Linton Ran.pdf

8/13/2019 Linton Ran.pdf

1/12

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 23: 341351, 2006

CopyrightTaylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1050-9208 print / 1543-5326 online

DOI: 10.1080/10509200690897608

KurosawasRan (1985) andKing Lear: Towardsa Conversation on Historical Responsibility

JOAN PONG LINTON

Adaptations have a way of speaking back to their sources, and a brilliant adaptation revises

its source and provokes a conversation. This may not at first be apparent about Kurosawas

Ran(1985), since, unlike other adaptations ofKing Lear, the film seeks neither to remain

faithful Shakespeares language nor to provide visual equivalents in another medium(Parker 412). Indeed, the film is only loosely based on the Lear story and Kurosawa

disavows having consciously set out to adapt the play (Grilli 1). When he became aware of

the connection however, he also had questions about the play that he tried to work out in his

film. The result inRan (1985) is an ongoing conversation with King Lear, one that never

becomes explicit but that informs his engagement with history. In commenting on King

Lear, Kurosawa observes that Shakespeare gives his characters no past, without which

I have never understood the ferocity of the daughters response to Lears feeble attempts

to shed his royal power (Grilli 1).

Indeed, the play seems more concerned to invite sympathy for Lear in the form of

his question, Is there any cause in nature for these hard hearts? (3.6.3435). Kurosawa,

however, would locate the cause of hard hearts in the feudal landscape of sixteenth-century

Japan, a time of clan warfare and power struggles within the military class. In Ran(1985),

therefore, he undertakes to give Ichimonji Hidetora, Lears counterpart, a history: I try to

make clear that his power must rest upon a lifetime of bloodthirsty savagery (Grilli 1).

This lifetime of savagery spans five decades of fighting and treacherous domestic alliances.

Specifically, Hidetora married his two older sons, Taro and Jiro, to daughters from rivals

clans, Kaede and Sue. Then, taking advantage of their relaxed vigilance, he murdered the

brides families in their castles. The film opens with a boar hunt that both symbolizes the

savage world of hunters and hunted and ushers in marriage arrangements for the third son,

Saburo, and a new generation is poised to inherit his violent legacy.

A character with such a history could hardly claim to be more sinned against thansinning (King Lear 3.2.60), and there are further implications for the film as well. As

Ann Thompson points out, compared with King Lear, there is much greater emphasis [in

Ran] on social networks and relationships: the personal is replaced by the domestic and

the historical (Thompson 8). I would suggest that the personal is not replaced but located

within the family as the institution that mediates societal violence, and this mediation

ensures that the personal is inevitably political and historical, even as the inheritance of

land and power is inextricable from a legacy of socialized violence. When the personal

Joan Pong Linton is an associate professor at Indiana Universitys English department. Herpublications includeThe Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English

Colonialism. Her current research focuses on trickster poetics in early modern English literature anddrama.


2/12

342 Joan Pong Linton

does not function on a mode of sympathy or identification, but is seen within the socializing

and generational context of the family, it becomes clear why Ran (1985) is not a tragedy

in the vein ofKing Lear. Instead, as Brian Parker observes, the film presents a tragic view

of history, one that reflects Kurosawas own sense, in looking at Japanese history, of how

man repeats himself over and over again (416).

The film does not simply impose its view, however, but poses it as a question of

personal response and responsibility that the unfolding narrative explores. At the heart of

this exploration, I will argue, is an understanding that the sense of sight is a socializing

medium and, as such, provides a basis for human dispositionones way of inhabiting

social space and responding to othersin the violent and possessive world of Hidetora.

At the same time, in the figure of Tsurumaru, a character dispossessed of sight, the film

also attends to the human agency that escapes social definition and raises the possibility

of thinking a different response and historical destiny. In doing so, Ran (1985) not only

radically revises the theme of eyesight and blindness in King Learbut also defines a means

to responsibilityboth a style and an ethic of respondingin its engagement with history.

In a very real sense, the style of Kurosawas cinema is one that engages audiences,through their own eyes, in negotiating an interplay of the personal and political, the familial

and social. From a technical perspective, Kurosawas use of the long shot allows him

the necessary distance to show characters in relation to their environments, natural or

social. Closer up, in both interior and exterior scenes, his camera achieves similar effects

through the use of the long take and static groupings of character. A staple in his late films

(Prince 84), these techniques, together with minimal dialogue, ensure that the audience

sees characters in their social settings, and that interactions between persons and groups

are located in the histories within and between families or other social nexes.

