Remaking Kurosawa: translations and permutations in global cinema

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to University of South Florida - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-30

Remaking Kurosawa

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez



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Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema

D. P. Martinez



Remaking Kurosawa

REMAKING KUROSAWA

Copyright © D. P. Martinez, 2009. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–312–29358–1 ISBN-10: 0–312–29358–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martinez, D. P. (Dolores P.), 1957– Remaking Kurosawa : translations and permutations in global cinema / by D. P. Martinez. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–312–29358–5 (alk. paper) 1. Kurosawa, Akira, 1910–1998—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Film remakes—History and criticism. I. Title. PN1998.3.K87M37 2009 791.4302⬘33092—dc22

2008039877

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.

List of Figures

vii

A Note on Japanese Usage

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Prologue

xiii

1

Setting the Scene

2

Portrait of an Artist as Filmmaker

19

3

Rashomon: The Problem of Subjectivity

31

4

Remaking Rashomon: From Subjectivity to “the” Truth

43

5

The Battle of the Sexes: Or, the One Scenario when Subjectivity is Acceptable

65

Permutations on the Theme of Murder: The Search for Solutions

75

And on Television . . .

97

6 7

1

A Short Interval: Rashomon and the Desire Lines of the Imagination

107

8

The Group Western

113

9

The Lone Hero

141

Cloning Kurosawa

161

10

Conclusion: Thinking with Films

173

Notes

183

Bibliography

195

Index

211



Contents




1 2 3 4 5 6

Masago Confronts Tajômaru, Rashomon Masago Confronts Tajômaru, Misty What is Truth? End Shot from Les Girls No Welcome in the Village, Seven Samurai No Welcome in the Village, The Magnificent Seven The Finale to the Robin Hood Act, Referencing King Arthur, A Bug’s Life 7 The Not So Magnificent Seven, Galaxy Quest 8 Yojimbo Requests Two Coffins, Yojimbo 9 No Name Requests Two Coffins, A Fistful of Dollars 10 John Smith Looks into the Funeral Parlor, Last Man Standing 11 Princess Yuki Sleeps, The Hidden Fortress 12 Princess Leia Awakes, Star Wars IV


42 42 72 112 112 134 139 146 147 147 168 168


Figures




The Japanese terms in this book have been Romanized according to the modified Hepburn system, where long vowels are marked with the macron ^. I have used English spellings for commonly used Japanese terms, as well as for the repeated use of film titles. The names of Japanese actors, writers and others have been written with the surname followed by the given name, except in the cases of well-known figures such as Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune, and Takeshi Kitano.



A Note on Japanese Usage




The seeds for this book were planted many years ago when I was a student at the University of Chicago and a member of the European film society. As one of the society’s projectionists, I showed anything and everything that fell into that category. Life became more exciting when we merged with Doc Films and all “foreign” films became part of my projecting remit. It was during those years that I rediscovered Akira Kurosawa, whose films I previously had seen only on television. In 1982 Doc Films held a Kurosawa film festival and I then had the opportunity to meet Audie Bock and Donald Richie, whose own critical engagement with the Japanese filmmaker inspired my continued interest. Donald Richie, over the years, has been a supportive mentor, always making time to see me when I am in Tokyo. Nearly two decades later, in 1997, when I was asked to put together a film course for the new Anthropology of Media Masters degree in my department (SOAS), I immediately thought of Kurosawa and how I might approach his work anthropologically. Thus was born Translations and Permutations, Towards an Anthropology of Film (the final course title suggested by Ronald Inden in a passing conversation). I taught this course until 2005 when, after a sabbatical year at the University of Tokyo supported by the British Academy and Japanese Society for the Promotion of the Sciences, I was ready to pull together my thinking on the topic, reworking a draft manuscript I had written in 2003–2004. My analyses of the films discussed in this book benefited from the involvement of the many Masters students who took the course over the years. Their discussions, insights, and original research into films and filmmakers enhanced my own thinking. I owe an immeasurable debt to all those students, but it was, oddly enough, some of my non-media students who offered very concrete support. Charmaine Chan interviewed Christopher Doyle for me in Hong Kong; Fumie Nakano photocopied the Japanese reviews of many films for me in Tokyo; and Silke Niehausman endlessly discussed translation as a process and concept with me. During 2003–2004, discussions with Donald Richie, and my dear friend Noriyo



Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Hayakawa, as well as with any Japanese academic willing to lend an ear were always fruitful. Mark Nornes also gave me some interesting insights into translating films when we met in Tokyo in 2004. Critical engagement with seminar audiences in the United Kingdom (SOAS, Oxford and Nottingham), Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, and New Zealand led me to further develop my ideas. Along the way, Louella Matsunaga, Hidetaka Matsunaga, and Yuka Kodama-Pomfret helped double-check crucial Japanese dialogue. A long ago summer spent working for Clark Productions preparing and translating Japanese television programs for transmission on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom taught me a great deal about the processes of editing and subtitling. But it is the filmmakers I know well from my involvement with the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Film committee who set me on the path to considering how directors look at film. Over a decade of preselecting films for the RAI Ethnographic film festival with Peter Getzel, Paul Henley, Michael Yorke, Howard Reid, Felicia Hughes-Freeland, Tom Sheahan, and Marcus Banks, among others, have changed how I look at any film: I now think more about technologies and techniques. Of course, it is the filmmakers that I know only through their work to whom I owe the greatest debt, but I must signal in particular Tom Tykwer and George Lucas, both of whom took the time to read what I had to say about them. I did contact the other directors mentioned in these pages, but they showed no interest in responding (or were puzzled at being contacted by an anthropologist). I must thank my usual two sounding boards at SOAS: Kit Davis, the colleague who always asks the right questions, and Stephen Hughes, who reminds me of what anthropologists have written on film, providing essential mini-tutorials. The SOAS IT department has cheerfully worked on solving my problems with visual material; while Jens Franz, anthropologist and media expert extraordinaire, always came to the rescue. Finally, my deepest gratitude is to my husband, David Gellner, fellow anthropologist, my toughest critic, and expert proof-reader. This book is dedicated to him and our three children, Nicolás, Martín, and Sofía, who along with having to bear Spanish names in England, have also learned to ask “Now which film does this remind me of?” whenever they see a movie.



xii

Films Are Good to Think (With) That films are good to think with has not escaped many modern cultural theorists. Scholars as diverse as literary critics, Marxist writers, social geographers, philosophers, sociologists, and feminists—often overlapping categories—have all used a film or discussed film genres in order to illustrate the ways in which cinema can reveal aspects of lived reality. Films have been used to discuss the way in which all narratives are political (Jameson 1992, 2006), to illustrate the condition of postmodernity (Harvey 1990), to reveal the human unconscious (Deleuze 2005a, 2005b; Žižek 1991, 2001), or to raise issues about the continued subjugation and future potential of women (Braidotti and Lykke 1996; Haraway 1991). Rare amongst the ranks of serious thinkers who have tackled the subject of films as good to think (with) have been social anthropologists. If anything, when anthropologists have studied film, they have tended to think “around” the subject, looking at the processes of filmmaking (Powdermaker 1950), social contexts (Varzi 2006), audience reactions (Caton 1999), or the experience of seeing a film (cf. Wilkes and Askew 2002, for examples of all these approaches)—they have not used films to think about broader issues to be found within the discipline of social anthropology. This book, however, is an anthropological attempt to think with films about globalization. The core of this book is an analysis of four of Akira Kurosawa’s1 films that have been remade, in most cases more than once, and mainly by non-Japanese directors. Film remakes are a subject even less associated with the discipline of social anthropology than straightforward film analyses; however, since they raise issues of cultural context, transcultural translation, and the knotty problem of narrative creativity, remakes should be seen to lie firmly within anthropology’s remit. In order to make this argument, I will be examining issues to do with narratives as they move around the globe and, while written from an anthropological point



Prologue

Prologue

of view, I also will deal with the issues that are deemed important to scholars from both film and Japanese studies. So what does anthropology bring to an analysis of films and globalization? Encroaching on the domain of film studies, which is highly reliant on textual analysis, would seem to land the anthropologist firmly in territory that has been well mined by others. Do we need to add an anthropological approach to film studies? This is a fair question to ask of a discipline that has built its methods on the foundations of fieldwork, participant observation, and comparison, that are normally done in small-scale societies. We could also ask: how can something as large as “the global” be the subject of a single study? Moreover, the most interesting aspect of the global for anthropologists has been how to locate it within the local (Lal 2002) or how to trace its effects through diasporas, as much current research on Bollywood is aiming to do. However this is not a book based on diaspora as global flow, local resistance or acculturation (Tobin 1992), frictions (Tsing 2005) or accommodations, nor is it based on audience studies, although I do talk about and have talked to a fairly small group of people who can be said to constitute an audience; that is, I have talked to filmmakers about their responses to seeing a film. What I am interested in is the fact that a filmmaker’s response to seeing a film is often to make their own film. It is striking that interviews with or biographies about any contemporary filmmaker will mention some film-viewing experience that propelled them toward becoming a director. It is this impulse to make a film, inspired by watching films, which is part of what this book is about. In short, I want to explore, in a LéviStraussian sense, how “films are good to think (with),” in the first instance for filmmakers and, in the second, for anthropologists. For Lévi-Strauss (1962) it was “animals” that were good to think, in relation particularly to totems and taboos, in order for us to understand how distinguishing between animals provides “a natural model of differentiation for human beings to create differences among themselves” (Tambiah 1985:207). I would like, in a structural inversion, to argue that films, especially remade films, are good to think with in order to understand the ways in which humans ignore perceived differences and assume the possibility of similarity across cultures. When directors decide to remake a foreign film they may be attempting to erase difference, to restore the film to “the seamlessness of a coherent, intact, and consumable image (and sound)” (Wills 1998:150), but they do this assuming that something about the film, generally its story, will appeal to a new audience. These assumptions about translatability, the possibility of understanding, the making of conceptual bridges to bring the translation about, are crucial to understanding this book (Ricoeur 2006:4).



xiv

Prologue

xv

a theory of cinema is not “about” cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others, any more than one object has over others. (2005b:268)

Within this book I want to expand this point to include the idea that what people make of films—as opposed to specialists’ theorizing—is a subject in and of itself. At one level, the way in which watching the films of others inspires a new film is easy enough to trace through the process of translation, remaking and referencing (that is alluding to, paying homage, parodying, adopting visual techniques, or even resisting), and this book will follow some examples of this for selected Kurosawa films. At another level, it is the problem of meaning—that is, what does it mean that films seem to flow around the world endlessly being made, watched, remade, and acting as sources of inspiration—that lies at the core of my analysis. While it is correct to say that anthropology is the study of human beings, their activities and societies, we social anthropologists make not only human bodies and societies our core subject, but also, in the most complex of ways, it is the human mind that interests us. Anthropologists study the ways in which human beings construct a sense of relatedness out of biological functions, build economies on ideologies, make the abstract into something concrete, give meaning to symbols, and tell stories that reveal how we think. As postmodernists, we often forget or chose to ignore Lévi-Strauss’ (1963) work in this last area because, in the end, his analyses of myth always ended as a discussion of binary oppositions; yet it was his combination of Freudian analysis and deconstruction that laid the foundations of much of post-1960s literary and film analyses. Jameson (1992), in his attempt to understand mass culture as reiteration, how all art has become commodity, falls back on Freud as well in order to understand the “desire” to repeat that seems central to modernity. It seems that if anthropologists want to reclaim their position as students of the human imagination—that creativity that makes humans human, the ability to see and make difference where, biologically, there is a large tendency to genetic similarity—we need to reclaim some of these techniques and not be afraid of the paths they lead us down. Thus the short answer to the question “What is this book about?” is: The human imagination on a global level. As Crapanzano notes: “Although anthropologists have treated the imagination in one manner or another in much of what they have written, they have done so largely by indirection” (2004:15). It could be



My approach also owes something to Deleuze’s point that

Prologue

argued that it is by indirection only that we can study the human imagination—“imagination” tends to exist inside individuals and normally we can only trace it through its products. To study it globally adds to the conceptual difficulties. For example, a recent anthropological attempt at charting the global imagination, Allison’s Millennial Monsters (2006), argues that the world’s soft power center has shifted from the United States to Japan. Allison makes her argument by tracing the global imagination through its material manifestations, the toys and games from Japan that now are marketed throughout the world, but with a key focus on the US-Japan relationship, ignoring much of the globe in her “global.” This fusion of material culture with an acknowledgment of global economy (the subject of another recent attempt to look at Japan and global flows by Bestor 2004) owes much to Appadurai’s (1996) seminal article “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” and this deserves some discussion here. Appadurai argues that we exist in an era of disjunctures, which, if we examine the areas that he labels “scapes”—ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes—we can see how global culture is neither worldwide nor a single culture.2 What I find interesting about his various ‘scapes is how each is implicated in the other: films, part of his mediascapes, for example, cannot be understood as objects without also considering the financial, ideological, technological, and cultural aspects involved. We may chose to ignore the way money was raised to make the film (although is becoming more and more important for some), 3 but film criticism and analysis, in the end, focus on the ideological, cultural/historical and even the technological. By examining how all the various ‘scapes come together, we also get the sense of how something like a global culture and a global imagination might exist not as centers or separate poles that represent monolithic hegemonies, but as continuous processes that are constantly changing: last year Pokémon (1999), today Pirates of the Caribbean (2003, 2006, 2007), tomorrow Harry Potter (2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007), next week a Simpson’s episode or Bollywood production that fuses elements of all three. Thus the concepts of soft or hard power seem irrelevant to me, since the complexities of the relationships between culture, technology, politics, ideologies, and economics are too intricate to be reduced to these terms. Napier, in a recent analysis of the history of Western artists’ engagement with Japan, takes a similar stance (2007:8, 18–19). In short, we should not assume that global culture is static, singular, or firmly centered in one place, and yet, many writers on the topic of globalization begin precisely from this premise or provide an analysis that looks at two poles on a continuum as does Allison. For anthropologists such an approach comes from their practice of documenting the experiences of others



xvi

xvii

through participant observation, the experience of globalization may feel as if it is singular, hegemonic, and occurring at the cost of local culture and identity and it is only fair to analyze this experience. However, in order to provide a more nuanced analysis in this book, I look at the process by beginning with Kurosawa’s work rather than vice versa and including non-Hollywood films. In chapter one, I begin by assuming that the film business is global, but the caveat is, of course, that some countries’ film industries are more global than others. Outside of the United States and Europe, Japanese and, more recently, Chinese films enjoy the industry’s recognition while Korea, Iran, Mexico, Brazil, and Thailand are not far behind. Canadian films are often seen as just an inexpensive way to make a Hollywood film. India’s films are famous for being spectacles of a postmodern sort, but do not necessarily enjoy completely global success, while some countries have only sporadic recognition: Egypt, Taiwan, Vietnam, or Turkey fall into this category. Aside from hardcore film buffs, immigrant communities, and cultural studies experts, global recognition has escaped Indonesian, Nigerian, or Ghanaian films (and yet Africa hosts one of the largest film festivals in the world, FESPACO). The global, as Hannerz (1992), amongst others, would have it, always appears to fracture along lines of politics, economics, and more ephemerally, because of what I would call “perceived cultural similarity.” Perceived cultural similarity can be explained through a simple example: when in 1983 I asked Japanese friends why I had never heard of the hugely popular Jackie Chan before, I was told that since Hong Kong was an East Asian society, Chan’s films translated more readily for Japanese audiences than they did for Westerners, so it was obvious that he would be well known only in East Asia. While time has knocked that theory a bit, the fact remains that Jackie Chan’s Hollywood films never wowed audiences in the West as much as his early Hong Kong films did audiences in the East. The global is relative and it is on this premise that much of current anthropological theory rests. And yet . . . There are always subcultures and through their fandoms there is a seepage, a process of osmosis, that brings the foreign film into mainstream culture: the film festivals in the United Kingdom or United States that show African or East Asian or Middle Eastern films; the martial arts fans who know all the new stars before they have a crossover hit in the West; the shops that specialize in films for immigrant communities that might be visited by others; the intelligentsia who prefer “foreign films”; the Internet communities that download and share films across the globe; and, most importantly for my purposes, filmmakers, producers, scholars, and critics who watch everything they can get their hands on. Slowly,



Prologue

Prologue

then, some films—in the past, mainly the foreign “art” film, more recently, the horror film—cross over into the mainstream. Thus while Appadurai wants anthropologists to think about the disjunctures that make the global, the differences that make poverty, reinforce national identities and religious affiliation while fuelling adherence to the local, what interests me about the creative aspect of films/narratives that travel is how they bridge disjunctures. We can think of this seepage, the crossover, as an example of “desire lines”—the lines made by humans as they traverse the countryside, connecting points outside of established paths because that is the way people want to travel. Desire as an expression of human imagination, rather than something that must be managed or repressed, is also important in understanding how narratives are made, and how they make and unmake human connectiveness. Why do we tell stories? It is useful to think here of the place narrative holds in the study of human beings. For scientists such as Dennett (2004), it is the human ability to narrate that creates human consciousness, it is what makes us human and unlike our fellow primates. For psychologists, such as Bruner,4 narratives are a way of knowing the world and he divides the forms of narrative into two: that of “action” and that of “consciousness” (1986:14); or the rational/scientific and the imaginative that includes fiction. Each form makes different sorts of knowledge: both make our social realities. It is precisely here that science, psychology, literary, and film analyses venture into the terrain of anthropology, which is concerned with how human societies make their own realities. The modern world of filmmaking is an important part of this and yet, as I have noted, we anthropologists have—by and large— ignored films and the stories they tell. I also am curious about how it is that the stories that human beings tell become narratives that not only make social reality, but also form bridges across societies, moving in time and space. The post-1980s anthropological notion that anthropology should avoid universalizing or generalizing (Marcus and Fischer 1986), that it should eschew grand theory-making strikes me as too parochial in the face of empirical evidence that human beings spend a great deal of time essentializing and generalizing; communicating despite the “impossibility” of translation (cf. Ricoeur 2004), while continuing to make borders, to create barriers that insist on difference. I do not agree with Iwabuchi (2002), for example, who argues that a local media becomes global only if it is “odorless,” that is, if it has so few discernable foreign elements in it that it can travel because it fits into what is a homogenized, and thus by implication, second-rate, global culture. I would rather argue the converse: that if we look carefully at what looks like a homogenized narrative, we will find points being made about cultural and social similarities that should give us pause to think; that if



xviii

Prologue

xix

Because the human being is the connecting creature who must always separate and cannot connect without separating . . . and the human being is likewise the bordering creature who has no border. The enclosure of his or her domestic being by the door means, to be sure, that they have separated out a piece from the uninterrupted unity of natural being. But just as the formless limitation takes on a shape, its limitedness finds its significance and dignity only in that which the mobility of the door illustrates: in the possibility at any moment of stepping out of this limitation into freedom. (1997:174)

This book also attempts to trace the tension between making connections, seeing similarity, and then asserting difference. It is, in itself, an effort to build a bridge out of diverse materials: anthropology, film studies, postmodern theory, and my understanding of Japanese society. It traces, from the “authentic” remake through to the way-out-therepermutations, the desire lines of the human imagination. I have had to set some limits to its scope, but even a focus on four films has led me down interesting paths. To begin with, in chapter one, I want to make some more detailed points about films and narratives in the global before examining some aspects of Kurosawa’s life and work in chapter two. Chapter three begins the analysis of Rashomon (Rashômon, 1950), not only the first film to bring the Japanese director to Western attention, but also a film that raises many interesting issues in relation to subjectivity, social reality, and a postmodern take on “the” truth. Chapters eight to ten look at Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954), Yojimbo (Yôjinbo, 1961), and Hidden Fortress (Kakushi-toride no san-akunin, 1958), picking up and elaborating on various aspects of the analysis developed in relation to Rashomon, concluding in a discussion of the ways in which humans come to know and understand their world.



we examine in detail, as this book does, the narratives that both build bridges and then proceed to burn them while retaining some memory of the connection, we will understand something about human nature. It was Simmel, prescient in so many ways, who had some interesting observations to make on these processes in his “Bridge and Door”:




Setting the Scene In order to write scripts, you must first study The great novels and dramas of the world. You must consider why they are great. Where does the emotion come from that you feel as you read them? . . . You must also see the great films. You must read the great screenplays and study the film theories of the great directors. If your goal is to become a film director, you must master screenwriting. —Kurosawa 1982:193

The course on which this book is based began with a simple premise: that Japan, so often called a nation of copiers, was also a nation copied from and that one of the best examples of this was the way in which the films of Akira Kurosawa had influenced non-Japanese filmmakers. As an anthropologist, I soon realized that such a simple thesis required discussion of a much more complex series of conceptual issues. First, copying in the eras of modernity and postmodernity has been considered to be an inferior art, the poor man’s craft next to the original artist’s creativity. That the film industry has long remade films is seen as an indication of the fact that it is popular culture and opposed to the realm of high art. This is certainly one of the lines offered by the adherents of the Frankfurt school such as Adorno (1991) when considering popular culture. This negative view of the copying relies on a misreading of Benjamin’s seminal essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical



1

Remaking Kurosawa

reproduction” (1973). A careful reading of the essay reveals that Benjamin saw film as having the power to reach into the viewer, like a surgeon, and my reading of this is that films, through such incorporations, acquire different meanings both between the filmmaker and audience as well as for different members of the audience. Films are not straightforward bearers of dominant ideologies that brainwash the audiences, but are something else altogether. They are, in Bakhtin’s (1981) terms, dialogic: they engage us in conversations. For most members of the audience, the dialogue is between them and friends: “What did you think of the film?” In this age of easy Internet access, some audience members go online in order to discuss, debate, critique, ask questions, provide answers, and ponder the meaning of films they have just watched or have become obsessed with. For other audience members, the dialogue is a conversation with the medium itself that fuels their own creativity. To “copy” a film then, reveals the impulse this process seems to spark in some people: the desire to somehow make art of one’s own. Thus, in looking at remakes of Kurosawa’s films I have had to consider the issue of copying, and have had to look at the process of transformation that is involved in remaking as well. I will be discussing these issues in detail as we consider the films. Kurosawa’s work also raises a second issue: that of cultural translation. It is currently assumed that translating stories, customs, ideas, attitudes, religions—anything—is problematic. As mentioned in the prologue, the anthropologist Appadurai (1996) argues that we exist in an era of disjunctures, which, if we examine the areas that he labels ‘scapes, we can see how global culture can never be a single culture, but always produces local responses. The implications of these disjunctures are various: the realization that the future might exist elsewhere—if you are poor in Africa, for example—; the slipperiness of identity for migrants; and the relegation of certain parts of the world to theme park status, quaint places for the wealthier Northern Hemisphere tourist to visit. The world might be full of commodities we can buy from just about everywhere, but that does not mean we understand anything about the people who produce them. I also noted in the prologue that I think it important to consider the way in which disjunctures are constantly being bridged by human activity. We need to think about the way in which people use slipperiness (Carrithers 1992) to communicate or construct new identities and how these processes seem to inspire creativity. What theorists who follow Appadurai do not consider is the way in which humans



2

3

make “bridges” that become conceptual “places”—locations from which something new can be generated.1 In this book I want to consider how it is that the film industry in general and films in particular do this. Films may well be mere representations of reality, shadows on a screen, but they have a material existence; they are made, bought, sold, consumed, regurgitated, and so on, and all by real people. As Jameson argues, this “materialisation” is “woefully misunderstood by much contemporary Marxist theory,” which negatively relates materiality to the “false problem of value” (italics in the original, 1992:16). What really matters is how “materialization is a key structural feature of both modernism and mass culture” (Jameson 1992:17). A second point then is that this concern with the materiality of moving images—illusions made concrete by their continued existence both in the popular imagination and in the work of filmmakers—should be of greater interest to anthropologists especially. I have discussed elsewhere (Martinez 1998), how I think that the mass media should be incorporated into anthropology and will only briefly restate my position here in relation to films: it is precisely because films are open to both symbolic analysis and concrete contextualizing that they constitute the stuff of anthropology. To make the point clear, before examining the case of Kurosawa’s films, I need to discuss some basic issues to do with the film industry as global, the identity of artists as local, the question of retelling stories, and the problems inherent in translation.

