Throne of Blood – Titled Kumonosu-Joˉ ( ), Which Would Be Better Translated As ‘Spider’S Web Castle’ – Was Not Immediately Noticed in Japan
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Copyright material – 9781844576647 Contents Acknowledgments 6 Introduction 7 A Guided Tour through the Spider’s Web 16 Notes 90 Credits 93 Copyright material – 9781844576647 T H R O N E O F B L O O D 7 Introduction In 1955, the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa and his colleagues began work on an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, transposing from medieval Scotland to medieval Japan the tale of a heroic warrior tricked into a violent and ultimately futile usurpation by supernatural prophecies and an ambitious wife. Kurosawa had aspired to undertake this project for many years, but his initial effort was delayed by the release of Orson Welles’s 1948 version – which, with its low-budget Halloween atmospherics and its abortive attempt to mimic medieval Scottish pronunciation, was neither a critical nor a commercial success. Kurosawa’s version has emerged as a classic both in the world of Shakespeare performances (screened and discussed in countless secondary and university literature courses every year) and in the world of cinema (it was the inaugural screening of the National Film Theatre in London, and was handsomely reissued by Criterion in 2003). The greatness of Throne of Blood – titled Kumonosu-joˉ ( ), which would be better translated as ‘Spider’s Web Castle’ – was not immediately noticed in Japan. It proved only mildly profitable for the Toho movie studio, which was hoping to catch a share of the booming market for samurai films (in the jidai-geki genre of historical period pieces) while keeping the international art-cinema audience won by Kurosawa’s Rashomon/Rasho¯ mon in 1950; and it only tied for fourth place in Kinema Junpo¯ ’s influential ranking of the year’s best movies in Japan. But – in contrast to the tepid domestic response, a contrast that has fuelled charges that Kurosawa abandons Japanese authenticity to please foreign audiences – the impact in the West was remarkable. Although initially laughed off by Bosley Crowther in The New York Times as an ‘odd amalgamation of cultural contrasts’ that Copyright material – 9781844576647 8 B F I F I L M C L A S S I C S inadvertently ‘hits the occidental funnybone’,1 Kurosawa’s adaptation quickly commanded high and wide respect. The then-vast readership of Time magazine was told that Throne of Blood was ‘the most brilliant and original attempt ever made to put Shakespeare in pictures’, an effort for which Kurosawa ‘must be numbered with Sergei Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith among the supreme creators of cinema’.2 Among notably distinguished directors of the Shakespearean stage and international film, Sir Peter Hall called Throne of Blood ‘perhaps the most successful Shakespeare film ever made’, and Grigori Kozintsev (who made the justly famous Russian King Lear/Korol Lir [1971]) called it ‘the finest of Shakespearean movies’.3 The renowned film theorist Noël Burch, who also wrote what is still probably the most important western study of Japanese film, lauded Throne of Blood as ‘indisputably Kurosawa’s finest achievement’.4 T. S. Eliot reportedly identified Throne of Blood as his favourite movie – or perhaps just as his favourite Shakespeare movie, or at least as presenting his favourite Lady Macbeth. Harold Bloom’s best-selling study of Shakespeare has praised it as ‘the most successful film version of Macbeth’,5 and many scholars of Renaissance literature concur. I certainly do: if a friend had not overcome my adolescent reluctance to attend a midnight college film-club screening of a battered print of some old, subtitled, samurai- themed, black-and-white Japanese retelling of Macbeth, I probably would not be a Shakespeare professor today. How could a masterpiece as dependent on its intensely poetic language as Macbeth survive so well its translation into a verbally sparse Japanese film? Although some of Kurosawa’s collaborators have said they did not even read Shakespeare’s play in preparing their screenplay,6 the director clearly sought out visual parallels to Shakespeare’s specific language, and drew on some large moral and existential ideas that Shakespeare articulates. The dominant theme of this film is the futile struggle of the self against nature. Kurosawa implicitly condemns the doomed battle of human pride and desire against an indifferent universe of overpowering scope, weight and persistence, but also mourns the suffering of the great Copyright material – 9781844576647 T H R O N E O F B L O O D 9 human spirit tricked into waging that battle. The struggle to pull free of the spider’s web is foolish to undertake, but – and here we may see Kurosawa’s controversial humanistic investment in the individual – at moments heroic, and perhaps inevitable. That may seem a remarkably universalising moral, from the perspective of twenty-first-century cultural studies that instead emphasise local and material phenomena. But Kurosawa’s film (like Frazer’s comparative anthropology, which was still hugely influential in the mid-twentieth century) is clearly interested