In narrative terms, the static groupings maintain a sense of ceremony and restraint

against which characters seem to explode into action from deeply rooted personal histories

and motivations. As well, strategic alternation between interior and exterior scenes in effect

links the intimate violence of domestic politics with the socialized violence of battle. In

formal terms, these techniques complement Kurosawas style of cinematic representation,

in which the camera operates first to present the givens of a situation before coming to focus

on a character who acts within or responds to the situation. As Gilles Deleuze explains,

this style lends itself to the two-part structure that operates in many of Kurosawas films:

the first, a long exposition and the second when senseless, brutal action begins (188).

Within this narrative structure, there is moreover an element of profound originality in

its exposition of the givens:

the givens, of which there must be a complete exposition, are not simply thoseof the situation. They are the givens of a question which is hidden in the

situation, wrapped up in the situation, and which the hero must extract in order

to be able to act, in order to be able to respond to the situation. The response

therefore is not merely that of the action to the situation, but, more profoundly,

a response to the question, or to the problem that the situation was not sufficient

to disclose. (189)

Variations of this narrative structure operates in Kurosawas films from Seven Samurai

(1954), Throne of Blood (1957), and Red Beard (1965) to Derzu Uzala (1975) and

Kagemusha(1980); in each, the hero must search for the question and its givens through

the situations (192). Although Deleuzes formulation predates Ran (1985), I believe it

finds another variation in the film. The hero Hidetora, who is an integral part of the social


3/12

KurosawasRan (1985) andKing Lear 343

machinery of violence, fails to fully confront the question posed to him until it is too late.

In the senseless brutal action that follows, the question is repeated in different forms and

contexts and ultimately posed to the audience.

From the beginning, Hidetora is confronted with the question of his legacy, when he

announces his decision to cede total authority over his domain to his eldest son. In the

words of Saburo: You have spilled so much human blood you cannot measure it. You

have lived without mercy or pity. Whereas Hidetora expects love in return for inheritance,

Saburo points to the madness of such expectation: But father, we, too, are children of this

degraded age of strife; you do not know what we may be thinkingmy dear children, you

think. To me, Father, you are none other than a madmansenile old madman (Screenplay,

sequence 8). If Hidetoras reaction is to banish the truth-teller, it is because in his world

there is no room for reflection on the consequences of ones actions. Those in power never

have to reflect; those in decline are afraid to do so. As an aging warlord, Hidetora seems,

at some level, to be aware of his precarious situation, recognizing himself in the boar he

has just killed. This recognition, however, only spurs his refusal to confront his bloody

past. Despite his refusal, his legacy of violence continues to unfold, through his family,eventually to engulf his entire domain in conflict and chaos.

Within the house of Ichimonji, Taro and Jiro certainly prove themselves worthy of their

fathers ruthlessness, but it is in the daughters-in-law that we see direct responses to his

violence. In Kaedes case, revenge emerges as the motive through which the personal and

the political, the familial and the social merge in the generational reproduction of violence.

For her part, Sue turns to Buddhist prayer and compassion, a choice that indicates violence

is not the inevitable answer to violence. If their responses seem extreme and schematic, they

also highlight the stark choices available to their historical counterparts. As Mieko Harada,

the actress who played Kaede tells us, these women were married off by fathers because

they wanted to dominate a part of the country or to make peace (Haberman C20). Indeed,

the film invites comparison between the two daughters-in-law in their relation to the samurai

world. The comparison is most direct in the judgment of Kurogane, who associates them

with the dual aspects of the fox from traditional folklore: Sue with the fox as the messenger

of the beneficent god Inari, the kami of rice, harvest and fecundity, and Kaede with

the fox as a wicked demon, haunting and possessing people through its supernatural

power to transform itself into a human being (Serper 147). As Jiros retainer who subverts

Kaedes order to have Sue murdered, Kuroganes judgment carries the weight of moral

commentary.

Beyond moral commentary, which comes towards the end, the film also implicitly

compares Kaedes and Sues dispositions to their world through the cameras different

spatial framing of them. As Kathy Howlett has shown, Kaede is consistently located ininterior, domestic spaces, while Sue is never limited or framed by domestic space (362,

365). Within the interior spaces she inhabits, Kaede asserts her dominance by redefining

her power relations with the Ichimonji men, ironically, . . . in her performance of designated

female tasks and in the space of the traditionally female identity (362). The presentation

of Sue likewise breaks the frame of the hierarchical, patriarchal samurai world, though

in a negative sense. In her first appearance close by but not inside a prayer hall, Howlett

writes, the camera, in effect, sympathizes with the perspective of the female encoded

by the samurai system, withdrawing or refusing, much like the female subject in its frame,

to participate in the sacred enclosure of the samurai (365). What is equally significant

about this spatial framing of the characters, I would suggest, is that it invites the audience

to explore the characters relation to space, which turns out to be inseparable from their

personal histories and goals as survivors of Hidetoras violence.