The Local and the Global In the early twentieth century, the film industry became global long before globalization became a buzzword. While the first fifty years of the twentieth century saw the world divided into economic and cultural blocs—the British Empire, German—dominated middle Europe, the French Empire, the Hispanic world, the growing imperialism of the USSR, East Asia and, on the margins, the Americans— almost from the moment movies began to be made, silent, and later sound, films crossed borders and traveled to wherever it was possible to set up a screen and crank a projector.2 It may have well been people in Hollywood who immediately recognized the implications of this: cinema was, after all, an immigrant business in the United States. So while in France, Japan, Shanghai, Bengal, Bombay, the United Kingdom—to name just a few places where local filmmaking has



Setting the Scene

Remaking Kurosawa

deep roots—directors, technicians, and actors were quickly forming film companies and making movies, in Hollywood there was already a global focus. Hollywood producers were asking not just where their films could be marketed, but from where would they get their next great director, cinematographer, or new star. From the 1920s onward, like some assembly line, the studio system remade already successful European films, hired and fired talented European directors, imported, put on a diet, and remade the great European stars. Occasionally, a Latin American or even Japanese actor3 made a career in Hollywood, but the artistic focus was on Europe, while the business focus was on the rest of the world. By the end of the Second World War, Hollywood was, and was recognized as, the center of the film world, and thus was challenged, in some places, as a far too dominant cultural force. France, for example, has long fought a battle against “the American film,”4 supporting local filmmaking both financially and by legal measures, limiting the number of “foreign” films that can be shown at any given time. It was from a surprising place, however, that Hollywood’s dominance was challenged, if only in a small way, in 1951—Japan. When Kurosawa’s Rashomon (Rashômon) won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival, the reactions were various: not really a good film, yes a surprisingly great film, well, a confusing film, and so on. Harrington (1987:141) noted at the time that the . . . success of Rashomon in the United States is most interesting, for it reveals, to one who knows how to read between the lines of praise, a reluctant acceptance of its obvious excellence. Snobbery will always lead Americans to admire the qualities of a French, English, even Swedish film. But when an Oriental country like Japan, whose customs often shock Americans (as primitive and backward), makes a film which technically and artistically surpasses the best Hollywood productions, then the amazed American critics feel uneasy and seek facile explanations based on external influences. (italics in original)

Not only was the Japanese film a revelation, but its director was happy where he was. Not for him the migration to Hollywood to be incorporated into the already changing studio system. His one invitation to make a film there (Tora! Tora! Tora! 1968) proved to be a disaster because Kurosawa had developed his methods and cultivated his team very much at home. Moreover, his international fame gave him the power to make in Japan, for almost a decade, the sorts of



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films he wanted to make. So like Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, or many of the French auteurs, Kurosawa’s incorporation into the global business of Hollywood was piecemeal—distribution contracts, copyrightapproved remakes of his films, and, almost from the beginning, the incorporation of his visual style by up-and-coming filmmakers. Since the 1960s, the dismantling of the studio system has forced Hollywood to become global in a sense that makes it necessary to question the supposed cultural imperialism of the American film: few movies seem to make it into the marketplace without being globally produced—financially, technically, or in terms of human input. An “American” film might be made in Malta and the Yucatan; have its special effects done in the United Kingdom or Czech Republic; be produced by United States, European, and Chinese backers; be based on a Greek epic and be made by an German director working with an Italian cameraman; might well star any number of actors who are not U.S. citizens; and come out of a studio actually owned by a Japanese corporation. The business machine for getting these films out and around the world appears to threaten the smaller industries that still operate more or less locally and “the” Hollywood film has come to be seen as a Godzilla-like mass medium that squashes all its competitors. The current cultural studies interest in vibrant local cinemas that appear to subvert the hegemony of the Hollywood product often ignores the fact that local cinema is invariably locked into a love/hate relationship with Hollywood, as well as being economically dependent on the big companies should they want global distribution. Local cinemas want to reject, satirize, remake, or parody the dominant style of Hollywood, and without this Other to work against, they could not develop their own identity. Moreover, it is the constant incorporation of other cinemas, other visions, other talents that makes Hollywood, whatever that may now mean, continually successful. Neither the global nor the local could exist as distinct cinemas without the presence of the other. In short, the local and the global cinemas of today constitute each other. There are those who might point to the hermeneutic films of the old USSR or China before the 1990s as contravening the assertion that the local and global constitute each other, but even the ideological rejection of “the American film” (cf. Oshima 1992) points to the way in which the dominant Hollywood film could be an absent presence. This process is one we do not yet well understand, although by using the example of Kurosawa I hope to unravel/reveal several aspects of it.



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Remaking Kurosawa

Kurosawa is not the only director to occupy a place of importance in the history of film—a book about remakes, translation, and global processes could be written about the careers of Antonioni, Bergman, Hitchcock, Truffaut, Eisenstein, Lang, Buñuel, or Fellini to name a few. Like Kurosawa, these are all “foreign” filmmakers who generally stayed at home and not only directed, but often wrote their own film scripts, frequently worked with the same film-crews and had strong relationships with particular actors. Aside from the fact that I, as a Japan specialist, have long been interested in him, the focus on Kurosawa is justified by noting that we cannot write about his career without taking into account his position in a postwar, postindustrial, late capitalist setting—a setting that presumes the existence of global processes and networks (cf. Cazdyn 2003). As Kurosawa himself pointed out, in the quotation above, even to want to be a film director means to immerse oneself in the literature and films of the world as well as in one’s own culture. A great film director has to be a citizen of the world. This statement implies that the culturally bound filmmaker will never create memorable works, a point that could be debated. It is more important to note that filmmakers learn from many sources and try to do something of their own with this knowledge. The use of knowledge in this way has led me to reformulate the term “knowledge capital.” Generally used in business, knowledge capital can be defined as “knowledge that a company possesses and can put to profitable use” (http://dictionary.bnet.com/definition/ knowledge+capital.html). In relation to filmmakers I would define knowledge capital as “knowledge that an artist possesses and that can be put to profitable use in their own work.” Of course, the use of knowledge capital leads to profits of other sorts, but I want to distinguish it from cultural capital, which relies on the concepts of value- and status-making within social networks. Knowledge capital is not unrelated to cultural, or even social, capital, but as a concept, it implies conscious agency and action in a way that cultural capital does not; I will return to this later in the “Interval” section of this book. A global citizen, or cosmopolitan, then, is someone who can consciously use their knowledge capital for some sort of profit. However, in the many Western books about him, it is not Kurosawa’s ability to succeed in the global that is analyzed; rather it is the problem of his Japanese identity that is raised, a “problem” in direct contrast to how the director was regarded in Japan for many years before



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his death: his work was not, somehow, Japanese enough, it was too Western. Such pronouncements should be treated with skepticism: how is this possible and why are such statements most often made about non-Western, nonwhite artists? Who is it that passes judgment on identity and in what units is identity measured? If works of art are in part defined in terms of their ability to transcend the local or individual (Heidegger 2001), what do such pronouncements mean? By the end of this book I will attempt, in part, to answer this question and in order to do so, will make use of anthropological theory. I am not just making an argument about identity however. I will show how other film directors, those in Hollywood and Europe, have agreed with Kurosawa on the need to study other literatures and other films, in fact, learning from the work of Kurosawa himself. In order to do this, these directors have assumed an understanding of the Japanese filmmaker and, understanding him, presumed to either translate or rework him. I choose my words carefully here. Not only have the films of Kurosawa been remade, but also his films scripts have been used to make new films based on his screenplays (Last Man Standing, 1997). Moreover, in assuming that something of the original was understood, the many directors I will consider in the following chapters had to be comfortable with the idea that they had some sort of access to the meaning of the Kurosawa original. Something about the film, visually and/or narrative, was seen to be translatable. Even when producing a permutation—a work inspired by a Kurosawa film—the allusion to the original is assumed to be understandable by the audience. How is it possible for non-Japanese people, nonJapanese speakers to assume this? What is at stake here? The last question leads to a more complex answer than we might expect. For the issue it raises is the post-1970s construction of a Japanese national identity that posits its Oriental impenetrability to the outsider, most specifically the Western outsider. Even more specifically to a North American outsider. The complexity of this national construction is worth considering because its existence is not due solely to the fact of an Orientalist discourse, but also to a Japanese response to that discourse (cf. Carrier 1995). As Revell (1997) has noted, it is perhaps an irony that in constructing its Japan Inc. identity, national leaders have incorporated precisely the stereotype that Said (1995) notes constitutes Orientalism at its worst: the inscrutable Oriental. Patrick Smith (1998) firmly attributes the origins of this particular construction to U.S. anthropologists and historians studying Japan during and after the war—and Revell labels the image as



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“made in the USA.” Yet details of this image—the total otherness of someone else’s society when compared with one’s own—are as old as the hills, as Herodotus’ description of the Egyptians, written in the fifth century before the birth of Christ, clearly shows. Given the ideological insistence of the nation-state that each state be different from all other states (both unique and yet, because of its nation-statehood, like everywhere else), it is no insidious plot that the creators of Japanese identity are involved in. Or, a plot no more insidious than that of other nation-states.

Making Identity But who, we might ask, are the creators of these national identities? Although the initial creators of national feeling are activists and intellectuals, by the time a state is established the most obvious culprits are politicians. In creating a nation-state, a particularly modern form of the state in which all the citizens are bound together by the concept of belonging to the land, cooperating for the sake of the nation, it is the leaders of the nation who most benefit from such identity construction: “We belong to this land, these islands, and are more like each other than we are like anyone else; therefore we will fight to the death to protect it. We will work like demons to keep the state competitive in a global economy.” This particular form of identity construction, Anderson (1991) argues, was made possible by the advent of the mass media. Without printing, and more recently, radio, film, and television, it would not have been possible to convince millions of people that they were more like each other than different. At the core of this, obviously, are national education systems that attempt to make sure that nearly everyone in the state speaks, reads, and writes the same language while believing that they share the same history.5 Implicated in the process, as Yoshino (1992) argues, are the ideologues, nationalist historians, folklorists, and intellectual elites of all sorts who continue to produce learned tomes on the subject. Yet, as Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) note, their work does not necessarily require the wholesale “invention” of traditions—the creation of a unitary state culture can only work if some part of these traditions are seen to have their roots in the actual historical past. National myths require a sense of antiquity to work—it is not the reality of the age of these myths that we should question, but rather whether they had even been important for so many people, or important at all, before the rise of the nation-state. In Japan, for example, it is the elite practices of the



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aristocrats (flower arranging, tea ceremony, calligraphy, to name a few), combined with the folktales of one particular region6 that form a large part of the modern identity of most Japanese. Through their involvement in the mass business of the media, artists are also prime suspects as the adherents of the Frankfurt School would have it. Artists assume they speak to an audience who share a language, an identity and an understanding of culture; and by assuming it, they perpetuate the myth. The mass media tends to take individual experience and present it so that it somehow represents all of us. While anthropology is veering away from saying “the” Japanese this or that, a Japanese novel assumes that native readers will understand what may well be, in the story, a fairly singular experience. For Bakhtin (1981) the ability of the novel and its author to do this lies in the fact that the novel as a modern genre represents a multitude of voices and this heteroglossia allows for individual interpretation. Novels become dialogic both within the text and between the text and the diverse readers. I have argued that if we follow Benjamin on film and read him carefully, we can assume a similar possibility for cinema; it reaches into each person and thus is internalized: it can mean different things to different people. In Bakhtin’s terms again, we can say that film is dialogic as well. Perhaps nothing speaks to this possibility as powerfully as the existence of fan websites that debate the merits and/or faults and interpretations of certain films. Paradoxically, particularly during eras of censorship such as Postwar Occupied Japan (1946–1952), or since the 1970s for Hollywood (where films have to make money), films also can be rigorously constructed to conform to current dominant models and ideologies.7 It is this paradox—the conformity to dominant models, which coexists alongside multiple readings, that allows for the possibility of translation—this is what I wish to examine in detail in relation to film. Once I have done this, we need also to consider the fact that “great” narrative art (novels and films in the main) also transcends the borders its author may have taken for granted.

The Paradox of Shared Meaning How can the mass media both represent and subvert a dominant ideology? I think that a fruitful way to approach this is to define ideology in terms of myth (Martinez 1992). Myths, tales of origin that offer social charters, always offer us at least two versions of the world: that of the deities, or fantastical creatures, which coexists with the much



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more mundane human realm.8 By the very positing of these realms, overlapping rather than separate, myth allows for the possibility of the existence of more than one reality. So do, ironically enough, ideologies; by positing one dominant view of the world, they presume the existence of other views, other realities, that must be subjugated— why articulate the dominant ideology in school textbooks, newspapers, or other mass media if it is unquestionably shared? It is precisely because other voices continue to exist that ideology has to be reiterated in an attempt to maintain its hegemony. We might also argue that by attempting to drown out these other voices, the dominant ideology can make the opposition somehow attractive and interestingly seductive. The other realms, other views, become both demonized and romanticized as Others always seem to be. In Freudian terms, we might say that they become fetishized: think of the Soviet underground value placed on blue jeans, for example, while the State condemned the very values that blue jeans, post-1960s, represented. By this inclusion of the Other through implication, dominant ideologies do not create myths so much as become myths. They end by representing the dominant “reality” as somehow alien, alternative, dreamlike, a potential of what life might be like; while somewhere, out there, is another place where things are very different indeed. Thus, positing that ideology is myth allows us to conceive of ideology as subjective and malleable in a way that other ways of defining it do not. Novels and films are inherently part of this process. Both seem to represent and have the possibility of shaping mass culture and yet, somehow, both are open to interpretations so varied that they are capable of subverting dominant myths. However, there is a tension between visual narratives—films—which assume a relationship to reality, and the written representation that is the novel. Novels also, of course, have a relationship to reality, but by their very nature rely on the readers’ imaginations to make the connection between the everyday and what is found between the pages of the book. Films do away with this dialogic possibility it would seem. While retaining the polyphony that Bakhtin found important in the novel, film appears to subvert dialogic imaginings by the simple fact of being a medium that we see rather than imagine. The experience, it could be argued, is more immediate (cf. Warshow 2002). This is certainly the issue at stake when discussing violence in film—the idea that seeing violence blurs the lines between what is imagined on the screen and everyday life, leading to a growing familiarity with violence, making it more possible for us to be violent (cf. Prince 2000).



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As an anthropologist I find such arguments both culturally bound and historically blind. Many researchers admit that the same films do not produce the same violent response in viewers outside the country mostly concerned with this issue, the United States (Berkowitz 2000), and all researchers ignore the fact that less than a century ago most humans in Western societies were familiar with violence at a very real level in everyday life. Moreover, many people continue to live in societies where ethnic, civil, and family based acts of violence occur with daily regularity. Thus the relationship between what we see in films and what we do is mediated in a variety of ways (our society, our family, our individual selves), making it firmly, in my opinion, dialogic. There is a Japanese concept, mitate (Yamaguchi 1991), which can help make sense of this process: mitate not only means to look at, but to look at critically. Yamaguchi applies the term to the offerings presented to the Japanese deities: as made objects they should possess the quality of being look-at-able and should imply a relationship to reality. This would seem to sum up films also and what we do as audiences involves mitate. Rare is the person who sees a film and does not form an opinion about it.9 Let us take, for example, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegal 1956). For some reviewers it was a clear morality tale about the horrors of communism with its insistence on individual conformity. For others, it was a very post-McCarthy tale that warned of the unthinking conformity of individuals within the U.S. anticommunist movement. It equated majority culture, not necessarily communism, with contagion and personal subjugation. It was this latter possibility that led to its remake by Philip Kaufman in 1978, as well as a more recent 2007 version The Invasion (Hirschbiegel) with its post-9/11 themes. Thus, by being open to viewers’ varying interpretations, films not only succeed commercially, appealing broadly to different groups, but involve their viewers in conversations about the story. These conversations, to repeat, are precisely the source of the impulse to remake, an attempt for the new author or director to create their vision or version of the story. It is not just that new times require new versions—an important point about historical and cultural context—but that the conversation a film director, for example, has with the story requires the remake. To make the point clear, let us consider a story that might appear to have nothing to do with the work of Akira Kurosawa: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1994). The vampire myth underpins Stoker’s novel and elements of this myth have been elaborated in countless vampire films—a huge global genre that includes more than 300 versions of



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the idea that there exist beings that exist by feeding on human blood. The novel itself has generated various versions on stage and screen, most recently in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Why retell this story so many times? The impulse to retell these myths can be traced back to the nineteenth century and Stoker’s novel, but why? One possible answer is that the novel is clearly, in Bakhtian terms, heteroglossic.10 Dracula is not a conventional narrative; it opens with letters sent by Jonathan Harker from Transylvania to his fiancée, Mina, in England. The story continues through a ship’s log, newspaper reports, more letters, and phonograph diary recordings. Not only are there many protagonists—Jonathan Harker, Arthur Holmwood, Lucy Westenra, Quincy Morris, John Seward, Mina Harker, and Abraham Van Helsing—but also there are multiple points of view. The supposed subjectivity of the letters sent by different characters is offset by the assumed objectivity of the mass media in the form of newspaper reports. The complexity of the novel allows for any number of readings and assumptions to be made by both critics and audience, generating ever-new versions of the story. The original story can be assumed to be about forbidden sexualities; Dracula also can be read as being about female sexuality and promiscuity; or it can be read as a novel that represents a British fear of the foreign Other. It has been read as a novel about the fear of contagion and syphilis as well. All these readings would appear to support the status quo, the dominant ideology of the Victorian Era—sex outside of marriage is bad, foreigners are suspect, and women are hysterical creatures. Yet the novel also represents the very fascination with all of the above: homosexuality, the beauty of youth, the strange foreigner, and the alluring gamble involved in being sexually active. By its very representation of all these evil consequences, Stoker makes the reader curious, aroused perhaps, even, in Baudrillard’s (1990) terms, somewhat enchanted/seduced by possibilities previously only dimly sensed, but now made concrete in the form of the mass-produced novel. The film permutations on this theme are almost innumerable: we have had the clearly foreign Dracula, Bela Lugosi, as well as his silent film predecessor Nosferatu, who, Michaels (1998) argues, is a representation of something fantastical, not present, and, ultimately, “the phantom of the cinema” (1998:245). By representing what is not there, cinema makes real that which is not real. It gives voice to those assumed to be voiceless or presumed not to exist. Both historical and social change come into play in the many remakes of the story, yet the theme of giving voice to those presumed not to exist



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remains, whether they are deemed to be faithful to the original or not. And, as more and more Western versions of the genre have piled up, a very interesting transformation has occurred: the vampire has moved from being a creature of evil, something to abjure, through to someone to pity, to someone who is both glamorous and an object of desire. It could be argued that this potentiality, the seductive game entered into by the reader and villain, is there in the novel where the boundary between the vampire and human is ever permeable. Is not the vampire a being akin to ourselves? If so, how can we not have some compassion for the creature? By the time we reach Blade (Norrington 1998), the vampire is all of these: Blade is a human born black vampire (in a post-1980s version of the story, born HIV positive we might say), and is a vampire hunter. The comic book hero as enacted by Wesley Snipes could not be more seductive and handsome to look at—but his dedication to the cause of vampire slaying makes it difficult for him to have romances. The possibility of his “reverting,” either through lack of the antidote or through a built-up resistance to it, is always present as a danger that is both real and, somehow, sexually exciting. Compare this to the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Wedon 1997–2003). First we have the sexually attractive Angel (David Boreanaz), the Irish vampire with a soul, whose demonic persona can be turned on and off largely at will. Along with her “watcher,” Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), he helps the young girl (Sarah Michelle Gellar) battle other vampires, many of whom appear as evil and demonic, but who, like the helpless Spike (James Marsters), also develop as characters. But more interesting is Buffy, a new incarnation of the young female “victims” of the original. It is no mere structuralist inversion that makes her the heroine of these stories—we could argue that Mina is the real heroine of the original, helping Van Helsing ultimately to destroy Dracula. But it is also important that as a young, somewhat brainless high school cheerleader of the 1990s, she represents a generation seen to be at risk, because of their sexual activity, their anomie, and the use of drugs. The constant themes of Buffy seem to be the seductiveness of, at first, the sexually attractive vampires, and evil; as well as—in later episodes—the addictiveness of magical power. Thus the original plot, seemingly old-fashioned at the end of the twentieth century and perhaps alien to the United States, is fully domesticated in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The process has been long and complicated, but who could be more American than a teenaged cheerleader?



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The impulse to tell a story of a young, not necessarily special, girl with the gift of vampire slaying is also worth considering. A feminist reading of the original novel might be one source for the Buffy version, but there is also a tenuous connection, perhaps, to films such as Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (Kakushi Tori no San Akunin, 1958) where a willful young princess and her advisor must brave many dangers to get her to safety. This story was reused by Lucas in Star Wars, and for his version he revived the tough-talking heroine of the 1940s comedies, but incarnated her in a barely adult body. We could see Buffy as a permutation on a permutation, a creative riff on a Kurosawa representation of a female heroine.11

Remaking Kurosawa/On Translation The films that I aim to discuss in this book are part of a similar process as I have described for Dracula: they began as translations, first in subtitled or dubbed versions that may have been edited for foreign consumption as well; were then remade, which could be seen to be a form of translation from Japanese to Western idioms; and finally, have served as a sort of fount for new stories. To use terms familiar from literary and film criticism, we can say that we are looking at some very basic stories—a woman is raped and her husband killed by a bandit (Rashomon); a village is besieged by bandits and rescued by hired warriors (Seven Samurai); a lone stranger enters a feuding town and ends a local conflict (Yojimbo); and an orphaned princess needs to be got to safety across enemy territory (Hidden Fortress). Then we can think about their plots—the way in which the elements of the stories have been organized—and finally the narrative techniques used by Kurosawa to tell the story, which have first been translated, then more or less faithfully remade, and finally expropriated, becoming permutations of the originals. This process is fascinating in and of itself, a sort of domestication of things Japanese we might say. To take such a line relies on a definition of stories as 1) basic structures that are made intelligible through being 2) plotted (e.g., how they are organized in a sequence) and that are related through 3) narratives, that is, through an establishment of point of view, or a number of points of view, using various techniques of storytelling and visual representation such as flashbacks, editing, and even flash-forwards.12 It could also be argued that there was nothing inherently Japanese about the original stories and we would then get lost in an argument about origins or in a discussion—again—of Kurosawa’s identity.



