The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Akira Kurosawa · a film · 1985 · 162 minutes · scored on the Japanese release, with the desk’s own English renderings · after Shakespeare’s King Lear
Mode
Shakespeare’s tragedy carried into the age of warring states; period war film, family tragedy and Buddhist reckoning in one structure
Mythos
The old king and the faithful child cast out; deeds that return on the doer; the fox-woman, a demon in a beautiful wife
Phase
One fall of a house, from a boar hunt and an abdication to the ruin of the First Castle and a blind boy on a broken wall
Presentation
Feature film in colour, in a wide frame, 162 minutes, in Japanese; three houses in three colours, Tōru Takemitsu’s score, Emi Wada’s costumes
Register
From the fool’s songs to the silent massacre; armies seen far off and from above, faces held like masks
Scale
A father, three sons, two wives, and a realm that will not stay in one hand
Governing Proposition
An old warlord divides his realm among three sons and keeps the honours of a lord; the eldest two shut him out, the youngest, banished for plain speech, comes back too late, and the wife of the eldest, whose family he destroyed, brings the house down. The wager of the film is that King Lear can be retold with the king made guilty, so that the world which destroys him is the one he made, and that a war seen from the height and distance at which heaven would see it can show deeds returning on those who did them, and on the gentle with the cruel.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a hunt. On green hills under moving clouds the old lord Hidetora Ichimonji rides with his three sons after a boar. When the hunt is over he announces that he will divide his realm. Taro, the eldest, is to have the First Castle and the headship of the house, Jiro the Second Castle and Saburo the Third; Hidetora will keep the honours of a lord, and live as a guest among his sons.
To show what he expects of them he takes three arrows. One arrow breaks; three bound together do not. Saburo, the youngest, takes the bundle and breaks it over his knee. He speaks against the plan with a plainness his brothers will not risk, and Hidetora banishes him, and with him Tango, the retainer who takes his part. The whole argument of the film is given in its first reel, as a lesson refused in front of the man who gave it.
Akira Kurosawa directed it at seventy-five, from a screenplay by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni and Masato Ide after Shakespeare’s King Lear, with sons in place of the daughters, and after the parable of the three arrows told of the daimyo Mōri Motonari. It was made as a Japanese and French co-production, by Herald Ace and Nippon Herald Films with Serge Silberman’s Greenwich Film Productions, first shown in Tokyo at the end of May 1985 and released in Japan in June: 162 minutes, in colour and in a wide frame, in Japanese. Takao Saitō and Masaharu Ueda photographed it, Emi Wada designed the costumes and Tōru Takemitsu wrote the score. Tatsuya Nakadai plays Hidetora, Akira Terao Taro, Jinpachi Nezu Jiro and Daisuke Ryū Saburo; Mieko Harada is Lady Kaede, Yoshiko Miyazaki Lady Sue, Peter the fool Kyoami, Masayuki Yui Tango, Hisashi Igawa Kurogane and Mansai Nomura Tsurumaru.
Movement II
Each house has its colour: Taro’s yellow, Jiro’s red, Saburo’s blue. At the First Castle the father’s fall begins as a question of rank, of whose banners fly and who takes the seat of honour, and Taro, with his wife Kaede beside him, does not yield it. The humiliation is formal and exact. The old man who kept the honours of a lord finds that the honours were the power, and that he has given the power away.
Kaede is the centre of what the film has changed. The First Castle was her family’s; Hidetora took it from them, and she was married into the house that destroyed hers. Lear’s daughters are ungrateful. Kaede has a grievance the play does not give them, and the film lets her carry it with full intelligence. Mieko Harada plays her with a gliding walk and a sudden stillness, a figure from the Noh set among soldiers, and every scene she enters turns toward her purpose.
At the Second Castle Jiro shuts the gate. Jiro’s wife Sue is the other woman Hidetora wronged: he burned her family’s castle and blinded her brother Tsurumaru as a boy. She has forgiven him, and she prays to Amida. The two refusals are needed one after the other, the first by rank and the second by a closed gate, and the old king, shut out by both his elder sons, goes to the Third Castle, the castle of the son he banished.