4/12


Kaedes dominance within interior spaces has to do with her sense of ownership, when

we consider that her sphere of action, the First Castle, was once her family castle. Returning

with Taro to this castle, she reclaims to it through the personal history it holds for her:

I was born and bred in this castle, which used to belong to my father. Then I left

it to marry you. My father and brothers, all unaware because of our marriage,

were murdered by your father, Hidetora. Then I was brought back to this castle,

which was seized from my family . . . . I have waited for this day ever since.

(Screenplay, sequence 24).

Seated perfectly still in this delivery, Kaede now turns her head and marks with her eyes

the spot where her mother had committed suicide. Right there, she says, her use of the

deictic revealing a relation to space that is at once visual and possessive, albeit understated.

This possessive mode of seeing extends to objects and persons as well in her struggle for

power, especially following the death of her husband. Presented with Taros hair, Kaede

asks instead for his armor, directing her gaze at Taros retainer rather than Jiro, who iswearing the armor. She then addresses Jiro: I never thought you could wear his armor and

helmet so soon after his death. It is too much for me to notice (sequence 126), her sarcasm

indicating just how much she does notice.

In the seduction scene, the camera tracks the breath-taking speed and precision with

which Kaede moves to redefine power relations. In offering Taros helmet to Jiro, she

springs from a kneeling position to pin Jiro beneath her with her dagger, drawing two lines

of blood on his neck, forcing him to confess her husbands killer. Her eyes still trained

on Jiro, she then rises to slide shut the wall panels, moving his sword beyond his reach,

laughing and spitting at the enclosed object of her scorn, before proposing a pact with him

that would allow her to remain in the First Castle he has taken over, reiterating that it is

hers. In this play for power, she has taken her measureand possessionof the space Jiro

occupies and made it her own. Her dominance in the sex act that followstopping him,

kissing him, baring his chest, licking the blood from his neckmerely ratifies her victory.

At the same time, however, Kaedes perfect possession of her familial space also indicates

how much she is trapped by loyalty to her murdered family into playing out a pre-scripted

role from a dead past. Not surprisingly, her revenge begins and ends in the same room where

her mother had died, her own death marking the completion of another cycle of violence.

By contrast, Sues location in exterior scenes effectively renders her an outsider to the

realm of domestic and political intrigue. Unlike Kaede, Sue neither uses her eyes to assert

ownership of the space she inhabits, nor does she aim to wield power in her dealings with

others. The Second Castle in which she lives has never been her home, her own familycastle, the Azusa Castle, having been reduced to ruins by Hidetora. Indeed, our introduction

to Sue is not through the eyes but the ears, the sound of her prayer-chanting close by the

prayer hall where Hidetora has gone in search of her. The camera then finds her on top

of a stone wall, attended by a servant. With her back turned to the audience, she stands

unguarded in the sunset, chanting to Amida Buddha, the god of mercy.

Sues relation to open spaces signals an inner spaciousness, a capacity for forgiveness

inspired by her Buddhist acceptance of human events as preordained in our previous lives

(Screenplay, sequence 33). Significantly, her disposition gives her a certain moral agency

over Hidetora, something outside his logic of action and over which he has no control.

The look of tenderness with which she greets him has the power to awaken his guilt,

if not remorse, about the crimes he committed against her family; a look of hatred, he

tells her, would have been easier to bear (sequence 33). At the same time, however, Sues


5/12


sense of resignation also renders her powerless against the evil going on around her, so that

in due course she loses both her husband and her life to Kaedes plotting. In her second

appearance, she is already fleeing for her life, homeless and unprotected as the powerless

often are. Our final image of Sue is that of a headless body lying on the grass: like the

bundle of wild flowers . . . picked by rough hands that covers her neck, she claims no

space in the earth for herself even in death (sequence 189).