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Conversely it could also be argued that the initial impulse to translate, based on a sense of understanding the original, on its apparent plausibility, makes domestication possible. In the world of film I have noted that the sense of confidence that some directors have in remaking or translating has to do with the medium itself: that it is visual and so is assumed to be easier to read or understand. To make sense of this process, it is necessary to think about what translation involves. The “translation” of a foreign film occurs in different ways. First, we can consider the simplest and most frequent act of translation: the act of dubbing or subtitling, although even these techniques might well require reediting for length, and/or censoring. In some societies, for example, sex scenes might be cut, declarations of love toned down in the subtitles, political opinions edited out, and so on. When we see a foreign film with subtitles, we are already seeing another version of the film, not merely just another copy in a different language. This copy retains much of the original, I argue, following, again, Benjamin (1973a), among others, who note that there are two different ways of translating: the text that is a faithful, word-for-word translation, and the text that aims for capturing something of the original and rendering it comprehensible in another language. It could be said that any translation is of the second sort, for the perfectly translated, word-for-word text is an impossible ideal: some words and concepts will just not translate, calling for the negotiation of meanings (cf. Eco 2003). In film, subtitling is often assumed to be more or less faithful, but anyone fluent in two languages can give examples of how subtitles can be incorrect: sometimes accidently because it is a poor translation; and sometimes purposely as a form of censorship. Despite these problems, films do get subtitled and appreciated, apparently for what they are about. A large part of this is because, as I have noted, film is a visual medium. It is possible sometimes to work out a plot without hearing the dialogue in film. Audiences do this by deciphering the images, assuming that films are constructed according to a “simple” grammar of sight as well as of sound. So a second reason that films travel cross-culturally is that they are seen to be fundamentally translatable as visual texts, that human beings share a way of seeing. This notion might well speak to Benjamin’s point about translatability being a quality that some texts have, and that this points to a kinship of languages—not an actual etymological kinship, but to a kinship of meaning and intent. Recall here the example I gave in the prologue of perceived cultural similarity. Audiences imagine that they will understand what they see, because they assume



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a human affinity with the world depicted in the film (MacDougall 1998). They take for granted that the experience of being in the world is somehow shared. Such assumptions are necessary for the construction of social reality, a point to which I will return later. Any film that is perceived to be truly foreign, as in the case of Rashomon for non-Japanese audiences, remains incomprehensible only for so long as audiences do not worry away at it, asking: “Now what was that about?” A simple check of IMDB boards demonstrates that this sort of discussion goes on for almost any film we can think of. Meaning may be perceived as both elusive and yet somehow possible to pin down if analyzed in enough detail. It is through these sorts of analyses—representative of the desire to understand, to make sense of what is seen, to forge meaning out of chaos—that imaginative connections are created, culminating in the building of shared meaning. The making of connections becomes a desire line that results in a conceptual bridge where the new is born. Although it could be argued that even the meaning acquired through seeing is not so easily shared cross-culturally, it could also be said that some texts are translatable because they speak to the human condition, both in a diachronic and synchronic way. Some stories are so powerful an evocation of the human condition that they become embedded in folklore and/or the high literature of societies, thus becoming part of the knowledge that is taught to children, forming a template for understanding the world. These are stories that get retold across generations and borders, for they are seen to merit retelling even if in the same language; this is a third type of “translation” to place alongside word-for-word and negotiated translations. These sorts of retellings are translations because they are attempting to work within new modalities of technology, or within historical moments that allow for the original to be interpreted once again and, perhaps, in a different way. All retold stories are permutations. However hard one tries simply to preserve old tales, in telling them again, inevitably they become new, despite the presumed connection with what has gone before and with the Other. I have noted that it is also possible for visual knowledge to be a source of misunderstanding. However filmmakers look at others’ movies in a more complex way than audiences. They are interested not only in how the story is represented, but in the techniques through which the story is told. These techniques include narrative methods that rely on the visual choices made by a director (what to represent or include in the film), how the technology of the business was used, as well as the



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editing process that pulls the final version together. Technology to a filmmaker also means the ways in which a director chooses to tell the story and represent the world—how is the rain made visible (rain is very hard to film it seems); how are light and shadow used; how does music punctuate the story; how is the camera moving; how many cameras have been used; from what angles were the shots taken; and at what speed? These are just a few of the questions that most audience members might not ask, but that a filmmaker will. This level of technique is an important aspect of what is seen to constitute a great film by a great filmmaker; the story is one thing, the mise-en-scène is another altogether. The idea of replicating or attempting to reproduce a certain type of atmosphere through the borrowing of technique is another way in which filmmakers refer to each other, becoming yet another way of making a film permutation as seen in the visual homage or the intertextual reference. Kurosawa’s impact at this level of filmmaking, as we shall see, has been tremendous. Any discussion of one filmmaker’s influence on another has to begin with a stated point of comparison. For the purposes of this book, that point must be the man himself as well as some important aspects of his historical and cultural contexts. This is not to say that I think there is only one way to read or understand the work of Akira Kurosawa. If that were the case, audiences and film scholars would not find his work so riveting. Yet to trace the process of translation and of later permutations, it is necessary to establish a starting point. Or as Simmel (1997) would have it, to separate what we mean to connect. Thus, my readings of the films from chapter four onward are meant to be jumping off points, not incontestable readings, for the discussions of the translations, remakes, and permutations that follow.



Setting the Scene




Portrait of an Artist as Filmmaker There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself. —Kurosawa 1983:189

Only the briefest outline of Kurosawa’s life needs to be given here. His own book, Something like an Autobiography (1982), offers an excellent overview of his “young” life and Galbraith’s massive The Emperor and the Wolf (2001) fills in many gaps; for summaries of all his films and excellent analyses of his work, Richie’s work is also important (1987, 1996). His daughter Kurosawa Kazuko (2004a, 2004b) has recently offered two memoirs of life with her father as well. There is a large body of Western scholarship on Kurosawa and films, and I will refer to many of these authors in the chapters that follow. There is a growing body of literature in Japanese as well, which situates Kurosawa more carefully within the Japanese studio system and explores his place in Japanese film history.1 Moreover, in my discussion of the films, I will refer, when necessary, to events in his life. What I would like to stress here is how, as a product of early twentieth century Japan, Kurosawa was in many ways a typical urban man. Much is made of the fact that Kurosawa was of warrior stock, and thus very Japanese, but even the descendants—or especially the descendants of samurai—were exposed to the rapid incorporation of Japan into the global flow after 1868. The Tokyo student of the prewar era was very aware of the rest of the world, widely read in nonJapanese literature, might well be involved in leftist movements, and probably preferred jazz to traditional Japanese music, Western art to calligraphy, and watched both foreign and homemade films.2



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So while it is true that Kurosawa, born in 1910, was of samurai descent, like many men and women of his era (Taishô and early Shôwa), he was educated both in Japanese traditions and Western knowledge. That is, in contrast to the increasing tendency in the postwar era to deny sameness with the outside world, during this earlier period, Japan was wide open to the rest of the world. Its leaders were confident that Japan could learn, adopt, appropriate, copy, and import what it needed from outside and remain, in essence, Japanese. Not all Japanese were convinced of this, most notably the ethnologist Yanagita Kunio who thought that the “soul” of Japan was being lost by this orgy of Westernization. However, Kurosawa’s youth occurred at the tail end of this period when, along with the buoyant buying into foreign modernization, Japan had already imported the art of filmmaking. The first foreign films were shown in 1898 and the Japanese immediately used the new technology to record traditional theatre (cf. Anderson and Richie 1982). In fact, Kurosawa’s elder brother, famously, was a film narrator (benshi), a storyteller who interpreted the actions on the silent screen for both foreign and Japanese films. It is not strange, then, that while in his autobiography, Kurosawa describes what seems a typical Japanese childhood and education, he is also able to list, from the age of eight or so, the foreign films he remembers seeing (1982:73–74). He was about fifteen when he took up the study of Western art, hoping to be a painter. At the age of eighteen or nineteen, Kurosawa also joined the Proletarian Artists’ League and drifted toward a sort of radical socialism that later in his films appeared as a generalized humanism. Oshima (1992) refers to this episode in Kurosawa’s life as typical of his generation of filmmakers, and, prewar, the Japanese film industry was a haven for leftist thinkers. Kurosawa himself downplays this period of his life, saying it was part of being young, something like a fever, but he was serious enough in his dedication to the movement to almost die—ironically enough of a fever—in the proverbial artist’s garret. One remnant of this time, although never so referred to by Kurosawa himself, was his dedication to Dostoevsky, a writer whose books he twice filmed. He told the Bengali filmmaker Ray that he always returned to Dostoevsky as well as to other Russian novelists (Ray 2001:184). Richie blames the sentimentality that he thinks mars some of Kurosawa’s work on the Russian writer’s influence (private communication). It was of course Dostoevsky’s novels that formed the basis of Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic novel, and it is no coincidence, I believe, that Kurosawa’s



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films retain the quality of polyphony that Bakhtin attributes especially to the work of Dostoevsky. 3 After his brother’s suicide, Kurosawa drifted, or so he makes it sound, into the film industry, being assigned as an assistant film director to Yamamoto Kajirô at P.L.C. studios in 1935. This was in the midst of Japan’s deep economic depression (shared with the rest of the industrialized world) and well into the growing militarization of the Japanese government. Kurosawa went on from this apprenticeship to direct his first film, Sanshiro Sugata (Sugata Sanshiro, 1943) during the war. Too unfit to be drafted, Kurosawa looks back at this period in his life with some guilt: I offered no resistance to Japan’s militarism. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I did not have the courage to resist in any positive way and I only got by, ingratiating myself when necessary and otherwise evading censure. I am ashamed of this, but I must be honest about it. (1982:145)

Readers of the autobiography might well wonder if his grave illness at the end of his proletariat artist period and the suicide of his brother had not somehow knocked out his ability to resist actively. Students of his films might well reply that resistance to the status quo never disappeared from his work.4 Moreover, the militarization of Japan during the 1930s had crushed the rebelliousness out of many, but not all, of its progressive thinkers. The government’s increasing censorship of the film industry in Japan becomes interesting in this light— equivalent, perhaps, to the McCarthy era in the United States. Suddenly the liberal, often leftist, certainly bohemian world of Japan’s fledging new cinema was under threat and, in fear of imprisonment, or of not being able to make films, many filmmakers trod carefully. Despite his acknowledged feelings of guilt, Kurosawa himself was proud of not having made a typical war film at all during this time, directing only The Most Beautiful (Ichiban Utsukushiku, 1944) about the stoic women who work in an optics factory. 5 That the Allied Forces (1946–1952) also practiced censorship was less a surprise to Kurosawa than the more pleasant fact that, in contrast to the war era, his films were now censored by people who knew something about cinema.6 Postwar, Kurosawa appears to have had success after success, making many films that did well at the box office, beginning with No Regrets for our Youth (Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi, 1946) a film




Remaking Kurosawa

that examined the real life of a leftist student executed in 1944. This film, admired by the censors of the occupying U.S. forces, is one that Kurosawa himself criticizes because of the added censorship of, interestingly enough, the communist-dominated Scenario Review Committee within the studio.7 This meant, he noted, that the script was extensively rewritten, undermining his vision. Yet it is significant that Kurosawa’s first postwar film focused on a young student, Ozaki Hidemi, who, unlike Kurosawa himself, never ceased his resistance to the military state and was finally executed. It is as if Kurosawa wanted to consider the alternatives to the line of least resistance that he, and so many others, had chosen. It is also, perhaps, an attempt to inscribe his own narrative, to make his own difference—a statement both about who he was and about who he was not. Even this postwar antiwar film does not fit the expected model, for the true hero of Kurosawa’s story is the student’s lover who ends by rejecting urban life and returning to live with the peasant parents of her dead lover. Kurosawa’s desire always to find his own take on a story is an important point, for what had his life been so far but a rejection of others’ values? He rejected his father’s military aspirations to become a Western-style artist, he followed his brother’s radical politics only a short while before giving up, and then, after Heigo’s suicide, he followed him into the film world but with a difference. Whereas his brother had written narratives for already made films,8 and then had become famous as a storyteller in the silent cinema, Kurosawa went on to become the maker of his own films, the narrator of his own versions of stories. He was a faithful assistant director to Yamamoto, but he chose to make as his first solo film the story of the young judo student who is overconfident of his ability and has to learn the hard way. At the film’s end, Sugata goes onto survive a difficult trial that shows he has learned something of spiritual value, and, somehow, Kurosawa’s own statement about the relationship between his work and self seems very pertinent here. Brash, full of energy, hard drinking, with a keen artistic vision and a deep empathy for other people, Kurosawa was slowly maturing, learning to be himself. This new maturity, this self-confidence, was to become the foundation of the rest of his filmmaking, allowing Kurosawa to remain steadfast on the nature of his Japanese identity. Save for one tragic moment when he too attempted suicide in the 1970s, this streak of individualism, of a personal vision, gave Kurosawa the strength to withstand the rejection of his work at home.



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One Wonderful Sunday (Subarashiki Nichiyôbi, 1947) was next, the film being inspired by a DW. Griffith picture. However, it was with the discovery of Toshiro Mifune (Mifune Toshirô) and the making of Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi, 1948) that Kurosawa seems to have come more and more into his own. In fact, Galbraith echoes Richie in arguing that the director and actor partnership was key to Kurosawa’s success. In Mifune the director had found the prefect extension of himself, a man not afraid of emoting on camera. Kurosawa himself noted: Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding . . . The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I have even seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities. (1982:161)

Kurosawa and Mifune were to make sixteen films together, four of which I discuss in this book. Ironically, if Kurosawa’s success outside Japan made his native identity suspect, as Galbraith notes, Mifune was always seen as the “most Japanese of men” (2001:20) despite being born in Manchuria, of Japanese colonist parents, and never having set foot in Japan until he was twenty years of age. Mifune has become the embodiment of the iconoclastic samurai for Japanese and Western audiences alike, despite the qualities that made him atypical. He was, according to Richie (1991:56–69), a person who always wanted to do the right thing; to Kurosawa he was fast and emotive; and to foreigners such as, surprisingly, Charlton Heston, he was exceptionally charismatic (Galbraith 2001:293). None of these qualities is normally associated with stereotypic depictions of Japaneseness. If Mifune, once he had broken off his working relationship with Kurosawa (for reasons that remain unclear), continued to enjoy success in Japan through the 1970s until his death, Kurosawa, by contrast, came in for a much rougher time. Although his films were successful in the 1950s, some of them topping the box office, his growing reputation from 1951 with the international success of Rashomon opened the door to criticism at home: Why did foreigners seem to like him so much? Was there something wrong with his films? Despite winning various prizes both at home and abroad for his films, changes in the studio system meant that Kurosawa’s expensive directorial style




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was becoming harder and harder to sustain. He famously always shot with at least three cameras, to make editing easier, and filmed the story in sequence. Kurosawa’s films were amongst the first in Japan to go over budget and to take longer than expected to complete. As an artist, he expected no less—it took whatever it took to make a good film and the more famous he became, the more leeway he was allowed—as long, of course, as the films made money—and for a long time they did. In the 1960s, however, the film world was under attack in Japan, as elsewhere, by the cheaper dramas shown on television. Meanwhile the work of Kurosawa was becoming too erudite, perhaps, to warrant large audiences. The closure of Daiei Studios in 1971, one of the two studios with which he had always worked, left Kurosawa with only the great Toho studio to back his production company and Toho was a tough proposition in those days. After his neo-realistic Dodesukaden (1970) did poorly at the box office and was considered a flop as well (other films had been badly reviewed, but had done well in the past) Kurosawa’s Japanese career appeared to be at an end. The same was in fact true for many of his generation of directors. No one wanted to back his working habits and the political messages of his films now seemed outdated in a buoyant economy where the growing middle class preferred light comedies. Even if the man was famous outside Japan, it did not impress Japanese backers—let him go to his outside fans, it was said, and so Kurosawa did, ultimately finding not only admirers but also backers, first in the USSR, then later in George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. That is not to say that Toho did not, later, also contribute in part to the making of a new Kurosawa film, but never again was Kurosawa to be certain about the money for a project Kurosawa’s rejection in Japan had a terrible effect on him, plunging him into a depression. What was he if not Japanese? In many ways his life has been typical of many men of is era. Why tell him now that what he did was not Japanese enough? While these sorts of comments had been made occasionally of his films in the 1950s, such critiques had not kept audiences away or lost him the backing of the studios. Kurosawa’s own comment on this, in response to critics who said that foreigners only liked Rashomon because it was exotic, is prescient: “Why is it that Japanese people have no confidence in the worth of Japan? Why do they elevate everything foreign and denigrate everything Japanese?” (1982:187). As one of my students, Daisuke Murakami, once commented to me, in Japan



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there is a thin line between the glory of making it internationally as an artist who has transcended Japaneseness, without necessarily losing whatever Japaneseness means, and being seen as having succeeded because you have crossed the line into no longer being Japanese enough. Kurosawa had straddled this line from the moment Rashomon had done so well outside Japan. Now he was confronted by producers who used his foreign popularity as a way of refusing him money, claiming that he was more a Western filmmaker than a Japanese one. Even though all his new films continued to be screened and not do too badly in Japan, this accusation was to haunt his reputation until his death. Of course, there was a terrible irony in this as well. To some extent the Japanese critics who said that foreigners liked Kurosawa’s films because they were exotic had a point.9 It tended to be his warrior, jidai geki (historical dramas), which won praise and prizes abroad (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood). This became apparent when, after two spectacular U.S.-backed forays into historical samurai films, Kurosawa returned to what was for him an old theme first broached in his Record of a Living Being (Ikimono no kiroku, 1955): what did the nuclear age mean for the human race? Dreams (Yume, 1990) and Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no Kyôshikoku, 1991) deal with the topic in different ways: the former by looking, in one sequence, at a possible nuclear future—after a series of sequences that seem autobiographical or even of wish fulfillment. The latter film retains some of the fantasy-like quality of Dreams in which the old folktales told by a grandmother (Murase Sachiko) to her visiting grandchildren are combined with their adventures in a countryside that sometimes appears to revert to this older Japan. The heart of the story is the visit by a half-Japanese cousin (Richard Gere), who is so moved by the grandmother’s recounting of her experience of the Nagasaki bombing that he apologizes to her for the act. This shocked American critics, some of whom labeled the lyrical film as “un-American.” While, as Richie points out, there are other more substantial critiques to be made about this film (1996:224–226), this is a harsh reaction to Kurosawa’s attempts to reiterate a point he often made in his films: the victims of war are women and children—men find glory, perhaps, in battle, but the worst consequences fall on those left behind. For Richie, Kurosawa’s later films were much too straightforward, lacking irony and prone to sentimentality (1996:228), and this may well explain their lack of critical success. Yet, in light of his life,




Remaking Kurosawa

Kurosawa’s later films also seem a desperate attempt to return to the modern-era (gendai geki) films that he had enjoyed making in the 1950s, the sorts of films in which his foreign-backers and audiences seemed less interested. These films were perhaps an attempt to “come home” to Japanese audiences who had treated his 1980s films as somehow alien. I remember well the première of Ran in Tokyo in 1985. It was considered a film for foreigners, so much so that one theatre ran one subtitled version daily so that the foreigners in Japan could see it. I cannot think of any other Japanese film shown in Tokyo for which this has happened until Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2003) was screened. By the end of his life, then, we might argue that Kurosawa was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Coppola and Lucas were faithful backers for the expensive sort of samurai action films that seemed to glorify ancient Japan—an interesting view of a director whose work had always depicted the corruption inherent in the feudal system. Foreign critics and audiences, on the other hand, were not sure what to do with Kurosawa’s attempts to deal with modern Japanese experiences (neither perhaps were Japanese audiences). Galbraith quotes two interesting interviews with Kurosawa on this: I would never make a film especially for foreign audiences . . . If a work cannot have meaning for a Japanese audience, I—as a Japanese artist— am simply not interested. (2001:584)

and: As a very normal part of my education, I have studied not only the Japanese classics but also the Western classics and music . . . There is nothing unusual about this for a person of my generation. But there is some misunderstanding of my work in Japan, probably because contemporary Japanese have not studied their own cultural background to the extent I do for my films. . . . I can only say that I am very pleased that this seems to be appreciated outside Japan. (2001:584–585)

That last is a modest understatement, for much of his work was and still is cited as enormously influential by Western and other filmmakers.10 Japanese audiences were, on the other hand, forgetting the early great work of Kurosawa, wondering why foreigners always seemed to know about this man, who, to them, was not so very interesting and whose films were increasingly out of step with the reality of postwar Japan. Also, Japanese films that foreigners claimed to love and



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understand went against the growing national discourse that Japan was unique to the point of incomprehensibility.11 Ironically, of course, Japanese audiences often admire the films by directors directly influenced by Kurosawa: Leone, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, Singer, Tarantino, and Tykwer to name just a few. They also admire the stars who calqued their performances on Mifune in Kurosawa films—Clint Eastwood in the main, but also any number of rough, silent, somewhat crazy descendants: Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, and even Takeshi Kitano who acknowledged Kurosawa’s influence on his work in his acceptance speech for the Open Prize at Venice Film Festival in 2003. Since his death in 1998, Kurosawa’s place in the pantheon of Japanese filmmakers has been reassessed. But whereas many young Westerners have at least seen the Seven Samurai, albeit in a truncated version on Saturday afternoon television or late at night, most Japanese young people say to me, “Hmmm, I’ve heard of that film, but haven’t seen it.” Yet, in a sense, they do know that film, for, as I shall argue in the rest of this book, without being aware of it, they have been watching variations of it all their lives.

On a life in Translation As I have argued above, Kurosawa’s life and work could be seen as attempts on his part to distinguish his narrative from that of others. His father, his brother, the dominant ideology of the era, his mentor and, later, to continue to work independently with his own production company, remaining Japanese while always acknowledging his love of foreign film even in an era when fears of Japan being overwhelmed by the West were great.12 We also can see how he strove to remain true to his own concerns even when incorporated into the larger arena of international film. This global aspect of the industry was recently well described to me in a seminar discussion by a SOAS student who had worked in film production: Imagine that you are a successful Chinese filmmaker who has had a film hit it big outside China to great critical acclaim. You’re about to make another film—should you stay with your usual budget of about 3 million dollars, to make the sort of film that has always been successful for you at home, or do you look for more backing, think bigger, try to make a film that will have success abroad? The gamble could cost you success in both places, and losing money will not make it any easier to get the next film made.




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Kurosawa was among the first to be presented with this dilemma and, for a time, managed to make it on his own terms. His global success in an industry that had only reached global proportions for the U.S.A., leaving other thriving cinemas to be famous more locally, was not totally unique, but his auterial independence from that system was largely unparalleled. He was among the first of foreign directors to do what is now taken as commonplace: forced to look for backing outside Japan, he found money here, there and everywhere to continue to make his films. His film-making techniques made him a hero to other directors, but it was his independence that spoke to a whole new generation of up and coming Hollywood directors as well (cf. Biskind 1999). In many respects his life as a director could be the story of any director—being in touch with the national zeitgeist, falling out of favor because of failure at the box office, being accused of having lost his touch, the comeback: it is all the stuff of Hollywood legend. But the difference is that Kurosawa remained a non-Hollywood director whose story was played out on the international stage while he remained at home. Compare his case to that of the English filmmaker Michael Powell. At the same time that he was backing Kurosawa, Coppola tried to work his magic on the great but almost-forgotten director, bringing him to Zoetrope studios. Powell never made a film for Coppola, but Kurosawa, who insisted on staying in Japan, using his own crew and writing his own material, did manage to make a few more films. His success outside Japan cost him a local reputation, as it has other non-Hollywood directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ang Lee, Jackie Chan to name just a few, but Kurosawa fought against this. Even his autobiography seems to be a carefully orchestrated attempt to reassure the reader of his Japaneseness, right down to his description of his “traditional arranged marriage” when, as Galbraith notes and as Richie confirms, he and his future wife had already been lovers. Yet he also appears to have fought against stereotypes all his life. When his international reputation seemed to be defined only by his warrior films, he chose to end his career by making small Japanese films that reflected his dreams, hopes, and fears. He managed, I would argue, to remain true to himself—what that self might be, may well be better revealed by looking at his films. However, the understanding of the director’s life that might be attained by looking at his work is one of the things that can be lost in translation when a film is remade. This makes sense in if we consider remakes as a director’s attempt to inscribe his own difference



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on a known story. What remains even when translated are the larger concerns that Kurosawa shared not only with other Japanese of his generation, but with the rest of the world: the cost of war, moral and physical; the burden of guilt; the possibility of glory through just action; the loneliness of the hero; and the suffering of women. Some of these themes have translated with few problems, others have mutated, as we shall see. But the core, a concern with social justice, remains the singular vision of Akira Kurosawa and it is his humanistic vision that forms the bridge which allows his stories to be retold. The first work to be considered, Rashomon, is important because, as already noted, it was the film that brought Japan as a filmmaking nation, and Kurosawa as a masterful director, to the attention of the rest of the film world. It is also interesting because an examination of the process of remaking the film in Hollywood and elsewhere reveals the importance of local interpretations, historical contexts, and finally, the way in which an understanding of the story changes almost beyond recognition. In contrast to Seven Samurai, which I consider afterward, the “truth” at the core of the original is almost unbearable. The translations of Rashomon, then, are not the same sort of translations that we get for other Kurosawa films; for this reason, the film deserves careful analysis.