Movement III
The armies of Taro and Jiro come to the Third Castle together, and the siege is played without its own sound. Takemitsu’s lament is the whole of what is heard while bodies fall, a woman stabs herself and a man holds his severed arm. The camera stands back and watches. Then a single shot kills Taro, and with it the world’s sound comes back: the noise of the battle returns at the moment one brother has been killed in it, and the second brother takes his place.
The keep burns. Hidetora, white-haired and blank, his face set like a mask, comes down the steps out of the fire and walks out of the castle through the ranks of soldiers, who part for him. He is mad. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the madness within the frame of the Noh, never breaking it, and the walk is the film’s central image: one blank face moving through the ruin it began.
The form is the knowledge. The camera stands far back and high, and the armies are banners of one colour moving across hills under clouds. Men are seen as heaven would see them, and the film’s statement about what they are doing is the distance at which it shows them. The guns decide the siege, and they will decide more: an order of single combat ends here, at a distance, in the smoke.
Movement IV
On the plain the mad king wanders with the fool Kyoami and with Tango, who has come back to him. The storm comes over the plain. Kyoami sings and dances and tells the king in nonsense what he has done, as Lear’s fool does; Peter plays him at a pitch that is sometimes shrill. They find shelter in the ruins of a castle, and the ruins are those of the castle Hidetora burned, Sue’s family’s.
In a hut among the ruins lives Tsurumaru, Sue’s brother, the boy Hidetora blinded. He gives the king shelter and offers him a flute. The man who blinded him sits in his hut and hears him play. The film makes no speech of it. Lear’s heath is a place of exposure; this one is the ground of a past crime, and the king is sheltered there by the crime’s victim.
At the First Castle Kaede turns on Jiro, who now holds his brother’s place. She puts a dagger to his throat, Harada playing it as a dance, and by the end of the scene she has him; through him she demands Sue’s head. Kurogane, Jiro’s general, brings her a stone fox head wrapped in a cloth in place of Sue’s. The fox-woman of Japanese legend is a demon in a beautiful wife, and the film lets the joke be prophecy: the woman whose house was destroyed has become the agent of the destroyer’s fall.
Movement V
Saburo comes back for his father, and finds him. In a short reunion the old man knows his son, and for a moment the faithful child is restored to him. Then Saburo is shot from the saddle, at a distance, and the reconciliation is over in a second. Hidetora cries out over his son’s body and dies over it. Where Cordelia’s death in Shakespeare is an outrage against hope, here it is one return among many, in a world where heaven watches and does nothing.
The neighbouring lords who have watched from the hills move, and the First Castle falls to the Ayabe. Kaede declares what she has done and why: the house that destroyed hers is destroyed. She is beheaded, her blood thrown across the wall behind her. Sue is killed. Kyoami cries out against gods who are absent, and Tango answers him, in sense, that the gods weep at what men do. The last movement stacks its deaths quickly, Saburo, Hidetora, Kaede, Sue and Jiro’s house, and one or two of them feel scheduled.
The last image is Tsurumaru, blind, alone at the edge of the ruined wall at sunset, the scroll of Amida fallen below him and the sky enormous. Emi Wada’s costumes won the Academy Award, and the film was nominated for its direction, cinematography and art direction. Its questions stay open: how far Kaede acts for herself, whether the film is nihilist or Buddhist, how far Hidetora is meant to be pitied. What it shows is not open. Power founded on slaughter cannot be handed on, what it was built on comes back to it, and the gentle do not escape the return.