While neither revenge nor resignation proves a viable response to the legacy of violence,

the film creates through its comparison of Kaede and Su e a critical and moral framework

that extends to the samurai world. In her Buddhist resignation, Sue embodies a tragic view

of history, one that sees the world as essentially an impermanent stage for repeated actions,

the wheel of recurrence (Parker 421). This tragic perspective, which reflects the influence

of Noh theater in Kurosawas samurai films, finds poignant expression in the deaths of

Saburo and Hidetora, shortly after their reunion out on Azusa Plain. Their deaths prompt

an exchange between Kyoami, Hidetoras fool, and Tango, his loyal retainer, in which

the former wonders whether the gods care about human beings, while the latter insists

that it is the gods who are crying: The evil of human beings. . .

the stupidity of thesinful creatures, who believe their survival depends on killing others, repeated again and

again throughout all time . . . Even God or the Buddha cannot save us from it (Screenplay,

sequence 183). In fact, it is not the gods who are looking down on the human drama, but the

generals from the rival Ayabe and Fujimaki clans who not so long ago were surveying the

field from their mountain perches. Significantly, Tangos insistence on human responsibility

for the repeated cycles of violence reiterates in broader philosophical terms the question

Saburo had posed to his father. One result is to locate individual subjects as agents in history,

to articulate an ethics of history that goes beyond self-interest or personal investment in

power relations and inheritance.

The question would find its echo in the final scene, as the two dead bodies are being

borne away. The camera tracks the party bearing Hidetoras body, then Saburos, then cuts

to a long shot catching at the top left corner the walls of the ruined Azusa Castle in the

distance. In the next long take, the camera zooms up and closes in on the lone figure of

Tsurumaru, Sues sole surviving brother whose eyes Hidetora had years ago gouged out in

exchange for his life. In the present scene, Tsurumaru has been led by Sue to their family

castle. The two have been fleeing for their lives and now he waits alone while Su e goes

back for an old servant, having left with him a painting of Amida Buddha for his protection.

Poised on the outer wall of the castle, with the image of Buddha in hand, Tsurumaru is

elevated in position like the generals. At the same time, he has also symbolically stepped

into the place where only moments before Hidetora had made his leap and survived (only to

die shortly after). A lone figure on whom the weight of the future seems to fall, Tsurumarubecomes the human embodiment of the question to which Hidetora could not respond, and

to which Tango has just given voice.

It is significant that Tsurumaru, who has lived on the margins of Hidetoras world

through most of the film, should emerge at the end so fraught with symbolic latency.

But in one sense, his character fits the role, given Kurosawas preference for unformed

characters. For him, they represent raw human potential to shape a destiny in the face

of challenges:

This destiny lies not so much in their environment or their position in life as

within their individual personality as it adapts to that environment and that

position. For all the straight-forward and flexible people who do not let their

environment and position get the better of them, there are just as man proud


6/12


and uncompromising people who end up being destroyed by their surroundings

and status (Autobiography130).

In describing the unformed character, Kurosawa has in mind the eponymous hero of his

first film, Sanshiro Sugata (1943), a wild and stubborn youth who learns humanity

from his judo master. What wakens his humanity is the purity of a lotus flower in a muddy

pond where he has, for his correction, stood through the night, holding on to a post,

allegorized in the film as the stake of life. The experience continues to inform his choices

as he becomes a legendary judo fighter and a man of thought. While Sanshiro typifies the

optimistic humanism critics have noted in Kurosawas early works, Tsurumaru represents

a far bleaker but no less insistent interest in the human potential to shape a responsible way

in a difficult world. It is true that an enormous distance separates Sanshiro Sugata and

Ran, especially when we compare the films social visions and protagonists (Prince 290).

But such comparison tends to overlook the significance of Tsurumaru in relation to both

Hidetora and the audience.

In the brutally possessive world of Ran (1985), Tsurumaru is the most radicallyunformed character, being dispossessed not only of an inheritance but, in his blindness, also

of the means to wield power through violence. He is stripped even of his masculinity in the

perceptions of other characters, being mistaken for a woman when Tango and Hidetora seek

shelter at his hut. But if Tsurumaru is rendered unfit for the violence of a sighted, possessive

world, this unforming of his character also opens him to a different source of nurture. Sues

gift of a flute and her Buddhist counsel enable him to make of his dispossession a different

way of responding to the world. Confronted with an old and defeated Hidetora, therefore,

Tsurumaru is able to offer his former tormenter hospitality of the heart (Screenplay,

sequence 122)music on his flute so affectively powerful it breaks down Hidetoras

defenses and sends him screaming into the night. The significance of Tsurumarus flute

music goes beyond the moment. As Parker points out, this same mournful flute music

underscores the opening boar hunt and closes the film beneath the cortege of Hidetora

and Saburo and the long shot of Tsurumaru abandoned at the very edge of his familys

ruined keep (419; see also Crowl 116). The flute music thus not only connects Tsurumaru

to Hidetora but, through this connection, underscores the possible if uncertain emergence

of a new kind of human destiny that departs from the cycles of violence.In this light, the

encounter between fallen oppressor and surviving victim is significant precisely because

of the ideals of the samurai code it evokes through its allusion to the Noh play, Atsumori.