Rashomon: The Problem of Subjectivity And I suppose that is supposed to be true —Rashomon 19501

Introduction Based on two stories Rashômon (1987a) and Yabu no naka [In a Grove] (1987b) by Japan’s great short story writer, Akutagawa Ryûnosuke (1892–1927), the film Rashomon opens, famously, with two stunned men—a woodcutter (Shimura Takashi) and a Buddhist priest (Chiaki Minoru)—sitting under the Rashô gate during a great rainstorm. It is somewhere between the ninth and twelfth centuries in Kyoto, Japan, during a time of civil war, plagues, and disastrous natural events. The times are so bad, says one character, that “I heard that demons used to live in the castle here by the gate, but they all ran away, because what men do now horrified them so” (Richie 1987:79). However, these two men are in a state of shock for entirely different reasons: they have just testified in a trial and the events of the trial are “beyond understanding.” A commoner (Ueda Kichijiro) joins them and asks them to tell their story. Over the course of an hour or so they do so, beginning with the woodcutter who relates what he saw three days before in the forest. The scene changes to a bright sunny day, we follow the woodcutter as the camera moves through the forest in a film sequence that is still analyzed by theorists in terms of its technical and visual brilliance. He finds first a woman’s hat and veil, then a man’s hat, then a piece of rope, an amulet case, and finally, the corpse of a samurai named



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Takehiro (Mori Masayuki). These “clues” form the main facts of the story. A modern viewer might, perhaps, immediately wonder what the CSI crew2 could do with so many objects—but this film, although it is about a crime, is also about human passion and will never give us the clear answers that Grisham and his modern team reach each week in their always successful search for truth. In fact, the point that both Ginzberg (1990) and Eco (1992) make about reading clues is pertinent here: Sherlock Holmes-like reading of clues can tell us a very neat story, but it may well be entirely the wrong story. 3 In addition to the “hard facts” of the hats, the rope, the amulet, and the body, there is also one part of the story that appears immutable. When we hear the first full tale of the events, as told by the captured bandit, Tajômaru (Toshiro Mifune), we are shown how the samurai is tricked by him, ends up by being tied to a tree, then has to watch as the bandit rapes his wife, Masago (Kyô Machiko), and finally he is freed to fight to death with the bandit because the wife insists that one of them must die. We will hear the story three more times and each time the first part—tricking the samurai, raping the wife—is taken as a given. It is only the last part of the story that changes with each of its recitations. In the wife’s version, she frees her husband and begs him to kill her with a dagger she offers him. When he does nothing but look at her with hatred, she “loses her senses” and awakes to find him dead. Perhaps she has killed him. She tries to kill herself, fails, and ends up in a temple before being found and arrested. She asks, “What could a poor helpless woman like me do?” (Richie 1987:68). The husband, through a medium, tells his version: the wife urged the bandit to kill him because she could not run off with him as long as her husband lived. The bandit refuses, but offers to kill her for being so duplicitous; she runs away and he runs after her. Tajômaru eventually returns, not having caught the woman, cuts the man free and leaves him. The samurai, alone, kills himself with a dagger. The woodcutter finally admits that he has called these stories lies because he saw it all: “There wasn’t any dagger there—he was killed by a sword” (Richie 1987:77). The story he tells is closer to the bandit’s version than anyone else’s, save that he describes a fight between two men who do not really want to kill each other—but who are goaded into action by the shrill taunting of the woman. Our belief in this tale is undercut by the commoner who points out that the woman’s dagger was never found by the police. Did the woodcutter steal it? His honesty undermined, we are given no sense as to what is the truth of the



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story. At this point, the priest, all faith and hope in humankind lost by having been a witness to all of this, has his faith restored when the three men discover a baby and the woodcutter offers to care for it. The film narrative is complex: the initial story is told by the woodcutter, but as Richie (1996) points out, we don’t know whether it is the priest or the woodcutter who recounts the police officer’s, Tajômaru’s, the woman’s, or the samurai’s stories. Yet by the mere fact of presenting the stories as if told by each individual character, we have a very clear example of heterglossia. The stories are told by people who represent a wide spectrum of medieval Japanese society, the samurai class (even if of a low level)4 —both male and female; the petty official; the priest who, we assume, is learned; the woodcutter, who by his occupation is very much on the margins of what was then a caste-like society; the commoner, representing the downtrodden urban man; and the bandit, who is certainly an outcaste. His rape of the woman is not only a terrible sexual transgression, but is doubly polluting by virtue of his very position outside of Japanese society. There is no way, as the bandit implies that he would have done, that he could have raped the woman and then released her and her husband to resume their lives thereafter. The disgrace, as the woman says in his version of the story, would have been immeasurable. 5 Thus, it is not only the polyphony of the text that reminds us of Dostoevsky, but also this attempt to represent something of the diversity of medieval (and postwar) Japanese society. In many tiny ways the chasm between classes is made clear: the world is full of poverty, disease, and disaster, we are constantly told, but the samurai couple travel through a lovely forest as if without a care in the world. Prince has noted how Kurosawa shared with Dostoevsky a concern with representing all levels of society: In the work of both men, narrative becomes a vehicle of philosophical exploration; incident and action are charged with metaphysical and spiritual significance . . . Dostoevsky’s perception of a society splintered by internal discord finds an analogue in the historical circumstances informing Kurosawa’s cinema, the encounter of East and West and the cataclysm of war, which forever altered the social coordinates . . . He does not dramatize a “timeless” Japan, an unchanging national essence, but rather the traumas of historical transition. Both artists share an apocalyptic sensibility. What Michael Holquist has observed about Dostoevsky is true of Kurosawa as well. He suggests that Dostoevsky’s work is structured by, and is especially sensitive to, the historical dilemmas of national identity. (1991:136)




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Both Goodwin (1994) and Prince argue that Kurosawa explored these issues very much through the polyphony of his cinematic text and, as I have tried to show, this is especially true of Rashomon where the camera and the various narratives tell us four different stories, leaving the solution to each of us as viewers in our dialogic relationship with the film. For Goodwin, “Kurosawa’s affiliation with these traits of Dostoevsky of extremism, psychological doubling, and paradox did not become explicit in his cinema until after the war” (1994:60). I would like to build on these film theorists’ discussion of Kurosawa and Rashomon in an attempt to establish the culture of the film and to consider a theme that Kurosawa certainly shared with Dostoevsky, a theme on which I have already quoted him, namely, guilt. Yoshimoto has an important observation to make of Rashomon in his analysis of the film. He tells us that Kurosawa said that he wanted to show a large crowd at the film’s opening. According to his unrealized plan, there is a black market in front of the Rashomon; the rain starts to fall, and as it becomes a downpour, the crowd run away in all directions; the three characters take shelter under the gate and start telling stories about the rape and murder incident. This unrealized version of the film would have made much more explicit the connection between the film’s narrative and the contemporary situation of Japan under the Occupation. In the existing version of the film, the fact of the Occupation is most clearly registered in the absence of the magistrate in the courtyard scenes . . . Consistent with the overall design of the film, the censoring eyes of the Occupation are formally inscribed on the film’s textual surface as structural absence. (2000:189)

The structure of Rashomon is polyphonic in all senses of Bakhtin’s term, but its implied dialogic Other—the court official—never speaks, never pronounces. When the camera shows us the various narrators in court, it is from the point of view of this official, apparently putting the audience in his shoes. He and, by implication, we the audience are to pass judgment, but within the context of the film we never do—we do not, we cannot, speak. One possible interpretation of this would be to say that each of us must make our own decision on the meaning of the film’s events. But how are we to judge? Who are we to judge? What other access to the events could we have that might lead us to the truth? On the other hand, what if the silent judge were someone else entirely who was capable of passing judgment, a saintly other, or God himself, as described in the Grand Inquisitor story in Dostoevsky’s



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Brothers Karamazov (1970)? That is, not the old Jesuit who encounters Christ come to earth again, but one of the heavenly representatives who Ivan tells us were often brought on stage to pass judgment in medieval dramas. That may well be too Christian an analogy for Kurosawa’s work—or is it? Given Kurosawa’s reading and rereading of Russian writers, the analogy may not be so far fetched. Moreover Japanese folktales are full of compassionate bodhisattvas who come to visit this world in order to help the deserving and/or punish the wicked, and this theme resurfaces, I will argue, again in Yojimbo. There is another reason that makes me raise the question of the judge, and that is to consider what was originally a Buddhist concept: the Japanese term seken. Seken is currently used to describe a Japanese sense of the panoptic society, the judging others who pronounce on our behavior. As members of society we are part of seken as well as being at the mercy of it. When Richie describes the stories each of the characters relates as caught up in the reality that they themselves have made, he precedes this by an indirect reference to seken, “. . . this limitation of spirit, this tacit agreement (social in its scope) that one is and cannot become, is one feudalistic precept which plagues the country to this day” (italics in original, 1996:76). Telling our stories, in the face of others’ judgment, becomes impossible if we are too concerned with our sekenguchi (our reputation). Our individual narratives become not the truth, but an egotistical performance. This may appear like an argument for an understanding of the person’s role in Japanese society as one that is relativistic, or that, in Benedict’s (1967) terms, the Japanese act in accordance with established social norms rather than letting themselves be guided by internal principles. But this is not what happens in the film. The stories each of the characters tells may well be interpretative acts premised on their sense of being judged by seken, but the events occurred in the forest. This is the place where, as Kurosawa himself argues, people go astray “in the thicket of their hearts” (1982:182), the place where people go astray because they are not constrained by seken. The tension in the film is between the internal passions that motivated the rape and murder and the stories we are told by each of the characters who tell us that they are responsible for Takehiro’s death. This is the astonishing thing about the film, not necessarily its structure,6 but the fact that when brought in for judgment, the bandit, wife, and husband do not say that they are innocent. They “lie” (according to the watching woodcutter and priest) and all say they are responsible for the death. But why are the narrating onlookers so




Remaking Kurosawa

sure that everyone has lied? Is it because their stories do not cohere into a single version that reveals a single truth? This is the puzzle that everyone has tried to solve for Rashomon. However, as I have noted above, we should be asking another question entirely: who is this judge who manages to get everyone to reveal what they feel? The elements of their stories may not be empirically true, but their experience of these events is and this is shocking—from whence comes this powerful sense of guilt? More to the point, who is it that has the power to see so deeply into the hearts of human beings and is able to elicit such frank, if unflattering, narratives? In Christianity, of course, it is God. In Buddhist tradition, if not in its theology, it is the compassionate Buddha. If there is common ground between the two religious traditions, it is through the concept of compassion. This is alluded to by the priest who says of the woman “I found her very pitiful. I felt great compassion for her” (Richie 1987:63). The priest also ends by forgiving the woodcutter when, selflessly, the man offers to care for the abandoned baby. Exposed to the seken, or gaze, of this priestly other, the woodcutter redeems himself. A far too sentimental and somewhat problematic ending for some critics, but a highly appropriate one given the problem of our dark hearts—how is it that we humans ever do anything good? Only through the forgiving gaze of others is redemption possible. If Yoshimoto is correct in calling the court the eyes of the Occupation, Kurosawa appears to be making a plea: “Yes we are all guilty, but do not judge us too harshly, forgive us.” He also, through the roles of the priest and woodcutter, appears to be saying, that ultimately we will be judged on our future actions and we will be forgiven or not by god rather than a secular court. A Dostoevskian point if ever there was one. Since Kurosawa’s imagined audience was purely Japanese, it is fair to assume that there is a dark joke being made about guilt and innocence in Rashomon. At the moment in time in which the film was made and released, the war crime trials were being held by the Occupation Government and most ordinary Japanese were claiming innocence—the war and its atrocities were seen as the fault of the country’s leaders, while the ordeals of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were seen to have made the Japanese into victims (cf. Bix 2001). In contrast to the zeitgeist of that era, the irony of Rashomon is that everyone claims to be guilty. It is an interesting point that many critics of the film seem to miss entirely. Part of the reason for this is that the complexity of issues to do with the concept of guilt and the semantic usage of words to convey this in Japanese are both clouded by current



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Japanese nihonjinron theories that posit Japanese difference from the West. That is, Benedict’s (1967) argument that Japanese ethical behavior is based on their perception of external sanctions rather than internalized notions of right and wrong is taken to be essentially true. An entire book could be written on this issue. For my purposes here, however, I will just point out that the usage of the world “guilty” in English is historically complex and, we might argue, also currently debased—any little thing makes us “feel guilty.” The Japanese preserve a conceptual connection that is interesting: tsumi, the word for legal guilt, is also the word for sin. This word is not used lightly. However, the word for shame, hazugashi, is used frequently, even to indicate something like shyness. When people feel that they have not fulfilled their responsibilities and are “guilty” they tend to use warui or bad—as in “I have been bad about that.” The word can be also used to mean feeling ill and conveys this sense as well—there is, of course, analogous usage of the term “sick” in British English to indicate how guilty one might be feeling. The issue of whether these feelings come from some sort of internal moral sense or some external pressure is another kettle of fish altogether. Benedict (1967) based her argument on an understanding of what was, in the 1940s, the dominant religion of Japan, State Shinto, which has no doctrines about sin but many concepts of pollution. In doing this she ignored twelve centuries of Buddhist tradition in Japan—Buddhism has strong doctrines on sin, responsibility, and retribution (rebirth, time spent in hell, cf. Rambelli 2002) that foreigners tend to gloss as karma without really understanding this theological concept (Sharf 1995). In Rashomon, then, it is significant that Kurosawa chooses to have a Buddhist, not a Shinto, priest as one of its main characters. In light of my earlier argument, we could say that Kurosawa was interested in Dostoevsky because the work of the Russian made sense even within a Japanese context, the Russian novels translated for him. To use Benjamin’s (1973) terms, their “intentionality” was unproblematic. Kurosawa’s interest in the work of Dostoevsky, then, is not necessarily idiosyncratic. In fact, this interest parallels his early leftist involvement. As Scalapino (1967) notes, Marxism/socialism was, for many Japanese, tied up with either an interest in Christianity or pacifist Buddhism movements—to be involved with the left was to admit that one had to be socially responsible not just for one’s own actions, but in relation to others. Prince (1991) makes much of how Kurosawa shares the concept of responsibility with Dostoevsky, but




Remaking Kurosawa

he appears to miss the religious dimension in Kurosawa’s point of view. This is striking in light of how often a sort of Westernized version of Buddhism is used by Prince (and others) to explain Kurosawa’s films and nowhere is this more apparent than in the various attempts to make sense of the story in Rashomon. I think it is fair to say that it was through his experience of the war and the Occupation, as well as of his earlier experience of living in a slum, that Kurosawa’s relationship to the Russian writer became stronger and more apparent in his work. His early films were more “traditionally” Japanese and if they challenged the status quo, they did so through their focus on unlikely heroes (the women in The Most Beautiful) or by adding a touch of humor to an old Kabuki classic (The Men who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail). If Kurosawa was raising questions about Japanese national identity, he was doing it very much within the framework of traditional Japanese arts or stereotypes (judo, the strong, suffering woman, or Kabuki and Noh). Yoshimoto argues that many foreign critics miss the point in these films; they become enchanted by the representation of Japan and do not “get” Kurosawa’s deconstruction of the current ideology (2000:113). I would push the point further—so ingrained is the image of Japan as a “shame” not “guilt” culture, that even when guilt as a theme comes right up and hits the viewer in the face, as it were, it gets ignored. Yet this is the dark heart of Rashomon and an understanding of this is essential in order to grapple with the success or failure of the film’s remakes: The Outrage (Ritt 1964), The Iron Maze (Yoshida 1991) and Misty (Misuti, Saegusa 1997). Interestingly, as I will argue, it is some of the permutations on Rashomon, most particularly Reversal of Fortune (Schroeder 1990) that best address this theme.

“. . . If Men Do Not Tell the Truth, Do Not Trust One Another, Then the Earth Becomes a Kind of Hell”7 As I have argued above, in their concern with the striking cinematography and complex narrative structure of the film, many viewers miss the central paradox at the heart of the story. From the very opening of the film we are presented with characters who do not fit their Japanese stereotypes: the priest has lost his faith; the humble woodcutter is probably a thief; the commoner definitely is; the bold bandit is cowardly; the samurai, bristling with weapons, is



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easily subdued; and the beautiful wife is not silent (a great virtue for Japanese women) and she is possibly not virtuous either. Moreover, a case brought before the court has failed to find the truth. Everyone has lied. But what is the nature of these lies? Each of the defendants says that they did it. Only Richie, in this discussion of the film, notes the important fact that everyone is telling the truth—as far as their subjective view of the events is honest, they each believe they have killed. The shock for the priest and the woodcutter is that everyone thinks they did it. The possibility that they are all lying is repeatedly raised by the commoner, who gets the woodcutter to admit that he saw all the events and then hints that it could have been the woodcutter who murdered the husband. If, as Richie playfully argues, this is true, what does this mean? Why do the three main characters lie and say “I did it”? Would it not be more obvious to say, as does the woodcutter, a possible suspect, “I didn’t do it”? Why does the priest say that “If men do not tell the truth . . . then earth becomes a kind of hell”? Men, and woman, have told their version of the truth, so is earth not a kind of hell? There is no way to answer these questions without resorting to the concept of the “eyes of the Occupation” and to recall, as Yoshimoto (2001) tells us, that Kurosawa’s deconstruction and questioning of national identity are often misunderstood. What if Kurosawa is asking: “What would the world be like if we all admitted our weaknesses and our guilt?” If his imagined audience was always Japanese (European audiences not being a target for him at this point in time), then the silent Other—not sitting in the judge’s place, but beside the judge—is an Other who has been silent about their own deeds. In addition, this guilt is deeply embedded within this role of silent observer—by not standing up to the growing fascism at home, all Japanese, even Kurosawa himself as he admits in his autobiography, and should feel responsible. All the earth, or at least Japan, is hell, because everyone, through their silence in the past and in the present, is lying. No one is more guilty of this than the woodcutter, our everyman, who saw everything and not once did he try to help. By making us watch this last set of events four different times, Kurosawa makes us, the audience, complicit through our silent viewing—like the woodcutter we are reduced to voyeurs and liars. No wonder, then, that the films wowed postwar European critics and audiences. Who else had shared the experience of keeping silent rather than protesting while the world around them became, literally,




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Perhaps you do not know what it is like to be in a world where history changes all the time, where to have an idea or a side one day right and the next day wrong [sic], where every choice, every thought, is a gamble that maybe you win or maybe lose, where what is patriotic now is treachery then. (2000:72–73)

In 1950 and 1951 both Japan and Europe had been through such an era (and parts of Europe were continuing to suffer under such regimes); it was a shared experience. In contrast, in the United States where history was short and Americans were respectful of other people’s deep roots, critics debated the merits of the wonderful, daring cinematography, the mastery of Kurosawa’s editing, his technique, the use of music, and, more often than not, came down on the side of masterpiece despite their confusion about the Japanese story. In Britain, a nation where history was not perceived as constantly changing, the London Times review was tough: “There are some impressive moments in Rashomon—and, obscure though the plot often is, it has pattern and intelligence—and one or two lovely shots of forest scenery, but the general impression is one of confusion and noise” (reprinted in Richie 1987:135). Rare, as Richie notes, was the critic who saw beyond a sort of orientalist surprise at the mastery of the filmmaking to the film’s more universalistic message (1996:80). The story is not about Oriental relativism or pragmatism versus an Anglo-Saxon inclination toward the truth, justice, or a single reality. It is about the conflicting desires of the human condition: we want a single reality, while holding fast to our subjective interpretations. We want to believe in a forgiving judge while dreading the harsh gaze of society (seken); we want to give into our passions while fearing the consequences. We all feel guilty about the things we should have done, but have not. The year 1951 was the moment for audiences, Japanese and European, to silently admit this through Rashomon and to wonder: what if we told the truth? Would the world be able to bear hearing the truth?8 The “heart of darkness” if we read Conrad (1994) closely, is not the African jungle, but the human condition and it is only by lying about this that “civilization” is created and maintained. The woodcutter’s and priest’s shock at the start of the film is not because everyone has lied, it is because they have told the truth and revealed the



hell? As a young character in Bradbury’s novel Dr Criminale argues to its British narrator:

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lies that are necessary in order to constitute a shared reality. In a Buddhist, if not Christian sense, life is an illusion that we can only transcend by understanding this fact. If there is a Christian dimension to Kurosawa’s story, it is that, unlike the original short stories on which the film is based, he offers us—through the woodcutter—the possibility of redemption through future meritorious acts. I am not arguing here that Kurosawa was a closet Christian, but that he shared/shares with all writers and filmmakers the impulse toward the confessional mode of expression. Rashomon not only reveals this desire on Kurosawa’s part, but also extends it to all of us. While the single author’s voice may well get lost in the polyphony of the text, Rashomon explores the impulse to reveal something of ourselves to others through telling of our stories. We inevitably inscribe our differences even when using the exact same building blocks of narrative—the story we tell has to be our story. It is for this reason that the sociological term, the rashomon effect, was coined to describe the conflicting and subjective nature of witness statements;9 I shall return to this in later chapters. I have argued for an understanding of Rashomon that is very much grounded in the context of 1950s postwar Japan and have noted that Europeans who had suffered similar postwar social and cultural shifts seem to have understood the film the best. The film and its story have endured, but my historicized reading of the film should not be understood to be what all audiences have gone on to make of it. So what has happened when this story became someone else’s tale to tell? What shifts occurred when Rashomon travelled in time and across societies?