Act III · The Twelve
Most of the 162 minutes is required. The hunt and the three arrows set the whole argument in the first reel: a father who thinks unity can be bequeathed, a son who breaks the bundle over his knee to show that it can be broken. The two refusals are each needed, a humiliation by rank at the First Castle and a closed gate at the Second. The siege is the turn and cannot be cut, and Kaede’s revenge alone shows that the old king made the world that destroys him. The give is real and recurs: the neighbouring armies watch from the hills at length for a pay-off quickly disposed of; several of Kyoami’s songs repeat a point already made; and the last movement stacks its deaths at a pace that lets one or two feel scheduled.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: power founded on slaughter cannot be handed on, because what it was built on comes back to it, and the gentle do not escape the return. The departure from Lear is its centre. Hidetora is no wronged innocent: he took the First Castle from Kaede’s family, burned Sue’s, and blinded her brother Tsurumaru as a boy, and when he is sheltered in the ruins it is by the boy he blinded. Sue’s faith in Amida is given full weight and answered with her death. The axis meets the bar and no more. The sons are drawn in strokes, and Hidetora’s guilt is shown more than opened: his inner life arrives as the spectacle of madness, not as knowledge of what he did.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation is frequent and very high, and almost all of it dreadful. The hunt on green hills under moving clouds; the siege of the Third Castle, played with the battle’s own sound removed under Takemitsu’s lament until the shot that kills Taro brings the world’s noise back; the keep burning while Hidetora, white-haired and blank, comes down the steps and walks out through ranks that part for him; the storm on the plain; Kaede’s death, the blood thrown across the wall behind her; Saburo shot from the saddle; Tsurumaru at the edge of the ruined wall. The film rises again and again across its length. Held from the top by what lies between the summits: the scenes at Jiro’s court run flat, and the fool’s shrillness lowers the air.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth built, and more than one. The load-bearing structure is Lear’s: the old king dividing his realm, the faithful child cast out for plain speech, the heath, the fool, madness, the reunion and the faithful child’s death. Two further patterns lie under it, both structural. The first is karmic: deeds return, and the woman whose house was destroyed becomes the agent of the destroyer’s fall. The second is the fox-woman of Japanese legend, a demon in a beautiful wife: Kurogane brings Kaede a stone fox head in place of Sue’s, and the joke is prophecy. The particular stays particular, a flute, a stone head in a cloth. Held below the top because the master pattern is inherited, and the Buddhist frame is carried more by Sue and her scroll than built into every scene.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is King Lear, the period film, and Kurosawa’s own: Shakespeare refounded in the grammar of the Noh in Throne of Blood (1957), and the colour epic of armies in the twilight of the warring states in Kagemusha (1980). The departures from the play are real: the daughters become sons, the evil passes to a daughter-in-law with a grievance the play does not give, the king is made guilty, and Cordelia’s death becomes one return among many. The stake was real too: a director of seventy-five, the money found at last in France. What holds the axis is the path. Shakespeare in the Noh and the painted epic of colour and armies had both been proven, by the same director, and the turn from his own inheritance is smaller than the turn from Shakespeare’s.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Substitute a different form and the film loses its knowledge. The camera stands far back and high, and the armies are banners of a single colour moving across hills under clouds: men are seen as heaven would see them, which is the film’s statement about what they are doing. The colours of the houses make the war a pattern of houses rather than of persons. The Noh grammar of the playing, Nakadai’s whitened face set like a mask, Harada’s gliding walk and sudden stillness, places the figures in a form where deeds have fixed shapes and fixed returns, so that the karmic law is the acting style. The silent siege is the form at its height. Held a step from the top because the narrative is linear and staged scene by scene in a classical way.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Forty-one years of evidence, and it has yielded. The film has been central to the study of Shakespeare on screen, read beside Kozintsev’s Korol Lir and Brook’s King Lear, both of 1971; to the study of Kurosawa’s late style; and to arguments about the Noh in cinema, colour in film and the depiction of battle. It returns on viewing: how far Kaede acts for herself, whether the film is nihilist or Buddhist, how far Hidetora is meant to be pitied, how the camera’s distance answers the gods Kyoami says are absent. The formal well is deep, the composition and colour rewarding close study. Held at the figure because the semantic questions, once seen, are few and stable: the meaning has been refined since 1985, not transformed.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Released in 1985, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1980s. The force is great but consolidating: the fullest statement of a late manner, Shakespeare made Japanese and an epic made a painted, cold, distant pageant, by a master at the end of the era of practical spectacle. It did not reorganise what cinema could do, as the director’s own Rashomon and Seven Samurai had. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it confirmed Kurosawa’s late standing abroad, with four Academy nominations and a win, and it stands as the reference for a Shakespeare tragedy wholly carried into another culture. What holds the axis lowest: the mode it perfected, the vast practical epic with thousands of extras, ended with it; the reach is diffuse and lies inside the battle epic; and few films changed course because of it.