Although these ideals no longer hold in the world of possessive violence, they provide the

moral framework within which Tsurumaru can be seen as one with a different destiny. As

Nogueira Diniz observes, the flute played by Tsurumaru, who wears a Noh costume whenHidetora enters his hut, is a reference to Atsumori, a Noh warrior in whom the ghost of

a samurai is disguised as the flute-playing reaper (62). The reference also indicates the

extent to which Tsurumaris story rewrites Atsumoris. In the play, the ghost of Atsumori

reconciles with his killer who has undertaken a pilgrimage to pray to Amida Buddha for the

salvation of Atsumoris soul. The former enemies thus become friends in Buddhas Law

(Waley 70), leaving unquestioned the system of violence that maintains the social order.

In the film, reconciliation remains a projected but unfulfilled ideal. We learn that despite

Sues counsel Tsurumaru is still struggling with his hatred for his enemy (Screenplay,

sequences 33 and 122). More important, deprived of sight Tsurumaru devises an alternative

means to agency in the sighted world by cultivating a different sensibility and disposition

to the world. In doing so, he turns the warriors flute into an instrument of the ear and the

heart, one that comes from neither revenge nor yet forgiveness but that holds responsible


7/12


his former oppressor for his violence without repeating the violence. Remarkably, it is a

sensibility to which the powerless Hidetora has also lately become responsive. Wandering

about on the Azusa Field, he associates the raindrops with people he had killed: These are

their tears! Their weeping voices (sequence 120). One can only speculate on how the social

order might be different had the ear and heart been the preferred sensibility in a sighted

world, or had Hidetora acquired this sensibility while still in power. But in Tsurumaru at

least, the film explores the radical remaking of character that issues from yet resists the

determining force of the social environment, through which a new order of human relations,

including power relations, can be shaped.

In this connection, it is most fitting that Hidetora should in his fall from power encounter

again the victim he has blinded. For, if blindness is aligned with dispossession in his world,

eyesight is aligned with possession and domination. The films first close-up is of Hidetora at

the boar hunt, his eyes staring down the shaft of an arrow at his quarry. Later, in announcing

his will, Hidetora marks the expanse of his domain with a sheathed sword in his hand and

pasturing eyes, eyes that possess what they see and define a self by what they possess:

I, Hidetora Ichimonji . . .

(Points to the small castle in the distance)

. . .was born in that small castle. At that time this plain of Unno was the scene

of fighting, a struggle among countless lords. When I was seventeen, I raised

my flag over that castle. I fought hard for fifty-odd years

. . .and at last I conquered this plain and raised the Ichimonji standard over that

castle there. . .

(Points to the massive castle on one side of the plain)

(Screenplay, sequence 8)

In his deictic emphasis Hidetora displays a possessive mode of seeing and being we

have already noted in Kaede, and it underscores the shared socialization that connects

the two enemies in their motives of conquest and revenge. In his territorial conquests,

this possessiveness entails such violent exclusion of others that the existential horror of

it crystallizes only in a dream, in which Hidetora finds himself in a wilderness utterly

alone: No matter how far I went I saw no one. I shouted and screamed, but no one

answered (sequence 6). Nor is it surprising that, confronted with his unfolding legacy of

violenceviolence he no longer monopolizeshis eyes should grow increasingly intense

with terror.

The pivotal moment occurs when Taro and Jiro join forces against him, and his own

violent legacy thus comes home full circle. Driven from both their castles, Hidetora andhis retainers make a final defense at the Third Castle, the one vacated by the retainers of

the banished Saburo. At the height of battle, Hidetora retreats into the innermost keep of

the castle, where his concubines have committed suicide and he falls into a stupor, only to

be aroused from it by the dying cry of his retainer. Hidetora is unable to seek the honorable

death ofseppuku, having broken his sword in the fighting and finding no replacement in

the confusion. He even escapes the gunfire and arrows, some tipped with fire, shot into the

castle, while on the outside the scene alternately expands to take in the epic scene of battle

and contracts to focus on a dying soldier. As he emerges from the burning castle, Taros

and Jiros soldiers part rank to let him pass.