Source: Kurosawa 1950. Daiei Co. Courtesy of The Criterion Collection

Figure 2 Masago Confronts Tajômaru, Misty Source: Saegusa 1996. Courtesy of Pony Canyon Inc. Japan



Figure 1 Masago Confronts Tajômaru, Rashomon

Remaking Rashomon: From Subjectivity to “the” Truth The truth for some reason is always hidden from view. —Bava 19691

Introduction In order to discuss the remakes of Rashomon, both defining and discussing film remakes becomes necessary. While I have argued for a remake being a sort of translation, it must also be asked: “What does it mean to remake a film as opposed to translating it?” Telling stories again appears to be a way of opening up the many layers of meaning we might find embedded in any given tale. An insightful edited book on filmic remakes, Play It Again, Sam (1998), allows every contributor to come up with a different explanation for this process. In their introduction, Horton and McDougal note the pleasure in “repetition with a difference” (1998:6). Eberwein cites Stuart Hall on identity production, and argues that remakes are implicated in the “positions of enunciation” from which we speak (1998:16); while Kolker notes the pleasure in allusion, representing a director’s love of film (1998:35). For Brashinsky the remake should be praised for skipping “the act of meta-aesthetic transition in which, according to the widely accepted modernist prejudice, originality begins” (1998:163). Later, Horton cites Branigan on narrative, reminding us that all narrative builds on the structures of stories already in existence (1998:173). Aufderheide sees the non-Hollywood remake as a strategy to “express both resistance to and fascination with dominant



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cinema (and culture)” (1998:191). On Dracula, Konigsberg tells us that each repeat does more than repeat, it takes the story one step further (1998:250); while Somigli takes us firmly into anthropological territory by citing Lévi-Strauss on myth, reminding us that myth should be understood not in terms of which version is original, but in terms of what is felt or believed (1998:287). Given that the phenomenon of remaking is nearly overdetermined by such a plethora of definitions, what do these diverse views share? The answer is an acceptance that narrative is something often reworked, but that the modernist stance on the importance of originality clouds the issue: in this case that films might well be art even if they are not “original.” Originality, as several of the writers cited above argue, depends on the vision of the person doing the remaking. Remakes are often failures artistically (but not necessarily economically), yet exceptions remain. Kolker obviously thinks Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear (1991) is a brilliant film. It is clear that audiences have different opinions on Dracula remakes: Was Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979) better than Murnau’s (1922)? And why was Coppola’s faithful adaptation of the novel a failure? Is it all in the eye of the beholder? The impulse to remake, rework, allude to, the building up of permutations results, sometimes, in the creation of something new as in the teenage heroine Buffy. Mimesis is not just about alterity and copying, but also about creativity (Taussig 1991). Filmmakers as artists bridge the gap between what is familiar, known, and understandable, and the new and not yet understood; the result is something both durable and fragile, meaningful and yet awaiting the attribution of meaning. This process is too often ignored in the cacophony of moaning about the loss of originality in the modern world. Despite its interest in the subject, no one in Play It Again, Sam (1998) tackles, in any deep way, this human propensity to tell the same stories over and over until they become something new. Only Gabbard (1998:96) attempts to speak to this, noting that if we think too much about it, there is a danger in reducing all narratives to a single narrative. But if we avoid such total deconstruction and stay at the level of function, perhaps we can posit some interesting possibilities. I have already noted how the biologist Dennett (2004), for example, has argued that it is the human ability to narrate that creates our sense of consciousness; it is our attempt to make experience cohere into something relatable to others that gives us the sense of being aware of ourselves. 2 I have noted also that for Bruner (1986:11), narratives are one way of knowing the world. So everyone tells stories,



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narratives, because if we did not, we could not understand our worlds and life would not make sense. Our lives would not make sense. But, as any anthropologist can point out, we learn to tell stories by hearing others’ stories. Our narratives are not absolutely original because we begin from the building blocks of other narratives. It is a process that I call parallel identity construction: we learn to make sense of what is happening or has happened to us because it is just like the story of—fill in the blank with a fairy tale, film, television program, novel, news item, or magazine article of your choice. We also learn to make sense of things in terms of what they are not like—narratives, while relying on the familiar, simultaneously inscribe difference as Wills (1998) so vehemently argues for foreign film remakes. I would push his argument further—in a parallel to the process of national identity construction—we all need a story to tell, but to avoid being just like the person or nation next door, there has to be difference as well. It is easy then, to analyze retellings in terms of making difference—and part of the sociology of globalization has come to focus on this, to look at how the local reinterprets the global. Global ideology does not triumph in any simple, straightforward, linear, or predictable way. However, and this is where film remakes are interesting, there is also an underlying assumption of sameness, of something shared, that makes the telling again possible—this could be called narrative plausibility.3 Parts or elements of a story are repeated because they mean something to us in the first place, they make sense in terms of a shared experience as in the example of Rashomon having added meaning for postwar European audiences. Thus, it is important in the case of Kurosawa and his remakes to not just to look at what has changed, but also at what seems to remain the same. As noted in chapter one, at the heart of this discussion is the debate on translation. In anthropology, post-structuralist theory raises the issue of the impossibility of understanding: by the time we have reworded in English, for example, a Japanese explanation of kinship terms—we seem to have lost something or perhaps created something fictitious (cf. Clifford and Marcus 1986). What we have not done, so this deconstructivist argument would have it, is actually to explain anything. Through interpretation and analysis we change the original, we get it wrong, we assert the dominance of our culture, our language. All such critiques have a point and plausibility about them—but they equally ignore the very empirical reality that human beings do manage to communicate. If we do not accept this possibility, we have to end by assuming, as Ricoeur put it: “that misunderstanding is a right,



Remaking Rashomon

Remaking Kurosawa

that translation is theoretically impossible and that bilinguals have to be schizophrenics” (2006:15). While clear communication remains an issue about which literary theorists argue (cf. Derrida 1985), it does seem to happen. Something like a shared social reality is created, even if we all experience it differently—if it were not shared, we would all exist in a state of autism: happy to play with blue pebbles but incapable of “reading” even the expression on others’ faces.4 Instead, most of us express ourselves through narratives that begin from the building blocks of the old, but we aim to inscribe the difference that constitute our selves by telling stories we assume will make sense to others. Kurosawa understood this well and the subjectivity of experience is at the core of what makes Rashomon a great film. So what happens when a film director attempts to remake a classic? Or attempts to allude to a classic, pay homage to it, satirize it, or parody it? These become acts of both interpretation and of making something new. There is a pleasure in recognizing the similarity and then acknowledging the new, that which is our own. The core of this process remains the possibility of translation. Not accurately so, but somehow truthfully so. The problem might appear to be in producing a faithful translation, which as I have already argued, is not the same thing as a word-for-word translation. For example, let us consider Japanese folk tales, which, as my son assured me when he was eleven, are not very interesting—they are all rather samey, they all seem to have ancient grandparents, who are poor and need to be helped. It is precisely when encountering “alien” stories that the reader might find the need to fall back on analyzing structures (Lévi-Strauss 1963), archetypes (Jung 1990), or similarities in plot (Propp 1968) in order to grasp what is at the core of different narratives. Once this is done, you may end, as did my son, by saying: “I see, it’s like the woman who wishes for more and more riches!” Yet one famous Japanese tale needs no such deep textual analysis: Little One Inch seems to exist in a variety of versions around the globe— Tom Thumb being one example. Not all stories are easy to translate then, but others seem to find their way around the world or are created in some parallel way (Cinderella as well as Tom Thumb being obvious examples). One manner in which this appears to be possible is to look at the similarities of human experience. Every human being has some memory of being small and having to be resourceful in the light of this, hence stories about tiny children. The meaning that is translatable then is



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not to be found simply in structure, or characters, or even plots, but in our innate understanding of each of these elements in terms of our own experience: they seem to be plausible. If we have not experienced such events directly, our experience as it is shaped by other narratives forms a social memory that allows for empathy. Young Western Europeans and North Americans have not personally experienced the Nazi era, but have been exposed to so many narratives on the theme told to them in so many forms that, perhaps, they understand the situation. 5 Retellings allow us to imagine all the ways in which we might live through diverse experiences, even when they seem to do little more than reassure us of our difference. Reiterations, then, create meanings and symbols that are widely recognized, although, paradoxically, analyzing them throws up a plethora of differences. Yet without the underlying sense of shared meaning, there could be no possible interaction with others; we would be back playing with blue pebbles. That this does not happen tells us something about the human desire to understand and share meanings.

Remaking Rashomon What is fascinating about the film Rashomon is that in its wake the term “rashomon” has entered the English language as a description of a certain type of plot as well as a description for subjectivity. If a story is told from more than one point of view and told mainly in flashback, then the film is labeled as rashomon-like or is seen to be using the “rashomon technique.” There is often, however, a great difference between the original film6 and its descendents: generally, the rashomon-like films or, in one case, television series, offer the audience a final version of the truth. Kurosawa, basing his film on Akutagawa Ryûnosuke’s stories, never offers us a final definitive “true” version of the events. This significant difference, I have argued, has much to do with the historical moment in which the film was made, as well as in Kurosawa’s personal interest in Dostoevsky’s work. Despite, or perhaps because of, the powerful European reception of Rashomon, it was in the United States that the first attempts to make a version of the film occurred. Initially, there was a play, Rashomon (1959), written by Michael Kanin and Fay Mitchell, who claimed to have gone back to the original Akutagawa stories. This became a television play directed by Sidney Lumet in 1960 (with Ricardo Montalban as the bandit)7 and was made into a film directed by Martin Ritt in 1964. The film, called The Outrage, acknowledges Kurosawa’s and



Remaking Rashomon

Remaking Kurosawa

Hashimoto Shinobu’s original screenplay—conceding that the play by the Kanins was actually close to being a “translation” of the film.8 However, like many remakes of Kurosawa films, the film places the action in the West, near the Mexican-American border. This is so frequent an event in the remakes of Kurosawa’s samurai films that it is worth considering to some extent here. When Kurosawa made a historical film, it often dealt with modern topics—as Richie notes about Rashomon, “he is holding up a mirror” (1996:76) to society—but in a manner that made the subject universal rather than, as it might be expected, Japan-specific. That is, by raising the subject within the context of the past, Kurosawa seems to be examining the way in which certain issues appear to persist throughout time. Is this the same when a filmmaker transposes a film’s action to the American West? I will ask this question, again, for Sergio Leone’s work, which, since he was Italian, merits a different answer. At the moment, the question is why does Hollywood take stories set in the Japanese past and transpose them to not just the U.S. West’s past, but to a past that takes place on its borders? One possible answer is that the liberties Kurosawa takes with Japan’s history (he was a very careful historian in many ways, but also acknowledged the anachronistic elements in his screenplays) allowed him to use the past as a sort of mythic resource. It is not just the place where certain Japanese events occurred, but also a sort of dream space—and dreams were very important to Kurosawa’s work—where all sorts of possibilities could be explored. In Rashomon, this dream space makes it possible for four versions of the truth to exist. The American West has much of this mythic quality about it—it often represents U.S. history and values as people wish they were rather than as they actually were (the negative representation of Native Americans in many pre-1970s films being a case in point). But if depictions of the West are, because of their “imbrication with the very idea of ‘America’ and ‘Americanness’ ” (Buscombe and Pearson 1998:3), history as people would have liked it to have been, the borderlines, the Hispanic space, is a far more fantastic place altogether. The filmmaker Robert Rodriguez has openly acknowledged this when discussing his own work in Mexico: “Anything goes there—it’s so cool” (in Hodkinson interview 2001). In the borderlands, the bad guys may be more evil because they are, clearly through their dress and accents, foreign, they can be also, in many films, just a little bit less frightening. They are far away, they are somewhat ridiculous, their villainy extends to actions not



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normally associated with the West’s villains, many of whom have, by an interesting process that can only occur in myths, been transformed into heroes. The Mexican villain is not quite white, but not a “primitive” Indian either—and if need be, he can be eloquent on the subject of his evil motives. This last becomes very important in the light of a play, then a film, based on Kurosawa’s Rashomon. While it could be argued that it is a Japanese aspect of the film that no one explains their psychological motivations to any great extent, it is probably best to accept Kurosawa’s own explanation that he wanted to return to the glory days of silent film when making Rashomon. The masterful visual style and powerful music are meant to make the audience aware of the characters’ feelings in the film, but do not translate to the stage. In theatre it is not easy to show a hot day, so the characters have to tell us it is a hot day. This verbosity in the play is carried over into a film that, ironically, also tries to duplicate the visual power of the original.9 The Outrage takes the Japanese story, set in the early medieval era and transports it to the late-nineteenth-century Mexican-American border. It turns the samurai couple into Southern gentry (Laurence Harvey and Claire Bloom) come to try and make a new life after the Civil War and converts the woodcutter into a prospector (Howard da Silva), the commoner into a con man (Edward G. Robinson), and the priest into a preacher (William Shatner). The bandit is played by Paul Newman, who might well have been able to reduplicate some of Mifune’s animalistic sensuality if he had not been saddled by the need to play a Mexican bandit. Newman’s performance is well worth comparing to Mifune’s. In the original film the bandit is almost naked as he lies sweltering in the heat of the summer, sheltering beneath a tree, when he first sees the couple. A puff of air blows away the woman’s veil, he sees her face, and wants her—nothing might have happened if not for that breeze he tells us. The audience sees Mifune’s reaction to the sight of the woman in a fairly long shot: sunlight falls through the trees onto him, looking, as he sometimes could, stunningly handsome. As Richie tells us in the Criterion introduction to the DVD version of Rashomon, Kurosawa is very clever here: as the couple move around and Mifune shifts to follow their passing, the hilt of his sword pops up, leaving us in no doubt about his desire. Moreover, the brute sexuality that Mifune manages to exude is important, for this makes it possible that a samurai woman might well be seduced by such an animal, giving into his embrace rather than being forced. It is not only Masago’s hand, then, dropping the dagger and reaching up to touch



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the bandit’s head that plants doubt in the audience’s mind about her version of the story, but also Mifune’s animal magnetism—he might well seduce any woman he encounters. Fans of Paul Newman would no doubt argue that he also possessed this sex appeal, but it is not apparent in this role. Dressed in various layers of Mexican “bandit’s” clothing (he looks like a poor Mariachi musician) with a huge hat, it is hard to see what there is about him that is seductive. That this is a problem with the role and not Paul Newman is made clear by the script resorting to having the conman describe him as a sort of brute force of nature who seduces women all the time. The question is, why make the bandit a foreigner? What was Martin Ritt trying to achieve with this switch from the original where, although an outcaste from society, the bandit is as Japanese as the couple? Is this an attempt, in the early 1960s, to try and say something about race in the United States? It seems telling that the couple are Southern gentry and the wife appears to fall into the category of the Southern belle who might secretly be tempted by a man who is not white. But if this is a weak, if well-meaning liberal, attempt to speak to some cross-racial attraction, The Outrage pulls back from this possibility by introducing the issue of class as well as ethnicity. Not class/caste in the sense in which it occurs in the original where we have a wide range of class positions presented—and perhaps this is the problem, for by the 1960s Americans were already seeing themselves as essentially classless, so that a poor woodcutter becomes a prospector who might well someday strike it rich; and an ordinary if poor common man becomes a travelling conman—but a class difference between the husband and wife. She is not, it seems, a typical hysterical Southern belle, but the daughter of a seamstress, “white trash” as the husband calls her in his version of the story. The doubt, planted in our minds in Rashomon by Mifune’s sexiness and Kyô’s drifting hand, is here intensified by an argument that the husband and wife have across her and his version of events. In fact, her class difference is so obvious, it seems, that the bandit falls for her, knowing she is more of a woman than an effete man like Harvey can handle. This interesting shift would appear to be an attempt to deal with the ambiguity of Masago in the original story. We never get to the bottom of the Japanese woman; she is—in contrast to Mellen’s assertion that she is the last complete portrayal of a woman Kurosawa was to film (1976)—the most elusive of Kurosawa’s portrayals of women. He, interestingly enough, was a film director who wrote and made films involving a wide range of female



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stereotypes: stoic, cheerful young girls (The Most Beautiful, One Wonderful Sunday); loyal and, ultimately tough, women (No Regrets for our Youth, Record of a Living Being, Seven Samurai, The Lower Depths, Red Beard); good wives and mothers (Yojimbo, Sanjuro); scheming and possibly evil (Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, Ran); women who have made peace with their lives (Ran, Rhapsody in August), or even heroic in the most literal sense (The Hidden Fortress). However Masago is someone about whom we are never sure, and this is in part not only because of the story, but also because of Kyô’s powerful portrayal. We never know if she swoons when Mifune embraces her, dropping the dagger and, unconsciously, reaching up to touch him as if he were he lover; or if she is very conscious and willingly gives in to this man who is more immediately powerful than her husband. This moment in the film is never retold or shown again, we are left with it as a given fact—this is how the rape happened. She portrays herself as “just a weak woman” in her version of events, hinting that there was nothing she could do—as a mere woman her life has always been in the hands of men. Why not assume, as the bandit says she did, that her only chance at life after the rape was to go with whichever man won her in a battle? Given the constraints of a woman’s life in medieval and modern Japan, it makes it very possible that she wanted to die; or that she wanted to run off with the bandit; or even that she hated both men—the bandit for the rape and her husband for having been so easily tricked—and so goaded them into fighting. Any of these is a possibility for a woman in a society where legally she could only exist as someone’s daughter, wife, or mother. To be rejected by both men leaves her with only two recourses: to die or become a nun. That she is worthy of pity, whatever her motivations or true actions, seems important, it remains the priest’s impression of her.10 It might be that the recasting of Masago as a Southern belle is an attempt to pick up on this point—that in the American South women were more at the mercy of men, unable to carve out roles for themselves as individuals, than women on the East coast or in pioneer communities (where they also could be, we assume, spinsters, widows, or whores). However, to introduce the class difference, as The Outrage does, seems to add another dimension to the story: it takes an unsolved mystery—what did the woman really do and say?—and points us toward a solution. Of course she lied, the woman is, after all, “white trash,” a passionate woman who married for money and position and is now trapped in a (loveless) marriage to an ex-solider who fought on the losing side. All four versions of the story add



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details to this representation: the bandit who tells us that he sensed her passion; the woman herself who describes her husband’s disdain for her as longstanding, not just because of the rape, but pre-dating it; the husband who claims she was always flirting with other men; and the prospector who tells us that she called her husband a coward. All these details about the couple’s life just are not there in the original. It is as if the U.S. version could not bear to leave the woman’s motives open to our interpretations—a mystery, subject to others’ assumptions—she has to add up to something more. There may well have been a feminist side to this portrayal, Faye Mitchell and her husband were well known for having written various screenplays with strong female main characters, but this attempt to understand the woman’s actions in terms of class and the sexual politics of a marriage gone wrong robs the story of the power that not-knowing gives it. It also speaks to a modern dilemma often confronting women who are, unfortunately, raped; the tacit assumption that they must have, in some way, deserved it. However sexist 1950s Japan was, Kurosawa’s film does not offer this as the core truth of the film. By making the state of the marriage the subject of all the confessions, The Outrage makes the woman not a possible victim, but somehow complicit. In fact, when the prospector tells us his version and, pushed by the conman, also admits that he stole the dagger (something we never know for sure about the woodcutter) because he has so many children and so little money, we believe him to be basically an honest man. His version, in which the woman forces the men to fight by insulting them both, is now marked out as the final, true version—we know what happened now, despite the preacher’s calm acceptance that we can’t ever know truth. In terms of why this remake of the Japanese film, I have been unable to find anything by either the writers or the director to give us a sense of their motivations. It may have been an attempt to get at the universality of the story by showing how it might have happened somewhere other than Japan, although this is undermined by the move to that other exotic imagined space—the Western borderlands. Yet the basic assumption that the story was translatable might explain why the main roles were recast as stereotypes, rather than against type as Kurosawa so subtly did. The preacher who has lost his faith, the cynical conman, the downtrodden prospector, the Mexican bandit, the effete Southern gentleman, and his unhappy hysterical wife— they are all stock characters in Westerns. Perhaps this version exists because the original was so great a work of cinema that it demanded



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its translation into a version without subtitles, as Wills (1998) argues for U.S. remakes of French films. Possibly—but it was a wordy stage play first. The remake might be a response to the original as read by the critic Davidson (1987), who posits the woman and her husband as Japan, both violated by the foreign-seeming bandit and the final scene with the baby as representing hope for the nation’s future. By making the woman responsible in The Outrage, a point might be being made about Japan as represented by the lovely Kyô Machiko. This last, rather interesting, possibility can only work if we were to know what the Kanins thought of the original. For the moment, we are left with a mystery—what in 1960s U.S. society required this theatrical and filmic remake? It seems not to comment in any way on the censorship of the McCarthy hearings (Martin Ritt had been blacklisted); there is nothing to hint at U.S. experiences of Korea, or in the film, of early Vietnam, so the possibility of it being a comment on subjective and wider political truths seems remote. It is not a revisionist Western; there already had been a few, but the great era of reinventing the West was not to happen for a few years more. It is not really about race in the end although it is about class and inappropriate marriages; the portrayal of the wife seems to owe much to Tennessee Williams. Yet the film pre-dates the feminist revolution that arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so if it points to a cultural unease about the state of marriage and the position of women, it is somewhat prescient. The more convincing possibility, to my mind, is that the film is nothing more than a desire to offer a solution to the original’s enigma and what subject is considered to be more enigmatic than a woman? But a feminist reading leaves us with this as the film’s own outrage: the implication that it is all the wife’s fault. If there is sexual tension in the marriage, caused by infidelity and guilt, the focus has shifted from all human guilt to that of modern women’s—an interesting view to take in 1965 American society.

A Japanese-American Romance One more possible reason for the 1960s remake of Rashomon was that the United States had begun, once again, to admire the art of Japan. Johnson (1988) outlines the various ups and downs of the U.S. love-hate relationship, as it could be put, with things Japanese. The recasting of the Japanese as “good” guys and our “allies” occurred quite strongly during the Vietnam War era and there is no doubt that



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the work of Kurosawa, generally admired by U.S. critics, and seen as box office success if remade by Hollywood, helped this process along. This makes the 1991 remake of the Akutagawa story as Iron Maze by the Japanese director/producer Hiroaki Yoshida an interesting contrast to Ritt’s admiring homage to Kurosawa’s film. The year 1991, just before the burst of the economic bubble that had made Japan the most powerful country on the planet, saw the tail end of an era of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States that had been apparent from the late 1970s. Not only were the Japanese aware of this feeling, it could be argued, they were pleased at this sign that they had made it. Buying up U.S. property and even a Hollywood studio, the Japanese business elite seemed not to care what the Americans thought or felt—or so the United States thought, and this is clearly expressed in Crichton’s Rising Sun, which was later made into an even more orientalist film by Ridley Scott (1993). Iron Maze is a television production backed by, among others, Oliver Stone. The title refers to a moribund steel mill near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, very much rundown and on its last legs, which is bought by a Japanese conglomerate. Sent to close the deal is the boss’ son, Sugita (Murakami Hiroaki), who arrives with his blond American wife, Chris (Bridget Fonda), in tow. This is what we learn from the story told by Mayor Peluso (John Randolph), related in flashback just after the opening scene in which Sugita’s body is discovering lying— lit by a very beautiful ray of sunlight falling through the tumbledown roof (perhaps the only real visual reference to Kurosawa)—in the steel mill. All the U.S. dislike and fears about the Japanese are revealed in this story; not only are the Japanese buying up U.S. landmarks and businesses, they are also taking American women. Worse, Sugita, against the wishes of his father and business partners as well as the Americans, wants to tear down the mill to build an amusement park. The sense that the United States has been reduced to Japan’s playground could not be stronger in Iron Maze. Everyone, as it says in the film’s trailer, has a motive for killing Sugita. The film’s writing credits, however, refer not to some modern U.S. crime novel, but to Akutagawa’s short story (Yoshida and Tim Metcalfe are credited with the screen story and Metcalfe with the screenplay). The tale quickly segues into “In a Grove” territory: first to confess to the murder is Barry Mikowski (Jeff Fahey), a former steel worker who works in the Pittsburgh hotel where Sugita and his wife were staying. Caught by the Sheriff, Jack Ruhle (J.T. Walsh), he tells of his encounters with the couple. During the confession, Chris



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Sugita rings from her car phone and appears to confirm the story— Barry raped her she says and then killed her husband. Barry denies raping her and tells a story of a growing romance between them just before Chris rings back and admits that she lied about the rape. She tells a tale of an unhappy marriage. Her husband, handsome and cultured in Japan, is, in the United States, boorish, drinking too much and cruel to her. The narrative takes many twists and turns, finally resolving itself when a badly injured but not dead Sugita tells a story that, interwoven with Chris’s confessing to attempting to kill him, is marked out as the final version—a version accepted as true by the Sheriff. The key to the mystery is Barry’s relationship with a young boy, Mikey (Gabriel Damon) to whom he is a sort of foster father. It could be said that the film is, at the core, an exploration of male rivalry. This is not just a story of business competition gone wrong, but of wounded male pride: the Mayor’s whose promises of new work in a new steel mill to the unemployed men of the area turn out to be empty; of Barry who has lost his children and wife when he lost his highly paid job in the mill, but who can still woo Sugita’s wife away from him; and of Sugita who not only loses his wife, but is constantly battling his father who does not believe in his vision of an amusement park. The Sheriff, to whom everyone lies, has his pride as well. “Everyone’s always asking me that,” he protests at the end of the film. “First they lie to me, then they ask me what I’m going to do about it.” The film’s ending is interesting and just as misogynist as that of The Outrage. Chris leaves Sugita and returns home to her small American town and clearly working-class life, while the building of the amusement park goes ahead. The last shot of the film is of Sugita, Barry, and Mikey, playfully throwing stones at the crane that is dismantling the old mill; all boys happy together, the tension created by the presence of a woman resolved, and business problems solved. The message seems to be that the United States is happy to do business with Japan as long as it is on an equal footing and that no one tries to run off with their women. By having the characters tell their tales to a visible judge, in this case the police officer who is only a minor character in both the short story and Kurosawa’s film, it can be seen that Yoshida’s version is not only set in a politically different moment—a moment when Japan was powerful—but in a psychologically and historically different moment as well. Gone is the sense of being judged by an unseen power, of pleading guilt to a silent and, perhaps, merciless presence,



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and in its place we have the ever accessible, friendly, wise figure of the small town Sheriff. The setting, in this sense, could not be more American—in the heart of the United States, Pennsylvania, one of the first states—but also could not be more traditional, the Sheriff being a key figure in so many Westerns. He is not the hard-boiled private eye of the film noir—interesting, given that it is in the new wave of film noir that the convoluted flashback or rashomon technique is most frequently found—but refers to the heroes of the police procedural, films in which the bad guys are caught through the hard work of honest cops who employ the logical and fair procedures of the criminal justice system. The small town cop, in this case, being the more human and approachable face of the city police (a point made humorously in the Coen brothers’ Fargo, 1996), is able to take the time to listen to everyone’s stories before deciding what the truth is. In this sense, it must be said that the story is fully domesticated into an American version despite its Japanese director and original story line. Subjective versions of the truth are but lies that people will eventually recant in order to finally tell a truth that seamlessly melds into a larger, more coherent narrative acceptable to all. There are many ironies in such a reading of Iron Maze. The notion of egos molded by a rigid society and leading to the subjectivity of Rashomon’s characters is what Richie finds important in the Kurosawa film. However, the black joke of everyone pleading guilt in an era when many Japanese were proclaiming innocence is, as I have argued, lost in such a reading of the film. While both The Outrage and Iron Maze play with the notions of sexual guilt and the lies that married couples tell themselves, each other, and the people around them, the more general sense of guilt as a condition of humanity (very Dostoevskian) is missing. What remains however, no matter how you read Rashomon, is that no one has captured better the curious fact that all experience is subjective and that a single truth is very hard to arrive at than Kurosawa. The social construction of reality as a natural outcome of human interaction seems an impossibility in light of this fact and yet human beings continue to believe in single truths, even in postmodernity. This complex conundrum appears unacceptable in both the faithful remake of the film, The Outrage, and its later permutation claiming to be a version of the Akutagawa story, Iron Maze. Yet, as we shall see, this is not some East/West or U.S./Japan divide, for the next version of “In a Grove,” a Japanese television production this time, is closer to the Yoshida film than the Kurosawa version.