in highlighting analogies: in this case, analogies between British and Japanese medieval history, and between Shakespeare as an epitome of high western civilisation and Noh drama as an epitome of high Japanese civilisation. The film thus asserts a truth about our condition that transcends historical boundaries. The opening chorus told audiences in 1957 that ‘what once was so is now still true’, and that the spirit of the doomed warrior ‘is walking still’. The film then proves how broadly the moral of this story can be applied. This theme of the vain struggle of reflexive human will against time and space is certainly present also in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as I have argued at considerable length elsewhere7 – although I suspect my reading of Shakespeare’s work was itself shaped by that compelling early encounter with Kurosawa’s adaptation. But in Macbeth, that pessimistic nihilism is mitigated (characteristically of Shakespeare) by a contrary suggestion of a more positive determinism that harmonises with human values, as divine Providence defends virtuous linear royal inheritance through the medium of natural order. Kurosawa pays less attention to that optimistic view: he undermines the benign aspects of both supernatural and monarchical control, and consistently employs the visual aspects of his medium to reinforce a message that (depending on the cultural position of the viewer) invites a Buddhist or nihilist interpretation. Kurosawa’s film adaptation thus shifts from Shakespeare’s theological and psychological exploration of the nature of evil Copyright material – 9781844576647 1 0 B F I F I L M C L A S S I C S towards a dark meditation on existential entrapment that is latent in Macbeth. What at first appears to be a version of mugen Noh theatre – a supernatural tale outside of time – collapses back into the genzai Noh of ordinary existence; as with the portents in Act 4 of Macbeth, the real betrayal is that the truth is literal, material and reductive, not that it is otherworldly.8 Some commentators see Spider’s Web Forest as ‘not so much a natural as a supernatural labyrinth’,9 but for creatures aware of their own mortality, nature itself is a force no less terrifying and overwhelming than evil deities. Some spiders inject poison, but others simply wait for their captives to waste away in the webbing. The recalcitrance of natural order against human will, depicted mostly as a blessing in Shakespeare’s tragedy, becomes in Kurosawa’s version an almost – but not quite – demonic assault on our desires for control and transcendence, desires which prove to be nearly as stupid and tireless as the biosphere that defeats them. One commentator accuses Throne of Blood of imposing a ‘simplification of the moral framework’ of Shakespeare’s tragedy through ‘the replacement of the Western concern for the individual soul by the rigid social ethic of feudal Japan, which encouraged obedience within a well-defined framework of social and political obligations’.10 Perhaps, however, the film instead achieves its deepest complexities by keeping those cultural values in tension – a tension reflected even by the contrast between the wildness of the forest on the one hand, and the well-defined framework of the human dwellings and their clean rectilinear designs on the other.11 That tension is reinforced by the juxtaposition, in the style of the film’s performances and storytelling, of modern western psychological realism on the one hand, and on the other hand the traditional Noh masks and movements towards which Kurosawa guided his performers.12 Kurosawa was attacked not only for naively believing in the possibility of individual human freedom, but also for not being ‘humanistic’ enough on that topic: ‘There are other film-makers who have a clearer regard for the individual in Japanese society, the individual free from the constraints of a Copyright material – 9781844576647 T H R O N E O F B L O O D 1 1 feudal relationship.’13 But, as in Macbeth, the deeper tragedy in Throne of Blood depends on recognising that complete individual freedom is no less dangerous an illusion than complete control by higher powers. This tension would have been important in the Sengoku period depicted in this film (as well as in Seven Samurai/Shichinin no samurai [1954] and The Hidden Fortress/Kakushi-toride no san-akunin [1958], made shortly before and after Throne of Blood). Roughly the century preceding the birth of Shakespeare and half a world away, this was an era agonised by warring samurai factions and multiple phases of gekokujoˉ: the overthrow of leaders by their supposed subordinates. Kurosawa commented that most people in Japan as well as the West misunderstood ‘what a Samurai is’ – or at least, what it was when ‘a peasant could still become a warrior’, before the codifications of behaviour that the Tokugawa shogunate initiated during the seventeenth century.14 The tension between traditional authority and individual self-assertion would have been extremely important both during the years Macbeth was produced (because of the late- Renaissance upheaval of socio-economic order and the uncertain launch of the Stuart dynasty in England), and during the production of Throne of Blood.