In this moment, Hidetoras eyes stare out of a face which, having grown progressively

mask-like, is now frozen in perpetual terror. If the effect of the entire scene is, in Stanley

Wells words, deliberately alienating (276), it owes something to Hidetoras eyes: fixed


8/12


on no one in particular, they are directed beyond the films world, catching viewers in the

safety of their specular pleasure. In this fracturing of the cinematic gaze, audiences are not

only distanced from the spectacle of Hidetora but also made aware of their own mediated

participation in the possessive economy of the eyes.

In Ran (1985), then, eyesight and sightlessness are not merely metaphorical, though

they are that. They define dispositions, ways of inhabiting the world and responding to

others, in which the personal and political converge. If in Hidetora, the film presents the

tragedy of inheritance as a schooling for the eyes, eyes that would possess and dominate, in

Tsurumaru the film explores the possibility of a different kind of human agency emerging

from dispossession. Not surprisingly, the meeting between the two marks the turning point

for Hidetora, since he can neither possess the sightless Tsurumaru with his eyes, nor close

his ears to the latters music. Although the encounter drives him to madness, it explains

why, despite comments that the film is pessimistic (Johansen 74; Prince 289; Thompson 7),

Kurosawa thinks thatRan(1985) is less tragic thanKing Lear:

By way of contrast to King Lear, who has no regrets, who never thinks aboutthe past, who never has any reason for undergoing these terrible experiences,

Hidetora does reflect on his past, and he regrets it: in that sense, my version is

less tragic, I think. (Tessier 69)

To be sure, Hidetora comes too late to reflection, when he is already swept up in the

violence. Hence Tony Rayns comment that the script of Ran is less interested in the

possibility of Hidetoras moral regeneration than in charting the ramifications of his past

crimes and misjudgments (116). And yet, even a morally regenerated Hidetora would not

be able to individually undo the systemic ran he has set in motion. Moreover, for Kurosawa,

the world will not change unless we steadily change human nature itself and our very way

of thinking (Hirano, in Goodwin 57). In this light, the unforming of character through the

sight that he envisions in Tsurumaru is far more radical than any moral reform Hidetora

can achieve. The comparison of Hidetora to Lear is thus only an index to a more complex

engagement with the plays exploration of sight and blindness, from which Kurosawa

shapes a fundamentally divergent view of society and the making of human destinies.

In the play as in the film, eyesight is, from the start, associated with inheritance and

possession. Hoping to win her third of Lears kingdom, Goneril declares that he is dearer

than eyesight, space, or liberty to her, and for failing to see the true motives of his

daughters, Lear is told to see better (King Lear, 1.1.55, 156). But it is Gloucester who,

for the same failing, literally loses his eyes when his bastard Edmund betrays him to Lears

bad daughters. For both patriarchs, the immediacy of their suffering enables them to blamethe evildoers and thus overlook their part in engendering their own victimization. Out on

the heath, confronted with Edgar disguised as Tom o Bedlam, Lear does learn to see

better the social ills of his kingdom, but the lesson he learns has little to do with the

familial bonds and inheritance he manipulates to such disastrous consequence. While this

lack of alignment between the familial and the social may well contribute to the plays

multi-dimensionality, the alignment of the same in the film gives it the clarity of a social

critique.

In the case of Gloucester, his plight relates directly to the question of inheritance,

specifically the system of primogeniture from which Edmund is excluded. Even so, both

his blinding and his rescue from suicide by Edgar serve to recuperate dominant cultural

values. In the first place, while Gloucesters blinding teaches him to see the world feelingly

(4.5.143), the play never goes beyond the regime of the eyes. Indeed, his blindness makes


9/12


it possible for the sighted Edgar to trick him into believing that he has miraculously

survived his jump from the dizzying heights of Dover Cliff, in a speech that invokes the use

of perspective in illusionistic representation (Goldberg 149). Paradoxically, then, Edgars

trickery both confirms the goodness of the legitimate heir against the evil of the bastard and

reaffirms Christian values against suicide as a sin of despair that damns the soul.

If in King Lear blindness precipitates a crisis of faith that leads ultimately to a

reaffirmation of the value of religion and family, in Ran (1985) where a sighted Hidetora

seeks suicide and a blinded Tsurumaru preserves the will to live, the result is to question the

very social order that produces tragedy through its repeating cycles of violence. Hidetoras

suicide attempt, like Gloucesters, is framed by religious perspective, albeit a distorted

version of the Buddhist desire for release from the repeating cycles of error and suffering.

