primary source of knowledge, especially in this particular story. Therefore, what chance does knowledge have? Truth is barely even a reflection of fact -- more like its echo. A dim, distorted impression that once bounced against actual fact, but that's it.

Okay I got kind of esoteric there. I have been watching Bergman and Kurosawa, after all. What do you expect?