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Losing the unseen judge, the court scenes, the very sense of trial, and possibly, retribution is a tack also taken by Saegusa Kenki’s—who normally works in Japanese theatre—remake of the film, Misty (Misuti, 1997). As with the play by the Kanins and Yoshida’s film, Saegusa and his cowriter, Inoue Yumiko, claim to have gone back to the original stories by Akutagawa, but of course, they also acknowledge Kurosawa (Yamaguchi 1997). This film is extremely beautiful, a clear attempt to do in color what Kurosawa and Miyagawa Kazuo, his cinematographer, did with the shadows and light in black and white. It was shot on Yakushima, an island that is protected as a heritage site, and full of amazing landscapes that rival the forest outside Nara in which Kurosawa shot Rashomon. According to Richie (personal communication), a huge indoor set also was built in order for Saegusa to play with light, in contrast to the “set” for Rashomon where Kurosawa had to achieve his effects by getting his cast and crew to cut down trees in the almost virgin forest. If it is possible to argue that Rashomon uses medieval Japan as a sort of dream time while filming in a purely realistic manner, Saegusa films the story as if it were all a dream: there is no larger context that allows us, the audience, to get to grips with the story’s events. We have no stunned priest, woodcutter, or commoner as our guides to the narrative, and so we are left with a sense of having hallucinated everything. Given the film’s title, Misty, this may be no accident. However, as we shall see, I think the title could also refer to another film. The other changes in the story are significant and do not come from Akutagawa, although they appear to be an elaboration on the story that is told about the bandit in all versions of the tale except Iron Maze: he once killed a woman and a girl; in The Outrage these women become a mother and daughter that he raped. In Rashomon we are left wondering if this crime is attributed to Tajômaru, but is not necessarily one that he committed—his boastful reputation leading to people pinning all wrongs on him. Misty, however, opens with the brutal rape and killing of a woman, who seems to be a shamaness dancing with a traditional mirror. This scene is intercut with that of a child, in theatrical make-up, perhaps also dressed to act as a shaman, outside the shrine/hut (it is not clear which it is), literally beating a masked bandit into the pond. The man goes under the water, but not before the child has seen a red lizard tattoo on his right arm. The camera cuts between the rape and murder and the child beating the



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bandit in a sequence that is confusing: it is not clear how many men are involved. The dark opening scene has that sort of nightmarish quality about it. The voiceover, however, is firm: “My mother was killed. The Red Lizard killed her. That evening I became all alone.” From this dark scene we are taken, by a travelling shot, to a beautiful spot by a river. A lovely young woman, Masago (Amami Yuki), is traveling with a young man, her husband, Takehiro (Kaneshiro Takeshi). As in The Outrage, it seems, the couple are newly wed and traveling toward a new life—something that Rashomon does not indicate. A gang of young children appear and steal all the couple’s baggage. Eventually we are shown the children gathering in their camp in the woods, they are part of a gang run by an older man (Toyokawa Etsushi) who sits in a tree nursing his wounded hand. This man takes a bit of red cloth the children have stolen and wraps up his injured hand. Back by the river the husband is washing his wife’s injured knee. The shot of his hand on her bare legs is meant to be very sensual but also tender: “Protect me,” she demands of him at this point. He promises and then starts to undress her. Cut to the bandit, then to the couple making love in the woods. Somehow the bandit has found them and spies on them using a mirror that has been stolen from the woman, he plays with Masago, caressing her hand with reflected light. She becomes aware of the voyeur and responds, moving her hand, letting the light catch up with it, while her husband remains unaware, on top of her. Much is made in the film of the play of light, and the mirror is especially important. Mirrors are very symbolic in Shinto religion, they were one of the three jewels given by the original deities to the ancient Japanese; mirrors can also be shintai, or receptacles in which the deity can manifest itself. This is an interesting shift from Kurosawa’s version where Buddhism is so dominant. Even the original story includes not only a priest but the idea of the woman looking like a bodhisattva (in the story the bandit says she looks like one to him). The link in Misty to ancient Shinto mythology is reinforced by the film’s sense of timelessness. Rather than being of a specific time, the setting—the forest and river—is somehow primeval; the children are like some feral society of primitives; and eventually a troupe of bizarre traveling artists will stumble upon the murder scene. We seem to have moved from a bad dream to a mythic ur-time or even theatrical time within the film. Saegusa might well want us to see all three of these liminal spaces as the same; in doing this, however, the story loses much of its force. It is no longer about events that might happen to any innocent



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traveler gone astray in the forest, it becomes a story about this particular young couple who find themselves in a very special place. And the events drag themselves out. A night passes, it is the next day before the couple encounter the bandit face-to-face as he comes through the forest, the mirror flashing in his hand. “Give it back,” demands Masago. Rather than return the mirror, the bandit plays with it until the husband draws his sword and the two men fight, standing knee deep in water. The fight eventually takes the men out of the water and into the forest, chased by the woman. Just when it seems that Takehiro has won, a flight of birds startles him. The camera cuts from the birds to the husband, fallen. Then a pan down to show that he has been bound. Masago reaches for the sword to defend herself and tells the bandit “Die”. In the next scene a group of travelers find Takehiro, now dead. They examine the body and realize that a child is watching them. They chase the child, catch it, and find a severed hand. Then, another cut to the interior of a fire lit room, it is night and raining. A nun speaks to the young woman, reassuring her and saying that she does not need to talk of the terrible events if she does not want to. The girl insists on telling her story: “That man wasn’t human, he was a beast. He raped me, he also violated the heart of my lord.”11 Her rape, as she tells it, takes place in the rain, the sky dark, the wind blowing as she loses her fight to resist the bandit. After her violation she finds the sword again, cuts her husband free and touches his face. He rejects her, she weeps and he suggests that they commit double suicide. She refuses, but he puts the sword into her hand and takes a dagger in his. He forces her to agree and she kills him, but he fails to wound her as he dies: “He didn’t take me with him.” Looking out at the night sky, the scene shifts to the bandit, in a prison cell: “I killed him,” he says. In his version, the wind is blowing and autumnal leaves are falling, but it is not raining. As in the Akutagawa story and the Kurosawa film, in the bandit’s version the woman tells him he must fight: one of the men has to win her. The men fight, but not wholeheartedly; the bandit keeps seeing the woman in place of the husband fighting him. Finally he kills the husband. The third version is told to the travelers by the child who found the samurai before he died (as a medicine man finds the husband in The Outrage) and hears the story from the almost dead man. In this version the sky is full of thunder and lightning, if it is raining, no one seems to be getting wet (in contrast to Masago’s version where she ends up bedraggled); his wife only resists the bandit for a little bit



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before she gives in and walks away to lie down. “Please close your eyes,” she says to him, “I’ll close my eyes . . . it will be as if I’m being held by you.” But he watches while they make love and, in between flashes of lightning, she appears to be caressing the man. The child says: “The samurai said ‘I saw it all. I didn’t keep my promise to my wife. I saw hell.’ ” At the end, the bandit asks the woman what to do, and she cuts her husband free. She asks him: “What shall we do?” “Forget it,” replies the husband. She argues against this and gets him to agree to a double suicide, it would be the only way to forget it. He stabs himself and hears her calling him “dear” as he lies dying. It is the next morning before we hear the final version. The travelers are taking the bandit, the woman, and the child to the city where they will be taken before a judge who will try them. As far as they can tell, everyone has been “Telling lies.” They begin their journey and when they reach the river where all the events began, they stop. The bandit accuses the child of being wrong: “The samurai lied, I killed him.” The child says that he couldn’t have since his hand was wounded—he didn’t have the strength to kill the man. The woman suddenly realizes that his right arm is in a sling and touches the stump. She says: “I loved my man, he died, this man killed him.” She runs away, the bandit escapes his captors and runs after her, they end by fighting in the river, the bandit beating her, one-handed, until the other men drag him away. The scene cuts to her lying in a pool of light; “My loved one died,” she says “My beloved was killed.” We are taken back to the men fighting in the forest, she has the sword that she puts down and, going to the bandit, she lifts his redwrapped hand and looks at it. She kisses him. The tied up husband is bewildered as he watches. Masago puts the bandit’s hand on her body and then takes his face in her hands. She kisses him again, kisses his hand, and slowly unwraps the bandage to look at the tattoo of the red lizard there. A red camellia flows down a river12 and the bandit and Masago are naked in a shadowy woods, making love. When it is over, the bandit leaves, the wife cuts Takehiro’s bonds and he says: “You had to do that to save us. Let’s go. We’re alive.” He sits her down and tries to clean her dirty feet: “You got dirty. Don’t worry about it.” He obsessively rubs at her feet while she begs him to stop. When he does not, she takes the sword, and with one thrust, kills him. A green light falls on her face, she weeps in the present. Then back to the story. She screams, a scream exactly like that of the child who beat the bandit at the opening of the film. The bandit,



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standing in the river, hears the cry and sees the camellia going by. He cuts off his own hand. Now the bandit is in another prison cell, he is given a last meal. There is a shot of a spider falling from its own web, and a red light falls on the bandit. He smiles as the music from the sex scene wells up. He thinks of the woman, walking against a purplish light. She turns to the camera and smiles. I have gone into rather more detail with this film than the others because, true to Kurosawa’s own version, it is an intensely visual narrative. There is little dialogue and lots of symbolism, but, as already noted above, it is mostly Shinto symbolism. It is as if Saegusa wanted to be sure that his version was fully Japanese, a film that could not be accused of pandering to the West in its telling. The other obvious difference from the original is that the woman tells her story twice and the second time we are led to believe that she is telling the truth. Her mother was killed by Red Lizard; somehow, although she saw only a masked man that night, she senses something about this bandit. His bandaged hand fascinates her and she takes the first opportunity to unwrap and examine it. The story becomes not so much about subjective interpretations of reality—although there is much of that with the changing weather in each version—but a tale of vengeance. She kills her ineffectual husband who did not keep his promise to protect her and who seems to have been driven mad, his heart broken by witnessing the lovemaking, and blames it on the bandit. In the meantime the bandit, true to his character, is already boasting of having killed the man. We can only speculate as to why he cut off his own hand—some impulse to symbolize his emasculation by the woman who appears to have strange powers? The story seems to be full of what Barrett (1989) has called Japanese archetypes—the avenging woman being one of these. Rather than deconstructing the characters as Kurosawa subtly does, Saegusa and Inoue give them to us as rather one-dimensional young people. The husband is young and madly in love, while the bandit is dark and brooding, nothing indicates that he is a coward. The wife seems silly, with her mystical mutterings about the mirror, but in the end she seems to have something of demonic about her. If the story is meant to be a sort of mythic dance, it does not quite achieve this. We are also left with many unanswered questions: Why does she take so long to work out who the bandit is? Why does not she kill him? We get some indication of why she killed her poor husband, but was this necessary in order to set up the bandit? Why does the



Remaking Rashomon

Remaking Kurosawa

bandit cut off his hand? More to the point, why does the woman tell two different versions of the story? The first one, to the nun, comes after being told that she does not have to talk—is it meant to be a rehearsal of her lies? As with The Outrage we are left with a film that hinges on the character of the young woman, but we do not really know who she is—Southern white trash is a more detailed description of the character in the Outrage than we get in Misty. The fact of her mother’s death is terrible, but does it justify the death of her husband? It is as if she is the murderous woman from Play Misty for Me (Eastwood 1971)—another film in which a woman kills men, although in this case it is because they reject her.13 If the film is meant to portray the female as timeless, enigmatic, dangerous, and beyond human ken, it manages this to some extent, but why bother? One answer to this question has to do with a Japan that both has greatly changed from the postwar era country Kurosawa tried to represent, and yet which continues to hold onto some notion of “ancient” continuities. Despite many changes to society and equal rights for women being updated constantly in the law, Japan remains a deeply gendered society in which women are more often than not represented in the mass media as sexual objects; they exist only as the subjects of men’s fantasies. Misty is not much of an observation of this trend, although there are other films, such as Audition (Oudishion, Takashi Mike 2000), which clearly do comment on this state of affairs. While the female producer of the film, Ibiza Nape, and its female cowriter, Inoue, both make claims for the strength and pride of Misty’s heroine (Yamaguchi 1997:118–119), in fact the film seems to fall into the very trap offered to us by more male-centered films: full of gratuitous sex scenes, it presents the woman as both willing sexual victim and terrifying aggressor. Yet no amount of making the woman an active avenger can make the film feminist in any sense—the killing of the young husband is totally unnecessary, she could have walked away. If, because of his wounded hand, the bandit could not have killed anyone, Masago could have killed him herself. But she lets him go and later, she lets him beat her—another favorite theme in Japanese sex fantasies. As a revenge film it seems to have its priorities all mixed up. Moreover, the sense of responsibility, of guilt, in which Kurosawa implicates the audience as voyeurs, in Misty applies only to the bandit who sits brooding in a tree if that—it is no longer a communal sense of responsibility in which all of us partake. Without the court, there is no sense of a higher authority, the audience actually becomes the



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judge, but what is there to judge? If the Red Lizard killed her mother, then the woman is avenged. But we have no idea why the man became a bandit in the first place. Have some events or the inequalities of society made him into a man who not only robs but rapes and kills women? In the Kurosawa film we know that it is a time of great upheaval and poverty, the sort of time when men turn to crime, but this does not seem to be so for Misty. If circumstances have not made the Red Lizard, perhaps he is meant to be all men. If so, we are talking of “rape” and its consequences in its purest sense. It is almost as if Saegusa took Kurosawa at his sardonic word—when asked why the film was so successful, Kurosawa said: “Well, you see . . . it’s about this rape” (Richie 1987:11). Saegusa makes the film about the rape and murder of Masago’s mother (who in the original short story is very much alive and testifies in court), and the consequences take years to make themselves felt—although in a weird example of filmic time, the bandit seems to be not much older than the couple he encounters. The original film was not just about a rape, but about how this was experienced by all the people involved in the events and these people are clearly members of a feudal society that is in turmoil. We know nothing about the world outside the lovely forest in Saegusa’s film. Misty tries to achieve the original film’s subjectivity by changing the weather in each retelling, yet this simple ploy does not achieve what Kurosawa managed to do: in the same place, with the same light, everyone still thought something different had happened. That is the secret of subjectivity—we can point to hard facts that are incontestable and yet read them in very different ways. In Misty even the hard fact of the weather is contestable. This may well be an attempt to be postmodern—externalizing the internal state of the characters— but since we know that our inner states do not affect the weather, it is pure fantasy and, being fantasy, the horrific story is robbed of all its power. Perhaps everything in the film is a dream? Perhaps all the characters are really Shinto gods enacting some primordial event? The mirror and rainbowed light (rainbows also being important symbols in Shinto) hint at this, for, despite the dominant imagery of the mirror, this is not a story that holds up a mirror to modern Japanese society. That it could have done this—it could have been about men’s attitudes toward women and how patriarchal principles embedded in society make women resort to all sorts of strategies in order to survive (one possible reading of Rashomon that seems to have inspired The Outrage)—seems a sadly missed opportunity. But set in this mythic, timeless place, this is not the main message of the film. It is



Remaking Rashomon

Remaking Kurosawa

all brilliant surface, very beautiful to look at and somehow as empty as a music video. That Misty might appeal to a more superficial generation is borne out by a conversation with the feminist historian Hayakawa Noriyo. She told me that while Kurosawa’s film might not have reflected the views of all Japanese in 1951, since many people felt themselves to be victims of the prewar government and somehow exonerated by this fact, a film about a general sense of guilt would not even make sense to the current youth of Japan—especially as a sort of postwar sentiment. When she starts to give her lectures on Japan and the war, Hayakawa notes, most of her university students think she is referring to the Gulf War or the Vietnam War and are very confused by the idea of Japan having a role in these events! Japanese school history books, famously, are ambiguous about the Second World War. Misty is a film aimed at a generation who feel no particular shame about their lives and who, as a result of a long economic recession, are more into escapist fantasy than ever. Old Japanese folktales are often mined for such fantastic tales and Saegusa and Inoue may well have gone back beyond the Akutagawa original stories to Heian (794–1185 CE) tales about all the supernatural doings that went on by the Rashô gate. What is interesting, in comparison to the original film, is that the Saegusa version insists on presenting us with a final solution and if anyone is guilty it is men who rape and kill as well as the men who are too weak to protect their women, leaving honorable revenge in the hands of women. Despite being into escapist fantasy that often involves convoluted plot lines that can take years to work themselves out (cf. Standish 1998), the current generation of Japan, it seems, are just as uncomfortable with the idea of reality as subjective and truth as unattainable, as are the supposedly more objective Westerners. In short, no remake of Rashomon or version of “In a Grove” appears to tackle head on the murkiness of the heart, which, as Kurosawa put it “goes astray.” However, strangely enough, it is two comic permutations on the Rashomon theme that appear to achieve this best, as we shall see in the next chapter.



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The Battle of the Sexes: Or, the One Scenario when Subjectivity is Acceptable “What is truth?” —Les Girls1

Introduction The woman as the key to understanding the story is not something Kurosawa offers as a solution. For him the problem was “the human heart.” But it could be argued that it is the woman who translates— after a manner—and transcends in many versions of Rashomon. Perhaps this is a result of something that many societies still seem to have in common, an inability to understand or accurately portray women in works of art. This theme of women and their unknowable motivations are at the core of the comic versions of the film. So it can be argued that it is the two films considered in this chapter—Cukor’s Les Girls (1957), and the Italian film, Quante volte . . . Quella Notte (Bava 1972)—that seem truer to Kurosawa’s point about the human heart than do the more faithful remakes, despite the fact that the plots of both films only resemble the original in terms of some of their narrative structure. This narrative resemblance is what I chose to call a permutation: it contains changes that lead to great difference, but the relationship with the original remains obvious.2 It is also worth noting again that among the first attempts to try to make something like Rashomon occurred not only in the United States, but also that this attempt was a musical comedy about the relationship between men and women. That reality is subjective, then,



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Remaking Kurosawa

“Must Be a Shock, After These Years, for a Chap to Learn the Truth about His Wife”3 The British Film Institute’s press release on a season of George Cukor’s films noted: If there is a particular theme running through Cukor’s work, it hinges on illusion and reality, the theatrical and real life, with plots revolving round doubles, deceptions, disguise or self-doubt, seized on by biographers as a metaphor for his own homosexuality. (www.bfi.org.uk/ news/realease/2004.2004-08-12-cukor.pdf)

All these themes appear in Cukor’s Les Girls, which is the story of how an autobiography written by Lady Sibyl Wren (Fay Kendall) causes a furor when her old friend Angèle de Croiz (Tania Elg) sues her for libel, and the resulting trial offers us three versions of what happened between the dancers of the troupe Les Girls and their star, Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly). The three variations on love gone wrong, based on the ambiguous nature of Barry (is he a playboy, a serial seducer, or a man in love with only one woman?), never gel into one coherent tale and thus appear to reflect well the point made about the themes in George Cukor’s work in the quotation above. Was Barry seduced by the playful French Angèle, who, although engaged to be married, sees him as a challenging conquest? Did Angèle attempt to commit suicide because Barry fired her for making a mess of the act on the night that her fiancé Pierre (Jacques Bergerac) and his family see her performing on stage, catching her out in the lie that she is working as a nurse? This is Sibyl’s version of events. Angèle, on the other hand, argues that it was all different, that Sibyl had a drinking problem and was about to be fired by Barry for it, when it occurred to her to tell Barry that Sibyl drank because her love for him was unrequited. On the strength of this deception, Barry begins to be kinder to Sibyl, who, interestingly enough, stops drinking. A sort of romance seems to take place, punctuated by a visit from Sibyl’s old beau, Lord Wren (Leslie Phillips), which ends in a fight between the two men and Sibyl’s realization that Barry does not love her, but was only being kind to stop her drinking. Does she get drunk,



seemed an apt point to make in 1950s United States in terms not of murder, but of romance, and how it can go wrong.

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get fired, and then attempt suicide as Angèle claims in her version of the story? Finally Barry tells his tale, one in which he is in love with the third, American, girl in his troupe, Joy Hensen (Mitzi Gaynor). She seems to have no time for him because he will not propose marriage. During the time he is trying to woo Joy, Pierre and Lord Wren approach Barry and ask him to help them win their suits, it is time the girls gave up dancing and settled down they think. Barry comes up with a plan that achieves that: he fakes a heart condition and lets slip that he should quit dancing, but won’t because he doesn’t want the girls to lose their jobs. Pitying him, all three girls quit and Joy even seems to be falling for Barry. Both Sibyl and Angèle are accidentally poisoned by a gas leak after a good-bye party and, taken separately to hospital, never compare stories until the book appears. Barry swears his version is the truth, the marriages of Sibyl and Angèle, threatened by the competing versions each has told about the other’s romance with Barry, are saved and the case is dismissed. However, when Barry meets his wife Joy in a taxi after the trial, she berates him with “They couldn’t have invented those stories completely; there must have been some truth . . .” “Here we go again . . .” replies Barry, indicating that this is a longrunning argument between them and the film ends with a shot of a sandwich board that asks, “What is Truth?” Like Rashomon, Les Girls has one key scene that is repeated, with variations, depending on the teller. This is the song and dance routine “Ladies in Waiting,” which, in one version has Angèle trying to hide from her fiancé’s family who are in the audience; in another has Sibyl drunk and falling over; and in the final has Joy weeping because she knows of Barry’s bad heart. In contrast to the Japanese film, however, the “mystery”—who committed suicide, was it really both women?—is not really so important. More central to the film is the mystery surrounding how men and women act when they are in love. How can Angèle claim to love her fiancé, but still want to seduce Barry for fun? Does she really fall for him? Why is Barry so easily convinced that Sibyl is in love with him and why does she respond so well to his kindness in light of this? Why does Barry tell a version in which the only woman who attracts him is the one who rejects him constantly? Is it really, as he claims “the truth”? That we are never given answers, that there is not a final solution is seen by some critics as a flaw in the narrative rather than true to the spirit of the Japanese original. Who can understand male and female



The Battle of the Sexes

Remaking Kurosawa

attraction? Do men and women experience the same events in the same way? Did the men in Rashomon see a seduction, did the bandit sense that the woman gave into him, while Masago felt only violated? In this comedy the issues are handled with less of a shock value—the permutations of the romances in the story are fairly stock for the prefeminist era, but the point is the same: how can we ever arrive at the truth when it comes to male/female relations? That the concept of society depends on the idea that there is a truth is well parodied in Les Girls by the idea of a trial to determine whether libel occurred or not. Again, true to Kurosawa’s film, the notion that courts somehow attempt to establish veracity in situations where stories may well completely contradict each other is important in this film. However, the sense of guilt surrounding a crime is not key to Les Girls in the same way. In the end, it is guilt that they have publicly maligned each other that causes Sibyl and Angèle to make up their quarrel, whether or not they agree with Barry’s version. The story he tells lets them all off the hook and satisfies their husbands, both of whom are threatening divorce in light of the versions each has told of the other. If there is added guilt here, some sexual guilt about real affairs with Barry, it is buried as the new version of the past is accepted by everyone but Joy. While Kurosawa gives us a film about the chaos that ensues when everyone tells their version of the truth, Cukor gives us a rather different film about how relationships are maintained by the lies we all agree on. Marital discord occurs only when competing narratives are examined and compared, something that happens especially, it is implied in the final scene, when a woman wants to discuss a man’s fidelity or lack of it. Moreover, anticipating Lerner’s and Lowe’s bittersweet duet, I Remember It Well, from Gigi (Minnelli 1958), this film makes a point about the different ways in which men and women remember what is important. It reduces the complex issue of finding the truth about a crime to a sexual comedy, and yet, perhaps because of Cukor’s own concerns with social deceptions, it is a sex comedy with a valid point to make. For the Hungarian based in Hollywood, Cukor, the human condition was one in which it was necessary to lie in order to survive in a world dominated by an accepted construction of “normal” gender relations; for Kurosawa it was one of guilt redeemable only by accepting one’s responsibilities to other people. No clearer example could be made of how culture, history, and even sexuality can affect the way in which a narrative might be told, reshaped and retold.