In the sequence leading up to his leap, Hidetora returns in his wanderings to the ruined

Azusa Castle, his sunken eyes looking wildly about without recognition. He remarks that

he is lost and that he has been there before, to which Kyoami replies: Human beings are

always lost. Human beings have walked the same way again and again from the earliest

times. If you prefer not to do it, jump from this wall (Screenplay, sequence 166). Insurviving his leap, Hidetora is frustrated in his desire for release from a world to which

his distracted sight no longer binds him. One might say that he has undergone a kind

of blindingan uprooting of his sight from its accustomed possessive relation to space.

Unlike Gloucester, who is restored to free and patient thoughts (4.5.80) and dies reunited

with his good son, his blindness shielding him from the full brunt of reality, Hidetora lives

long enough to experience Lears fate, reuniting with Saburo only to lose him again, denied

even the illusion of familial support and religious release in the end.

What is the condition of death for Hidetora is the condition of life for Tsurumaru, who

must, if he is to survive, find his way in the world entirely on his own. By the closing scene,

Tsurumarus dispossession has been made complete. Having already left behind his flute

in his flight and lost his sister to the assassins, he stands at the edge of the Azusa Castle

wall. As he tests the path before him, his cane reaches past the edge and he draws back

in alarm, letting fall from his hand the image of Amida Buddha Sue has given him. The

camera closes in and lingers on the image, then pulls back to show him at the edge of a

sheer drop. As Kurosawa tells us, What I wanted to say in the last scene is that we should

stop thinking that we can count on God or Buddha. We should make an effort to accept

responsibility for our own lives (Tessier 69). To do so requires, in the first place, reflection

on ones participation in and reliance on the social institutions that produce violence. The

challenge this poses becomes clear when we compare Tsurumarus situation with that of

Edgar, the only innocent victim left standing at the end ofKing Lear. Like Tsurumaru,

Edgar also suffers dispossession, but his suffering is temporary, and he ultimately returnsto power and reclaims his social position. In the play, then, the good can survive and even

prevail in institutions that are all too susceptible of corruption through the folly or evil

of those in power. If to this end Edgar must employ trickery and disguise and await his

opportunity, this only underscores the moral complexities the play explores as part of its

social vision.

For Kurosawa, however, continued participation would only repeat the tragedy. While

this is not a rejection of family or religionafter all, Tsurumaru has benefited from both

through Sues carethe challenge remains as to how one might use the nurture provided

by these institutions to radically remake ones relation to others in the world. In their

respective worlds that will continue as before,King LearandRan(1985) do seem to depart

most visibly at this juncture. While the play ends with the personal imperative (delivered by

Edgar himself in the 1623 Folio edition) to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say


10/12

350

(5.3.300),Ran (1985) imagines a different future to history in which ones responsibility

to others begins in the dispossessed self.

Will Tsurumaru survive dispossession to shape a destiny? The final scene seems to ask.

The question demands an answer that the situation in the filmto return to Deleuzeis

insufficient to disclose. The situation is insufficient, because accepting responsibility for

ones life entails a response to the past, to which neither vengeance or resignation (in the

film) or vindicated trickery (in the play) provides an adequate logic. Furthermore, although

accepting responsibility is a matter of personal initiative, the change Kurosawa envisions

goes beyond the personal. In the figure of Tsurumaru, the challenge to responsibility is

posed to a collective we, to which a response is possible only if audiences find it relevant

to their own historical circumstances.

For his part, Kurosawa is confident that his historical films contain modern

dimensions because I live in modern society (Shrai et al., in Goodwin 56). In fact,

the tragedy of inheritance already has a modern context in his filmRecord of a Living Being

(1955), made three decades before Ran (1985). The setting of this early film is an island

close to ground zero in the aftermath of the atom bomb. The protagonist Nakajima sets fireto his foundry in a last desperate attempt to free his family from their expectations of

inheriting the business and to make the plan to emigrate finally viable (Goodwin 132).

Ironically, his act of self-dispossession destroys the livelihoods of the foundrys workers,

who are doubly dispossessed since they do not have the economic means to emigrate in the

first place.