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-one years. The form: the film as released survives whole, and restoration has repaired its colour and image without altering the work. The presence: continuous and wide within art cinema, in repertory, revivals, home video in every format and the teaching of film and of Shakespeare; it is among the Kurosawa films most often shown, though below Seven Samurai and Rashomon in common reference. The fabric: the original colour is what restoration exists to protect, the smallest charge. The surface does not date to 1985: a sixteenth-century world in costume and landscape, with no idiom of its decade, leaves nothing fixed to its year. Presence wide, but not the widest a film reaches, holds it at the usual figure for its span.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, the making bearing weight in every department. The battles are shot with several cameras on long lenses, so that masses and colours compose like painted screens. Emi Wada’s costumes give the three houses and Hidetora’s descent from armour to white robes. The castles and the burned keep are built to be seen whole. Takemitsu’s score is held back for long stretches and then becomes the whole sound of the siege. Nakadai is mask and man at once; Harada’s Kaede is the most exact performance in the film, the dagger at Jiro’s throat played as a dance. The costs recur and hold the figure: Peter’s Kyoami is shrill and mannered in several scenes, Terao and Nezu are stiff where the sons need inner life, and the score leans on a Mahlerian idiom that tells the images what they already show.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Kyoami’s comic songs and dances, and Kaede’s death. One law governs both: deeds return, and heaven looks on. The fool tells the king the truth of what he has done in nonsense, as Lear’s fool does, and his last cry against the gods is the same law spoken from below; Kaede’s death is the law enacted from the other side. Sue’s piety and Kaede’s vengeance, the two most opposed women, are the two answers to the one injury Hidetora did, and both end in death. The colours, the camera’s distance and the Noh register keep the guns and the politics under one physics with the masklike faces. The strain: the fool’s scenes and the stylised women sometimes sit in another key from the plain soldiers’ war, governed by the law but not felt in one body.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure. The family: a father and three sons, two wives, a brother and sister. The state: succession, castles, oaths and alliances, and neighbouring lords who watch for weakness. War and history: the Sengoku wars and the arrival of the gun, which decides the siege and kills Saburo from a distance, ending the order of single combat. The sacred: Amida, the return of deeds, gods asked for and absent. Nature: cloud, wind, plain, storm, the cliff. Consciousness: madness, guilt and its refusal. The siege is family, state, war and karma in one sequence. What holds the axis: labour and the common life are nearly absent, peasants appearing only as the victims of past burnings and servants as bodies, and the interior is seen through masks, shown more than entered.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime and The Made at 9.0, then The Archetypal Deep and The Living Form at 8.8. Elevation that rises again and again, nearly all of it dreadful, from the silent siege to the walk out of the burning keep; a making in which camera, costume, design, score and the two central performances bear weight; a myth built three times, from Lear, from the return of deeds and from the fox-woman; and a form in which the camera’s distance and the Noh grammar of the playing are what the film knows.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition at 7.9: a great force of consolidation, the fullest statement of a late manner, with a reach that is real, diffuse and inside a mode of practical epic that ended with it. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.0, a turn from Shakespeare made on a path the director had already proven; then The Encompassed at 8.3, many orders held, with labour and the common life nearly absent and the interior seen through masks.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. The work is held below the summit by two conditions of the Epochal Gate, The Swerve at 8.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 against the 8.5 it requires, and by its aggregate, 8.5 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ran (乱, “chaos” or “turmoil”) as released in Japan in June 1985, after its first showing in Tokyo at the end of May, 162 minutes, in colour, from the boar hunt to the blind boy on the ruined wall: directed by Akira Kurosawa from a screenplay by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni and Masato Ide after Shakespeare’s King Lear and the parable of the three arrows told of Mōri Motonari, produced by Herald Ace and Nippon Herald Films with Serge Silberman’s Greenwich Film Productions, photographed by Takao Saitō and Masaharu Ueda, with costumes by Emi Wada and music by Tōru Takemitsu. The film as released is the object; restoration is repair and bears on survival only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Japanese film. The English renderings are the desk’s own, used for sense, a reader’s aid rather than the object; no subtitled version is judged, and nothing here is charged to one. No line of the dialogue is held to the word with certainty, so none is quoted, and the speech is described. Shakespeare’s play is not part of the work and enters only where the adaptation’s departures are weighed. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the budget and the film’s rank in cost, how and where the burned castle was built, the locations, the exact frame ratio, the full list of those credited with the photography, the makers and dates of the restoration, whether the film was released in more than one version, the events of the production, the studies written on it, and its use as a model by later makers of battle epics; nor are the scene and shot counts, the share of the dialogue, or the manner of Sue’s death.