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The Italian Rashomon is a European coproduction—largely West German and Italian money in this case. The director, Mario Bava, was both a painter and cinematographer, as well as film director who had learned his craft through a long apprenticeship in the Italian studio system. In many ways, Bava appears to resemble Kurosawa and his expertise in special effects is one talent that he shares with Kurosawa who, with his cinematographers, pioneered many ways of filming the heretofore difficult to film (rain, spurting blood, shooting into the sun). However, Bava made his mark with gothic horror films, the occasional gladiator film, and Spaghetti Westerns. This film, set at the end of the swinging sixties, is rather an unusual offering from him. One thing that can be said about it is that the tongue-incheek quality of the film extends to making fun of what had come to be stock characters in more serious Italian cinema: the liberated young woman, the anguished playboy, and the beautiful people of la dolce vita. In this way, Bava seems to have understood something of the original that subverted stereotypes and made a dark joke about national innocence. However, the tragedy that is Rashomon becomes a light comedy (or a heavy-handed attempt at light comedy) in its Italian incarnation. The plot is simple: a young male model, John Price (Brett Halsey, an American actor) meets and chats up a beautiful young girl, Tina (Daniela Giordano), in the park one day. The first point of view we get is that of Tina, whose voiceover expresses her doubt at this young man’s intentions. The English-dubbed version (like many Italian films of this era, various dubbed versions were produced at the same time) is done entirely in Southern U.S. accents, perhaps a jibe at The Outrage. Later that day, John picks Tina up for a date, he takes her dancing and then they head home early since she insists she promised not to be late. Much later, Tina arrives home with her dress torn. This is where the film enters Rashomon territory. Tina tells her mother a convoluted story of stopping by John’s place, waiting for him in the garden outside his flat while he makes a call, but being frightened by the arrival of two foreigners she goes into the flat. There John tries to seduce/ rape her; she escapes via some complicated tomfoolery with the two doors of the bathroom and comes home more or less unscathed. She refuses to let her mother call the police because, she says, they might not believe her story since she went willingly into his apartment. An insignificant detail becomes important in all the versions—the gate to



“Do You Believe It?”4

Remaking Kurosawa

the garden that leads to John’s flat is difficult to open and the caretaker does not answer the call button when they try to reach him. John, with a huge scratch on his face, is pictured next, telling his version to some male friends in a bar. In his story, Tina is a voracious “nympho” who couldn’t leave him alone. They have sex and then, giving him some time to rest, she comes back for more only to find that he is not ready yet. She keeps trying to interest him, knocking him off a swing (in his flat!) at one point and scratching him. Finally, on Tina’s third attempt to get him back into bed, the foreign neighbors ring the doorbell and John invites them in, “If they hadn’t dropped by, she’d have killed me.” The third version is told to a milkman by the caretaker, who happily admits to his voyeurism. It is this man, played by Dick Randall, who repeats the single line that refers to original “I tell you the times are sick, the young people nowadays . . . won’t even fight for their country anymore.” The line also appears to be a weak attempt to address a U.S. audience, hinting at the draft dodging of the 1960s. The caretaker’s version is the most outrageous of the stories: it involves not only his witnessing a homosexual orgy in the flat (with the arrival of the neighbors), but includes also a flashback triggered by a story the woman, Esmeralda (Calisto Calisti), tells Tina in an effort to seduce her. The flashback, to an S&M club where the neighbors both first met John, is a sequence that raises the film to cult status for some viewers. After this flashback, Esmeralda spikes Tina’s drink and, while the caretaker runs off to get some binoculars, Tina loses her dress somehow. On his return Tina is naked and Esmeralda is tickling her with a feather. When Esmeralda pounces, Tina fights back, tries to get her dress, it tears, John comes out, Tina struggles with him, scratching him and finally gets away. The final version is the most curious since it is given to us by someone who is not part of the story at all, a psychiatrist who suddenly appears to say: “Of course what you’ve seen is all false or all true—an interpretation . . . Whose interpretation should we accept? The truth, for some reason is always hidden from view. Would you like to see how things really went?” He then proceeds to tell us the fourth version. In this version, the couple meet, they spend a long day together in the park, she wants it not to end, he suggests the evening out. They go to the club but leave early. Tina wants to go home and he agrees saying, “I’m not that type, but do you mind if we stop at my place for a minute?” They go to his flat, have a drink, he kisses her once (with the caretaker watching from the rooftop), and she promises “I will let



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you do anything you want, but not yet.” He agrees to take her home, but the gate out of the garden won’t unlock and the peeping caretaker is still stuck on the roof when John rings for help. They try to get out by climbing the gate, tearing her dress, scratching his face, and finally give up, settling down to wait on a bench in the garden. The other couple arrive, they have to ring for the doorman to open the gate and John and Tina get to leave. The doctor asks us: “Do you believe it? Do you really believe things happened that way?” End of film. With its denouement that appears to offer us a real version and then undermines it by the psychiatrist’s closing words, we are much closer to Kurosawa territory than in The Outrage. Moreover, the various stories hold true to what Richie tells us about the confessions in the original: Each is proud of what he did because, as he might tell you: “It is just the sort of thing that I would do.” Each thinks of his character as being fully formed, of being a thing, like the rape or the dagger is a thing, and of his therefore . . . being capable of only a certain number of (consistent) reactions. They are in character because they have defined their own character for themselves and will admit none of the surprising opportunities which must occur when one does not. They “had no choice”; circumstances “forced” their various actions; what each did “could not be helped.” It is no wonder that the reported actions refuse to agree with each other. (italics in original, 1996:75–76)

The young girl is “a good girl” as her mother says, and so can only tell a story that reaffirms this. The man is meant to be a handsome model, irresistible to women, so how could he explain a scratch that might have come from a woman fighting him off in such a way that does not undermine his masculinity? It seems that even great lovers quail in the face of a sexually voracious woman. The caretaker, a sleazy, sexobsessed and homophobic voyeur, can only tell a story about what he wishes he had seen. The psychiatrist, trained not to believe the stories any of us tell until they have been analyzed and reanalyzed, offers us a rather anodyne version. It is rather chaste, full of promise perhaps, but nothing like the interpretations that filled Freud’s work. This last version presents us with a problem that is very like a Spanish riddle: “If all men are great seducers, taking any woman they please; and if all women are virtuous and would never allow themselves to seduced; who is telling the truth?” Or, to put it another way, in the late 1960s/ early 1970s era of supposedly liberated swinging sex in Italy, what was really going on?




Remaking Kurosawa

Quante Volte . . . Quella Notte is more potentially interesting than The Outrage since it attempts to comment on modern Italian mores. However, by being so pinned to a particular moment in Italian sexual history, the film now looks very dated. It does make some changes to the original that are worth considering: for example, the judge and the commoner roles have disappeared. We have no sense why we, the audience, are being told these stories. Is it because this is not a tale of crime, really, but the sort of story anyone of us might be involved in? The priest has also disappeared, an interesting erasure in a film made by an Italian; but the psychiatrist might well be meant to be his replacement. Moreover, it could be asked, how is it that the psychiatrist has had access to all these stories? Is the fact that his hand reaches down into the film, like something out of Monty Python, and picks up John’s car as he drives Tina home at the end of the last story, an indication that this rather “mad” appearing doctor is something or someone more than a mere psychiatrist? There is nothing in the film to offer us answers and so we are left with an inferior, if fun, variation on the original. That some see this film as a camp precursor to Austin Powers (Jay Roach 1997) and, I would argue, Rocky Horror (Jim Sharman 1975) is enough to ensure its cult status. Bava fans, on the Internet, argue that he made other films that better dealt with the subjective nature of reality: The Whip and the Body (1963), Operazione Paura (1966), and Ecologia del Delitto (1971) (cf. Monell 2000). In relation to how the remakes of Kurosawa’s film and In a Grove seem unable to deal with subjectivity and not-knowing, it would

Figure 3 What is Truth? End Shot from Les Girls Source: Cuckor 1957. MGM. Courtesy of Warner Brothers Classical Musicals Collection



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seem that—as with Les Girls—it is all right to question the nature of human subjectivity if done as a sex comedy. In such narratives audiences appear to comfortably accept the idea that human society is always made up of different versions of reality—stories that contradict and maybe even cancel each other out. Moreover, who has not argued with a partner about whether something really happened that way or not? Our awareness that the truth is unknowable is easier to bear if we can laugh at that fact, the laughter itself signaling our unease. As a guiding principle of how to understand a crime, however, we do not find individual subjectivity and various versions of reality quite so amusing, this certainly seems to be the message of the remakes discussed in the last chapter. So it is no surprise that in the permutations on the narrative style of Rashomon in crime films, as we will see in the next chapter, audiences are given comfort in the form of a final solution, a final version; in short: the truth.







Permutations on the Theme of Murder: The Search for Solutions “Just the facts” —Ritt 19651

Introduction What does an analysis of the films that appear to be closest in narrative structure to Rashomon offer the media scholar? The issue of translation, particularly in the case of The Outrage, seems to be most at the forefront. It seems clear that the concerns of a particular director at a particular historical moment do not translate straightforwardly across time and cultures. The amount of material written on Rashomon makes the point that even the original creates problems of interpretation that are related to the fact that it is a Japanese film. By the time the story has been framed by a need-to-know discussion of the original short stories it is based on, the legends surrounding Rashô gate, notions of guilt in Buddhism, the supposed culture of Heian Japan, the postwar culture of Japan, and Kurosawa’s own worldview, the film itself gets buried under a weight of scholarly material. This, however, is not how film directors generally go about creating a remake. As we have seen with Les Girls, Quante Volte . . . Quella Notte, The Outrage, Iron Maze, and Misty, each new version of the story has focused on a different aspect of the original narrative. It is as if Rashomon, as text, opens itself up for its viewers allowing an accessibility that transcends the narrow confines of the moment of its



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creation. For the Kanins as writers and Ritt as a filmmaker it was the relationship of one particular couple that held the key to the story. For Cukor and Bava it was the more general problem of sex and romance as the subject of people’s own narratives that was at issue. In Yoshida’s version we have the relationship between the United States and Japan as the key metaphor for all that happens in the film. In Saegusa’s version we have what, I would argue, is a failed attempt to change the depiction of Masago—to make her less an object, the subject of men’s fantasies, and more of an active agent. The seeds for all these versions are there in the original, depending on which version of the story the audience is most convinced by. Masago is either a victim of the violence that seems an integral part of the medieval construction of masculinity and can do nothing but respond to this and feel guilty for the consequences (the tack taken by The Outrage and to some extent Iron Maze); or she is the guilty of being her husband’s murderess (Misty). Or we can assume that no one’s version is entirely true (as does the commoner) and it remains a mystery, as Cukor and Bava assume for their versions, in which even the final narrative is presented as possibly inaccurate. However, as was argued in the introduction to chapter three, for a film to be rashomon-like, it does not have to be about rape and murder (or attempted rape). As Galbraith notes in his discussion of the film, there have been any number of films that have since used the techniques and ideas of Kurosawa, and, in his opinion, resulted in better films. What does this mean? The concept of what constitutes a better film is one that I won’t discuss, but certainly the idea that there exists a genealogy of films spawned by Rashomon is worth considering. It seems that almost any film that consists of multiple points of view presented to the audience through flashbacks and that tries to solve a mystery is labeled as being like Rashomon. As was noted earlier, the use of flashback was not introduced to the West by Kurosawa, nor is the technique of many voices telling us parts of one story uniquely Japanese. It could be argued that this polyphonic technique goes as far back as Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus’ son is told about his father’s various adventures by several people. Odysseus himself tells the final, larger part of his adventures, inspiring James Joyce’s version of the story.2 Citizen Kane (Welles 1941) is another film that not only tells a complex story through more than one point of view, it is also a narrative that contains a mystery at its heart: Why does Kane say “Rosebud”



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as he dies? This film differs from Rashomon in that only the audience is involved in solving this mystery—no one else has heard these dying words. Generally, in the films that are seen to be rashomon-like, the mystery exists for someone within the narrative itself who wants to know the truth. This is not a hard and fast distinction: Bava’s version has no such “investigator” (unless we count the psychiatrist), while in Saegusa’s it is a troupe of travelers who seem to want to get at the truth, but who are content to let someone else do the judging in the city. In the main, however, the films seen to be like Rashomon present us with a mystery that is also in some way a crime. In contrast, a film like Velvet Goldmine (1998), which has an investigator who wants to get at the truth of a man’s life and supposed death, is so clearly modeled on Citizen Kane that it would make no sense to link it to the Japanese film. A few films are labeled as being like Kurosawa’s because the audience can never be sure of the truth of the stories given, but this is not an essential reason for citing Rashomon. For some, the reason to so label a film has to do with camera technique as much as the use of flashback, various points of view, and an uncertainty about “the truth.” If the film includes a woman whose motives are unclear, this seems to be another reason for labeling the film as being like Rashomon. Summed up in this way, Rashomon appears to resemble a standard murder mystery or film noir. In contrast to the modern mystery that aims to make order out of the chaos of people’s lies and arrive at a final solution that is true (as in CSI), this is not the main aim of Kurosawa’s film. However, it appears that late-twentieth/early-twentyfirst-century audiences, whether they are Western or Japanese, prefer solutions—wanting answers, we could argue, is a feature of modernity. That the solution to the problem might not be the right one or that everyone is somehow responsible—that is the occasional plot line of a cop drama, but, even so, justice must be seen to be done. The sense that wrongdoers must be caught and, ultimately, punished is central to the murder mystery. In an increasingly secular world, even the possibility of a justice that is meted out after death by God, the possibility that Dostoevsky continually returned to, no longer exists. The power to punish is now in the hands of state institutions and ordinary individuals who have chosen to become officers in the employ of the state. Moreover, members of society like to be reassured that this system works, that there are solutions to the problems caused by criminals. Since real life, clearly, does not offer this reassurance, then the genre of the crime story seems to fill the



Permutations on the Theme of Murder

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gap between expectations and reality. Allowing life to take its toll seems to be less an option in these postmodern times, even in Japan, which is enjoying a huge vogue for detective novels, than it was in the past. Thus, the theme that most rashomon-like films have in common is that while many—if not all—the story’s narrators are unreliable, the truth is finally revealed. While this is not true to the original’s intent, there is, however, one more way in which these films are like Kurosawa’s, and that is to the extent to which they depend on the audience’s dialogic imaginations. To analyze each and every film that bears some resemble to Kurosawa’s would take more than a chapter. What I propose to do here is to try and piece out various films and look at how they may have been inspired by Rashomon. The films I have chosen to consider include: The Killing (1956), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Reversal of Fortune (1990), Reservoir Dogs (1991), The Usual Suspects (1995), Run, Lola, Run (1999), Courage under Fire (1996), Memento (2000), Ghosts of Mars (2001), and the television series, Boomtown (2003). My choices are neither ad hoc nor personal: if a reviewer or an audience member has labeled the film “like Rashomon,” I have chased it down, sometimes to my disappointment. Narc (Carnahan 2002), Hoodwinked! (Edwards 2005), Hero (Ying Xiong, Zhang 2002), or Vantage Point (Travis 2008) might well inspire people to think of Kurosawa, for example, but the first one falls out of the scope of my analysis because I just don’t see the connection; the second through fourth are excluded for reasons I will discuss later.

Inspirations Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) is often cited as having been influenced by Rashomon. Given its voiceover narrative, its coterie of desperate men willing to take to crime for varied reasons, and its two main female characters, it is hard to think of a film that resembles Kurosawa’s film less. In short order the film introduces us to Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer) who has a chronically ill wife; George Peatty (Elisha Cook) and his demanding wife Sherry (Marie Windsor); Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), the “mastermind” who wants money in order to make a new life after getting out of prison; Randy Kennan (Ted deCorsia) who is tired of his job as a police officer; and Marvin Unger (Jay C. Flippen) who, we learn indirectly, is involved in the planned heist because he loves Johnny; as well as to Fay (Coleen Gray) who is Johnny’s sweet, innocent, and supportive girlfriend. It is a large



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cast of characters, yet Kubrick is able to tell the story from various points of view and through a series of flashbacks within flashbacks, laying out a timetable as tight as a train schedule. Is this enough to merit its inclusion as a film that is influenced by Rashomon? Not if we recall that other intricate flashback films such as Citizen Kane and The Locket had pre-dated the Japanese film; and that the perfect crime gone wrong premise owes much to a French film, Du Rififi chez les Hommes (1955), directed by a U.S. blacklisted Jules Dassin. There are, however, two ways in which the film might be argued to be part of the genealogy of Rashomon: Kubrick’s film is shot in black and white, and his use of shadow and light owes much to Kurosawa. There is also a moment in which Sherry Peatty manipulates her husband, George, by telling him that Johnny “abused” her, setting the scene for George’s violent explosion—a passionate incursion into the minutely plotted heist, which instead of upsetting the division of spoils actually coincides with and interrupts the robbery attempt by Sherry’s boyfriend Val Cannon (Vince Edwards). Everyone, except a late running Johnny Clay, ends up dead in a shoot out that clearly inspired Quentin Tarantino. In true film noir style, a dying George stumbles home to kill Sherry. The lying female might well be another small reference to the Japanese film. If so, it is a reference that does not understand the ambiguity of the original. In The Killing, Kurosawa’s main theme of a subjective reality is entirely undermined by the documentary-style voiceover: this is what happened, this is how it happened, is the message of the film. The factual voiceover narration is the opposite of the unreliable narrator that all the characters in Rashomon, including the director’s camera, definitely are. However, the film ends with an invitation to the audience’s imagination that might well be pure Kurosawa: an accident causes the suitcase full of money to open and, with the cash blowing away in the wind, two police officers go after Johnny Clay. As they draw their guns and he runs away, the film ends. It is up to us to imagine what happens next. The decision is explicitly ours as the audience, yet, as with the judging in Rashomon, how are we to ever know what “really” happened? Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad 1961), written by the Frenchman Alain Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain Resnais, is also cited as influenced by Rashomon. Again, as with the Kubrick film, a quick look at the film would appear to make this a rather tenuous connection. In contrast to most of the films discussed here, this one is about the total subjectivity of experience and one in




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which we doubt the reliability of the narrator: we have a man, the narrator himself perhaps, who tries to convince a woman that they met the year before. She denies knowing him and he repeatedly tells her of what they did and what they had said the previous year. Slowly, it would seem, she comes to admit knowing him. The construction of the film is even more convoluted than that of The Killing, but with no attempt at unfolding a chronology that makes any sense: scenes could be in the present or in the past; they could be of real or imagined events. In short, as with Rashomon, Last Year at Marienbad appears to reject any attempt to offer a single interpretation—it all depends on whether the audience thinks the man is lying or if the woman is lying. It could all be a dream. At the heart of the film, as with much of Robbe-Grillet’s work, is a possible crime: was the woman shot by her husband? Or does she imagine this possibility? Was it another woman at another time? Did the man fall off the balcony? It seems to me that there is a possibility that everyone is dead and in some sort of purgatory, and the only escape possible is for the man to get the woman to remember what led to their deaths: once she does this it is finally possible for them to leave the hotel and its garden. But that is my interpretation. Again, it is in this way that Marienbad most resembles the Kurosawa film: the audience must exercise their dialogic imaginations and make a choice about what they think has happened. Yet since the French film creates its “ambiguity through contradictions on many different levels: the spatial, the temporal, and the causal” (Bordwell and Thompson 2003:392) the meaning each of us creates may well be totally different from that of anyone else. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet push the idea of subjectivity further than Kurosawa, relying on the subjective interpretations of the audience as the only possible response to the film. This begs the postmodernist or deconstructionist question: can there any shared meaning at all?