Stephen Prince has rightly noted that, in the film, political analysis of the nuclear

phenomenon is secondary to Nakajimas struggles with his family (166). The result, then,

is to foreground the tragedy of inheritance. When family members petition the court to have

him declared mentally incompetent, the presence of the court locates the family within the

political economy of post-war Japan. As Prince points out, the space of the family has not

merely absorbed the energy of Nakajimas protest, but it has itself been absorbed by the

dominant structures of state and society (166).

That the tragedy of inheritance has both a feudal and a modern face in Kurosawas films

reinforces his claim that he has been tackling problems which transcend specific periods

(Hirano, in Goodwin 57). In both films, the tragedy persists because the family is an integral

part of the social order, and the violence it harbors in the name of inheritance illustrates, in

Walter Benjamins terms, the barbarism that inhabits the institutions of civilization (258).

But in his attention to the dispossessed as well as what may come of the dispossessed self,

Kurosawa can be said to perform through historical fiction the task Benjamin urges upon

the historian: to brush history against the grain (259).

WhileRecord(1955) addresses Japanese society on the threshold of an age of terrorwith global implications, Ran (1985) presents the long view of history, engaging an

international audience through its conversation with King Lear. The film offers the past

as a distanced perspective from which audiences may reflect on the present, from which

reflection a different future may emerge. Just how we imagine this different future depends,

of course, on our own situated perspectives on history. In this age of corporate feudalism,

dynastic oil interests, and the proliferation of the military-industrial complex, when war

and terror are waged in the name of God, democracy, or revenge, perhaps we, too, have a

collective history to bring to the conversation.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter.Illuminations. Trans. Ed. Harry, Zohn. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace,

and World, 1968.


11/12


Crowl, Samuel. The Bow is Bent and Drawn: Kurosawas Ran and the Shakespearean Arrow of

Desire.Literature and Film Quarterly22 (1994): 10916.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh, Tomlinson.and Barbara, Habberjam.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Goodwin, James. Akira Kurosawa and the Atomic Age: in Goodwin, 132.

Goodwin, James, ed.Perspectives on Akira Kurosawa. New York: Hall, 1994.Goldberg, Jonathan. Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation. InKing Lear.

Ed. Ryan, Kiernan. New York: St. Martins, 1992, 145157.

Grilli, Peter. Kurosawa Directs a CinematicLear: Interview with Peter Grilli.New York Times (Dec.

15, 1985) Section 2: 1.

Haberman, Clyde. Mieko Harada, Japans Unknown Star.New York Times(Dec. 25, 1985): C20.

Hirano, Kyoko. Making Films for All the People: Interview with Kyoko Hirano. In Goodwin,

5758.

Howlett, Kathy. Are You Trying to Make Me Commit Suicide? Gender, Identity, and Spatial

Arrangement in KurosawasRan.Literature and Film Quarterly24 (1996): 360366.

Johansen, Ib. Visible Darkness: Shakespeares King Lear and Kurosawas Ran. In Screen

Shakespeare. Eds. Skovmand, Michael and Caudery, Tim. Cambridge: Aarhus UP, 1994, 6486.Kurosawa, Akira.Something Like an Autobiography. Trans. Bock Audie E. New York: Knopf, 1982.

Cited in the text asAutobiography.

Kurosawa, Akira, Oguni, Hideo, and Masato, Ide. Ran: The Original Screenplay an Storyboars.

Trans. Tadashi Shishido. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1986. Cited in the text asScreenplay.

Nogueira, Diniz, and Flores, Thais. King Lears Filmic Adaptation: a Chaos?Canadian Review of

Comparative Literature23 (1996): 777778.

Parker, Brian. Ran and the Tragedy of History. University of Toronto Quarterly 55 (1986): 412423.

Prince, Stephen.The Warriors Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Princeton: Princeton UP,

1991.

Rayns, Tony. Ran.Monthly Film Bulletin53 (April 1986): 115116.

Serper, Zvika. Lady Kaede in Kurosawas Ran: verbal and visual characterization through animal

traditions.Japan Forum13 (2001): 145158.Shakespeare, William.King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition. Ed. Weis., Rene. London: Longman, 1993.

Citations are to the 1623 folio edition of the play.

Shrai, Yoshio et al. The Emperor: Interview with Akira Kurosawa. In Goodwin, 5556.

Thompson, Ann. KurosawasRan: Reception and Interpretation. East West Film Journal 3 (1988-

89): 113.

Waley, Arthur. trans.The No Plays of Japan. New York: Grove Press, 1957.

Wells, Stanley. Reunion and Death: Review ofRan. Times Literary Supplement(Mar. 14, 1986):

276.


12/12

Documents

Linton Ran.pdf