The Idiocy of Compassion: Akira Kurosawa’s Tale of Prince Myshkin

Andrea Hacker

If I could have said it in words, I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble and expense of making a film.

Akira Kurosawa

Introduction

In 1951, a few weeks before Akira Kurosawa received the Grand Prix at the Venice International Film Festival for his film Rashomon, the Japanese Production Company Shochiku released the director’s twelfth feature film, an adaptation of Fedor Dostoevskii’s novel, (Hakuchi in Japanese).1 Kurosawa later recalled:

I had wanted to make this film long before Rashomon. Since I was little I’ve liked Russian literature, and have read the greater part of it, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film. He is still my favourite author, and he is the one - I still think - who writes most honestly about human existence. There is certainly no other author who is so attractive to me, so - well, so gentle. When I say gentle, I mean the kind of gentleness that makes you want to avert your eyes when you see something really dreadful, really tragic. He has this power of compassion. And then he refuses to turn his eyes away; he, too, looks; he, too, suffers. […] this compassion […] is what I admire most in Dostoevsky, and what I love terribly in his Prince Myshkin.2

While Rashomon established Kurosawa as an internationally acclaimed auteur, Hakuchi proved to be a disaster. Its release followed a fierce battle between the director and the production company over the length of the film: Kurosawa’s original version was over four hours long, but the 298 Andrea Hacker studio insisted on radically shortening it. Kurosawa, who was by then already nicknamed Kurosawa-Tennô (Kurosawa the Emperor), snapped at the producers: ‘If you want to cut it in half, you may as well cut it lengthwise!’3 Nevertheless, he lost the battle, was removed from the project, and the studio edited the film to its current length of 166 minutes, which is the only version that has survived. Had it not been for Rashomon’s success in Venice, Kurosawa’s career might have folded altogether:

This Idiot was ruinous. I clashed directly with the studio heads, and then when the reviews on the completed film came out, it was as if they were a mirror reflection of the studio’s attitude toward me. Without exception, they were scathing. On the heels of the disaster, Daiei4 rescinded its offer for me to do another film with them. […] I arrived home depressed, with barely enough strength to slide open the door to the entry. Suddenly my wife came bounding out. ‘Congratulations!’ I was unwittingly indignant: ‘For what?’ ‘Rashomon has the Grand Prix.’ Rashomon had won the Grand Prix at the Venice International Film Festival, and I was spared from having to eat cold rice.5

Despite all the criticism, Kurosawa never abandoned this deeply personal project and stood by Hakuchi as one of his major accomplishments: ‘The Idiot was strongly criticized, but from my point of view it was not a failure. The audience really loved it. It was touched by this “idiocy”’.6

Yet the film remained a lesser known work, and over the decades critical appreciation of it has not really risen until recently. A challenge to re-evaluate the film came from Mitsuhiro Yamamoto in 2000, who suggested that ‘Kurosawa’s adaptation can be used as an occasion to ask some fundamental questions concerning translation between different artistic media, cultures, and historical periods, but critics who slight The Idiot avoid addressing these questions’.7 Contemporary investigations such as the works by Alexander Burry and Dunja Brötz show that scholars are now ready to address these questions and discuss Kurosawa’s extraordinary and complex interpretation of Dostoevskii’s novel.8 This chapter intends to contribute to this development by investigating three of Hakuchi’s most criticized aspects. The first concerns the significance of Kurosawa’s spatial recoding. The film’s bold