“If You Tell Me the Truth, It Limits Me to What You Say . . .”3 There may well be several films made between 1969 and 1990 that deserve the description of being like Rashomon, but if so, they are rarely mentioned in the material that discusses Kurosawa’s work— this might be a very Anglo-centric view: perhaps Europe, Bollywood, China, or Japan itself continued to mine this vein. On the other hand,



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it might well be possible that nostalgia for a single shared reality dominated the mass media in these two decades, which saw the start of theorizing on the postmodern condition, and that the concept of a subjective construction of reality was relegated to horror films. That we might experience events in various ways, then, became a possibility considered only in films that may well have been influenced by Bava’s more gothic work—films such as The Abominable Dr Phibes (Robert Fuest 1971) or Fright Night (Tom Holland 1985) (cf. Twitchell 1985). The problems created by not acceding to the dominant version of reality were relegated to the terrain of dreams (Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven 1984), the possibly insane (Asylum, Roy Ward Baker 1972; Fade to Black, Vernon Zimmerman 1980), the defiantly criminal (Manhunter, Michael Mann 1986), or to those who dwelt in other societies (The Gods Must be Crazy, Weyers, Prinsloo 1981). The use of flashbacks to tell a story did not disappear as a filmic technique, but tended to be used more straightforwardly, as in any mystery where witnesses each tell a version of the story but only one is lying (think of any Agatha Christie film). What these 1970–1980s films generally share is the certainty that subjectivity and reality somehow are connected. That the weird people next door might well be vampires; that the men caring for your wife might well be responsible for her death; that dreams can kill; that small objects can set us off on great quests; that a love of film and insanity are not so far apart and that the actions taken as a result of any subjective interpretation of the facts have real consequences in life. The insistence on a subjective interpretation triggers the events of the film, thus these horror stories different from Rashomon, which explores the subjective experience in the aftermath of the event. However, the theme of not being able to learn the truth because we might be lied to or because everyone experiences events differently was a theme that resurfaced in more mainstream films from 1990. It is interesting to speculate on why this should be so. The first film in this group I would like to consider, Reversal of Fortune, predates the Gulf War—one possible source of Hollywood’s current disenchantment with the idea of a shared reality (cf. Baudrillard 1995)—so it cannot be simply a result of the U.S. public’s re-encounter with the way a government can manipulate real events. Perhaps the end of the decade of greed, the spread of a recession, and the realization that life was not always “going to get better” for every U.S. citizen were all trends that influenced the reappearance of this theme in filmmaking. If so, no film could have been a more appropriate harbinger of the




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future than Barbet Schroeder’s 1990 version of the book written by a lawyer, Prof Alan Dershowitz (1986). The story of the Claus von Bulow case is a story emblematic of the 1980s when the upper caste of old New York was shaken by the revelations about Sunny von Bulow’s marriage, life, and descent into a diabetic coma. It is a true story that reveals, at its heart, the U.S. distrust of the foreigner (a German played in the film by an English actor of course); a delight in scandals about the rich and famous, especially if about the class of the old New York elite that generally did not get written about in newspapers; and it exposes the lengths to which people will apparently go for money. But, and this is what makes the story like Rashomon, even after two trials, no one has any sense of what the truth of the matter is; and the woman at the root of the mystery remains unknowable. Schroeder’s film opens like this: a camera pans over the houses of the rich on the East coast and eventually moves in, fades and opens again in a hospital corridor. It moves down the corridor and into a room where a woman lies in a bed on life-support. Then, a voiceover begins; it is the voice of the woman herself. She refers to herself in the past tense (since the woman in question is brain dead) and she takes us back to 1979 when she was resuscitated from a previous coma. A year later, she is found unconscious again: “I never woke from this coma and I never will.” This introduction to the facts of the case is as powerful as the woodcutter walking through the forest scene in Rashomon. The camera work might not be as daring, but the camera as an independently moving agent that allows us, the audience, access to the “facts” is definitely analogous to Kurosawa’s work. The tactic of being addressed by a “dead” woman is even more interesting. In relation to the dead husband’s testimony in Rashomon, Richie and others have asked if we can trust the dead when they speak of their lives—despite the priest’s inability in Rashomon to believe that the dead could lie—and we can certainly ask this of Sunny von Bulow (Glenn Close) speaking from her long-term coma. As the film goes on to reveal, in her own voice, this is a woman who abused prescription drugs, drank, smoked, and was hypoglycemic—can we trust anything she remembers in her coma-like state? So we have our first unreliable narrator who takes us into the story of how her second husband tried to get his “guilty” conviction overturned in a case that had been brought by her children against him for attempted murder. The second unreliable narrator is Claus von Bulow (Jeremy Irons) himself. He keeps insisting that he is innocent and that his version



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of the story exonerates him, but his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver), an academic who generally takes on cases that constitute a real fight for social justice, keeps asking him not to tell “the truth.” The fact that it is not possible to be tried twice for the same crime in the United States means that he can only try and get the first conviction overturned on the basis of problems with the first trial and then to ask for a retrial. Dershowitz wants to deal only with the original miscarriage of justice. In his own words, knowing the truth limits what he, as a defense lawyer can do. This statement reflects something about the way in which the U.S. justice system currently works and highlights the conviction, shared by many Americans, that the rich do not have to go to jail for murder if their lawyers are good enough.4 It is perhaps this reality that underpins the making of Reversal of Fortune. So we cannot believe the story Claus von Bulow finally gets to tell. In fact we only hear his version of events after he has said to his lawyer: “Who do you want me to be?” and after we learn that von Bulow is a British-trained lawyer who is well aware of the malleability of facts. Thus, even if his version of his wife’s falling into a coma is true, we do not trust this man at all. Nor are we able to trust, as it turns out, the “evidence” collected by a private detective that led to the first guilty conviction. We cannot, it appears, trust the testimony of Sunny’s loyal maid, or that of any other witness. In the end, only the lawyer and his team might be trustworthy, but in their crusade to ensure a fair trial for von Bulow, are they not also capable of twisting facts? We are left at the film’s conclusion with two more possible versions of what happened given to us by the lawyer and his assistant—their attempt to get to grips with the facts of the case. Dershowitz’s assistant, Sarah (Annabella Sciorra), offers the story of a suicide attempt that coincides with von Bulow’s own version; Dershowitz offers a tale in which Claus “helped” Sunny’s suicide attempt along. We return to Sunny in her hospital bed and she tells us: “He was retried, acquitted. That is all there is. All you can know.” As a film that examines what the court system does in the United States—is there any justice being meted out, or has the legal system become an elaborate game of chance?—Reversal of Fortune is an example of the decades’ long U.S. fascination with its own institutions. The work of Scott Turow certainly prefigures this film, but Turow writes fiction, albeit in a roman à clef way, while the von Bulow case is a true story. In contrast to works of fiction, either in print, film, or television, this real case does not end in a neat solution, a crime solved. It reveals the very thing that Kurosawa proposed in




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Rashomon: that reality is messy, chaotic, and ultimately unknowable despite all our attempts to make experience cohere, to make sense of it all. Sometimes it is impossible to know what happened and, perhaps, as Rashomon suggests, the main actors might well not be sure themselves, convinced that their story tells what they experienced. In contrast to the Japanese film, however, it is innocence that is at stake here, not the problem of properly appropriating guilt. The U.S. credo that everyone is innocent until proven guilty and that a person can be found not guilty because of “reasonable doubt” runs deep. Yet the fact that guilt might well be buried in the depths of the human heart, the heart that Kurosawa said was unknowable, is possibly but not necessarily provable. Therefore, despite the many differences in the story itself, Reversal of Fortune is close to Rashomon for the very reason that we will never know the truth; being nonfiction we do not have the comfort of a neat ending. It is a much darker film as well. If Kurosawa’s film posits the existence of the compassionate judge who sees into the hearts of people, Schroeder’s gives us a legal system that is labyrinth and endlessly manipulated. Perhaps the lawyer Dershowitz and his team represent the possibility of good, honest intentions, as does the priest, and finally, the woodcutter, but in their very involvement with the system they are suspect. As one of Dershowitz’s students protests: “We become accessories in his crime!” In 1950 in Japan, Kurosawa was implying that the audience might well be accessories in a crime; in 1990 in the United States, it is the very system created for trying criminals and its servants, lawyers, who are the accessories. In both films, it is the chaotic world outside the events that is problematic: the times are evil.

The World as Hell Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs is a film some liken to Rashomon because of its very complex narrative: the flashback technique that tells of the perfect heist gone wrong. Unlike The Killing, which it otherwise strongly resembles, we never learn the full details of the heist itself. The audience is shown how the men—Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), Mr. Pink (Steven Buscemi), Mr. Blue (Eddie Bunker), and Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino)—are recruited by Nice Guy Eddie Cabot (Chris Penn) and Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney). We are also shown the moments leading up to the shooting of Mr. Orange; the fact that there



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must be a police informer in the group; and finally, the revelation of the identity of the informer. There is nothing chronological about the unraveling of the story—the flashbacks have to be organized in the audience’s mind in order for the story to cohere and this is possible, in contrast to Marienbad. It also resembles Schroeder’s film, which does not give us a straightforward chronology either; but ultimately, unlike Rashomon or Reversal of Fortune, the same core event is not retold. There is some overlapping of points of view, but the dominant story is the mystery: who is the police informer? Is the claim that Reservoir Dogs is like Rashomon really merited? Tarantino himself, always one to pay tribute to the films that influenced him, talks of the aesthetics of violence in the DVD introduction to the film: “Violence is a purely aesthetic thing. It has nothing political, there is no morality involved.” As we shall see in the discussion of Seven Samurai, the issue of an aestheticized violence was one that Kurosawa himself considered, especially as he is acknowledged as having set the standards in this area of filmmaking. Yet, Kurosawa never passed up an opportunity to impart a moral message through his work. Famously, when he had to invent the technique for showing blood spurting from a pierced heart in Sanjuro (Tsubaki Sanjûrô 1962), he did it to further the key theme of that film: that violent action is not the solution to life’s problems. In Reservoir Dogs, the “Bloody Orange” is the victim of a similar sort of horrific wound, but we are in the realm of men who think that violent action is the solution to all of life’s problems. If a burglar alarm is set off, shoot the poor girl who pressed it. If you need a car, shoot the woman driving the first available one; if you want information, torture your victim. It is the amoral world moaned about at the start of Rashomon: what does it mean that Tarantino presents it as the everyday reality of a country not at war; not in the throes of famine; nor, really, in the grip of plagues? Can we trust him as a director who claims that there is no moral message to his depiction (actually, nondepiction; famously, his camera often cuts away) of violence—that it is not political, there is no morality involved? The world Tarantino depicts is masculine, racist, and sexist to the extreme and yet it is compelling, at least to men—the police informer, shown practicing a story he will tell the other men in order to “validate” him as one of gang, suddenly finds himself in the middle of his own story. The cutting of this sequence is masterful, but the idea behind it is powerful as well: is it possible to pretend to be a criminal and not be tainted by the association with this world?




Remaking Kurosawa

In a tangential way, the story is closer to Kurosawa’s Sanjuro. In this Japanese film, the question of how better to solve one’s problems than by drawing a sword is raised by a woman and by Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) himself—because these two advocate thought before action, a bad situation is not made worse. Tarantino, by depicting a world where men’s first instinct is to kill, hit, or punish, shows us what the world is like if that sword/gun is always drawn. He may deny a moral to his story, but it can be found. This is only a Rashomon film in terms of use of the flashback as a narrative technique and, in the fact that like The Killing, the audience is left to imagine what happens at the end when the police break in—the ending is ours to invent.5 The Usual Suspects (1995) is yet another “heist gone wrong” film. The director, Bryan Singer, in the special features track of the special edition DVD (Keyser Soze: Lie or Legend?), says that “It’s a bit like Rashomon.” The film is, as one of the actors tells us in an interview, “A maze . . . of lies, not clues” (Stephen Baldwin). This description is close to how the woodcutter and priest describe the court testimonies they have heard: lies, not clues. The story, however convoluted it appears, is in the main a simple flashback told from the point of view of the one criminal who survives the bloodbath at the start of the film. Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) is forced to confess to Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), a detective who has been pursuing a former corrupt cop, Keaton (Gabriel Byrne). It is the story of how the round up of “the usual suspects” (as well as Verbal and Keaton these include McManus [Stephen Baldwin], Hockney [Kevin Pollak], and Fenster [Benicio del Toro]) leads to their coming together to pull off a robbery that in turn leads them to another robbery and, finally, to the night of the killing. Kujan forces this story, bit by bit, out of Verbal and his telling of the tale is intercut with the FBI’s attempts to get a description of the shadowy crime lord Keyser Soze from a badly burnt survivor of the massacre. Kujan does not believe in Soze, he is sure that Keaton is behind the whole event, but Verbal remains adamant: of the larger crime, killing everyone on board the ship and then killing all the usual suspects, it is Keyser Soze who is guilty. The end of the film was the sort of surprise ending that the theatres asked audiences not to give away, just as they were to do later for The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan 1999). It is this moment when all the details of Verbal’s story are revealed to be taken from odds and ends in the police officer’s office—pinned up news items, pictures of criminals, the brand name on a mug—that is the shock of the film. As the screenwriter, Christopher McQuarrie notes in the DVD



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interview: “It’s just a big, well-structured magic trick.” Of all the unreliable narrators we have encountered thus far, Verbal Kint is the most unreliable of all. Others may have lied to themselves about their actions, and, in doing so, have misrepresented themselves but only in terms of who they think they are; Verbal has just lied. As he leaves the station, his crooked gait straightens, his weak arm stretches, and we are suddenly in the presence of a man who is capable of not only lying, but who might well be the master criminal Kujan is sure does not exist. This revelation required many in the audience to see the film again in order to determine how not only the narrative, but also the camera, had lied to them— how every scene as described by Verbal could be read in an entirely different way. As Singer himself points out this is not the tack taken by Rashomon where we see the same event four different times, in four different ways—here, the audience sees everything only once. If they want a reinterpretation of the events they have no other narrator than the camera to turn to and in order to do that, they must see the film again. Again, as Singer notes, not even the camera is truthful; it sometimes focuses on objects that will trick the audience into believing Verbal’s version the first time through. This is a visual step further than that taken by Kurosawa and more on the lines of something Orson Welles might pull—as he did in F for Fake (1976). Again, it would seem that the Japanese film is being credited for something that any film student could have learned from another source. Why this might be so is something I will discuss later.

Rashomon at War The American director Edward Zwick has long acknowledged his admiration of Kurosawa; he has gone on to make The Last Samurai (2003) and in interviews he has said that he always wanted to direct a battle scene like that of Kurosawa. Courage under Fire (1996) has been called “Rashomon goes to war,” indicating a first attempt at emulating the Japanese director. In many ways the film is a carefully structured homage to the Japanese version, yet it too cannot resist offering a final, truth solution. The film opens with news clips of the events leading up to the Gulf War in 1990, including one reporter describing being in Baghdad as like being in hell. The imagery supports this, all red lighting and oil fires showing under the credits until we find ourselves observing a group of soldiers about to go into action. They are led by Colonel




Remaking Kurosawa

Nat Serling (Denzel Washington) who—after warning his men about mistakes caused by sleep deprivation, saying a prayer and a gung-ho “Let’s kill them all”—proceeds, through a complex series of events, to kill his great friend Boylar in an incident of friendly fire. Serling immediately assumes responsibility for the act, but the military hierarchy appears bent on a cover up. The case is considered “closed” and Serling is entrusted with the task of investigating the case for awarding the Congressional Medal of Honor to a helicopter pilot, Captain Karen Waldren, the first woman proposed for the medal in combat. 6 The case for the woman’s heroism is not a straightforward one and involves Serling in an investigation where we are presented with several versions of the events. The first version is that of the wounded men who were saved by Waldren’s heroism—Lt Chelli (Ned Vaughn) tells the basic story: how the medic team was unable to land to collect them because of enemy fire and, after managing to destroy an Iraqi tank, was also shot down. Stuck in a position between them and the Iraqis, the downed crew protected the wounded men until help arrived the following day, and they continued to fire an M-16 rifle even as they were rescued. The men of this crew are certain that the dead captain of the medic chopper crew deserves the Medal of Honor. When Serling goes to interview the surviving members of Waldren’s crew, he gets different versions. Raden (Tim Guinee) adds to the original tale, explaining how they used a spare fuel tank to destroy the Iraqi tank that was pinning in the wounded U.S. soldiers and then, hit by a bullet in the lung, he remembers nothing of the next three days. Waldren’s medical specialist and friend, Ilario (Matt Damon), confirms the other men’s story of heroism. In his tale, Waldren is calm, she shows no doubt, no fear, voices no thought of surrender, and even after being shot by the enemy during the night, remains in full command. Her main concern is to keep safe the wounded officer, Raden. Ilario smokes nonstop as he tells the tale and asks, when he finishes: “Is that it? Does she get the medal? Because I don’t want to have to tell that story again.” Serling asks him about the M-16 rifle that the other crew mentioned: did it run out of ammunition? Ilario is flustered and cannot answer the question. Serling, driven by his own demons (in the form of flashbacks and a pursuing reporter who wants to interview him about the events in his own case), wants to make the various versions of the story fit together somehow. He tells Brigadier General Hersheberg (Michael Moriarty) that the case is more complicated than it appears. The General refers to the rashomon effect by telling him: “No two eyewitnesses agree on



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every detail,” and threatens to have him discharged over his increasingly heavy drinking, but Serling wants to find the truth and returns to the investigation. Sergeant Monfriez is the next interviewee, a regular soldier who was sent with the rescue mission. He confirms Ilario’s story in such a way that Serling becomes even more suspicious. Pressing him to “tell the truth,” Serling gets a longer story from Monfriez who says that the Captain was afraid, a coward and that all the heroic moments of the day and night were his. In his version, Waldren wants to surrender; she cries and distracts the men while the enemy creeps up on them in the night, resulting in her being shot in the stomach. In the end, she is too afraid to let him carry her to the rescue chopper and he has to leave her, cowering in fear, behind. Monfriez claims that because she was a woman and the White House is eager not only to award a medal for heroism in this war, but also to give a woman the first medal ever for combat, no one wanted to hear any other sort of story than the original, false, story he told. Serling goes on to drink even more heavily than before. He has several conversations with Gardner (Scott Glenn), the Washington Post reporter who is pursuing him. Serling tells him: “I just want to get something clear. Get something right. Get somebody to be a hero.” Things become complicated: Ilario goes missing, the fourth crew member, Altameyer, has disappeared, and the General tells Serling to finish the investigation. Everyone wants to give Waldren the medal. Taken off the case, Serling goes back to Gardner. In return for his help in finding Altameyer, he will give Gardner the tape of the night’s events in his own case. Gardner does locate Altameyer who is dying of stomach cancer and won’t tell Serling anything. A return visit to Monfriez ends with the Sergeant killing himself and Serling is left only with a clue Ilario has given him about liking to watch playing children at his parents’ cabin by a lake. He finds the medic, who, it is now revealed, is an addict and he gets the final version of the story. In this version, Waldren is calm, she has no fear, and she saves them all by covering their backs with the M-16 as they run for the rescue chopper. But during the night the men want to surrender and in arguing with her, Monfriez accidentally shoots her in the stomach. Because he fears court martial, Monfriez lies to the rescuing crew and says that Waldren is dead when she is still alive and covering their retreat. The napalm that the rescue crew sweeps the area with probably killed her, making her a victim of “friendly fire” as in the case of Boylar. Waldren gets her posthumous medal.




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Serling gets to hear the tape recording of the night in which he killed Boylar and finds that yes, Boylar’s tank confused them by firing at them and that he, Serling, went on to save more men from friendly fire by ordering all tanks to put on their lights (not shown in the opening scenes). The reporter calls him a hero, but Serling argues to Gardner that the public needs to know “The whole hard cold truth” or Waldren and all the soldiers who have died are dishonored. The film ends with a flashback: Serling, on the morning after his own action, watches a medic chopper, piloted by Waldren, taking off. Courage under Fire is a long and somewhat disjointed film. Serling keeps finding bits of his conversation with Ilario on tape that we have not heard; the events in his own case are hard to follow; and the unhappy guilt he suffers from, through conversations with his wife, is perhaps overemphasized. Nevertheless this is an interesting first Gulf War film made by a director, Zwick, whose earlier film Glory (1989) was about the black troops who fought in the American Civil War. Clearly there is an agenda here besides that of updating Kurosawa’s own film. The very fact of the Gulf War is part of the film’s main concern. This is the war that was seen to be an entirely media-dominated event, so much so that the French theorist Baudrillard (1995) claimed it wasn’t a real war at all. The government’s motives for going to war were considered to be suspect by many as well. Thus Zwick reveals a concern with the lies that society and its institutions tell, just as Kurosawa does. However, whereas the Japanese film inverts the story so that the lies are a form of the truth, this U.S. film gives us lies that are just that. Moreover, the investigator who wants the truth is also, by his own admission, guilty—as Kurosawa implies the viewing audience is—but he is also ultimately a hero. This is Zwick’s concern in much of his work, the way in which honorable men do their duty and accept responsibility for their actions. The theme is, perhaps, meant to be something Zwick has borrowed from Kurosawa, but it is somewhat different from the message of Rashomon. Not the issue, Dostoevskian as it has been argued, of responsibility, but the whole concept of honor. It is the idea of “honor” that is used in The Outrage but is not broached in the original Japanese film where Masago only once mentions her “disgrace” and her husband (in the woodcutter’s version) calls her a “shameless whore.” I am not saying that there is no idea of honor in Japan—there are various terms used in relation to the concept7—but that in Rashomon, as Richie notes, it is ego manifested as pride and human responsibility, not honor that are at stake.



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The problems of Rashomon are the problems of everyone; in Courage under Fire the problems are those suffered by those who serve their country as soldiers. Baudrillard may have argued that the war was not real, but Zwick shows that real men suffered, fought, and died. Not just men, but women. The Gulf War was the first war in which women were sent into combat as opposed to serving on the margins. This was, and remains, a problem for many: the idea that women, the ones who are meant to be protected in times of war, are capable of fighting like men. This has proved problematic even for feminists, many of whom have argued that women are naturally more peaceful, less violent than men. Zwick, just as he was keen to tackle the case of forgotten African American soldiers and their heroism during the American Civil War, confronts the issues head on. Karen Waldren is not only brave, calm, and unafraid, she is a heroine who is undone by her own men’s fears—fears that they express in terms of a sexist distrust of her ability to command. Just as it could be argued that Masago is a victim of men’s fantasies and expectations in Rashomon, the same could be said of Waldren. In both cases these women are destroyed by men’s reactions to them as women: the Japanese woman raped because of a chance breeze and a bandit’s whim, then disowned by the husband who could not protect her; the American woman is also violated by being disobeyed and finally abandoned by her own fearful men who then go on to lie in order to protect themselves. More than Misty then, Courage under Fire is a feminist variation of the Akutagawa story: the woman fights back. It is her undoing and ends in her death. Hers is certainly not the heroic death one might expect in battle, she had to fight not only the enemy, but her own men who would not accept her as their superior. As a permutation, or working out of the original story, this film is a “fighting document” (cf. Brode 2000:9) about the respect that all soldiers, regardless of gender, deserve. Liberal in its overall political view of the Gulf War and in relation to the place of women in armed combat, it is nevertheless conservative in its view of military honor and glory. This last makes Courage under Fire a version of Rashomon that begins with the same premise, the difficulty of getting to the truth, but ends very differently. The audience does not have to exercise their imagination to decide what is true or not: Serling does that for us, sometimes even imagining events of which he has no knowledge, like Waldren singing to her men and her daughter. As with The Outrage and Misty, the film is uncomfortable with not knowing, and it falls back on the device so common in mysteries: the second but “true” telling of someone’s tale.




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The next film, Run, Lola, Run (Lola Rennt, Tykwer 1998) has no reservations about leaving it to the audience’s dialogic imaginations. If this is a Rashomon-like film, as has been suggested by Galbraith among others, it is a version for the video game generation. This fastpaced and sometimes exhilarating film’s premise is simple: Manni (Moritz Bleitreu) is a small-time crook who manages to leave a bag of cash on the underground train next to a homeless man (Joachim Krol). He is certain that his boss will kill him unless, within twenty minutes, he can deliver the 100,000 marks. He rings his lover, Lola (Franka Potente), to tell her this and to berate her because she was not there to give him a lift on her moped, forcing him to take the train. She makes him promise not to do something stupid, like rob the supermarket round the corner, while she tries to collect the money. The rest of the film consists of three versions in which she attempts to do this. In the first version she goes to her banker father (Herbert Knaup), who, furious after a fight with his mistress, refuses to help her. Lola meets up with Manni just as he heads toward the supermarket to rob it and ends by helping him. They come out to find the police in wait for them and Lola is shot. Dying, she remembers a conversation she has had about love with Manni and proceeds to “replay” the last twenty minutes. In the second telling, Lola hangs up the phone, runs out of the flat, past her mother in the same way as in the first version, but she trips on the stairs on her way. As a consequence, her encounters (literal runins) with people on the way are not the same, the timing is somewhat changed by the slightly different start. Her father also has a different argument with his mistress and is much tougher on Lola as a result. On her way out of the bank she takes the guard’s gun and returns to hold her father captive. She forces him to hand over 100,000 marks and runs with the bag of cash to meet Manni, catching him before he enters the supermarket. An ambulance, which Lola has encountered in both versions, hits Manni and as he lies dying he recalls the conversation with Lola (although somewhat differently) and proceeds to “replay” the events again. The third time Lola avoids crashing into a woman on the way down the stairs, and also misses a run-in with a car driven by a friend of her father’s. As a result, when she arrives at the bank, her father has been collected by the friend and is not there. The two men go on to become involved in a car crash that leaves the friend dead and the



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father injured. In the meantime Manni sees the homeless man (who has been in the previous versions but unspotted by him or Lola) and gives chase. Lola sees a casino and argues her way in. She wins the 100,000 marks and hitches a lift in the ambulance, affording her a touching moment with her injured father. Then Lola arrives just in time to see Manni leaving the car of his boss—he has exchanged his gun for the money with the homeless man. With an extra 100,000 marks in hand, the couple wander off into the distance. The fast editing, occasional use of cartoon images, and minivignettes where the future of minor characters is rapidly presented in montage, make this film very like a music video. The three versions of events, no one labeled as more true than the other, are perhaps the one way in which it resembles Rashomon, but these versions are not subjective readings of the same event, rather they are alternative constructions of what might happen. In the notes for the DVD Tykwer says: The sequences with Lola and Manni are shot on 35mm. The others, where Lola and Manni are not involved, were shot on video—in a kind of synthetic, artificial world. That places Lola and Manni at the centre of their world, in which miracles can happen just like in the movies. The film image is true, and the others are untrue, as it were.

Perhaps the director is correct to argue that something about his process is a first—the idea that the contrast between 35mm film and video is equivalent to the difference between reality and artificiality is an interesting one. Why should the use of older film techniques be “more true”? In fact, for Tykwer it is important that 35mm film makes the characters seem more real and powerful enough to change their reality. But they can only do this “like in the movies”—we certainly cannot do this in real life. The key to this, according to the director, is the power of Lola’s love: “It is this woman’s passion alone that brings down the rigid rules and regulations of the world surrounding her.” In short, Lola is a far more active agent than Masago could ever be in Rashomon; she is powerful enough to change reality, making her perhaps somewhat akin to the version of Masago given to us in Misty. The German film, however, is a more satisfying portrait of the woman as a sort of powerful deity—we know that she does everything she does out of love, her actions make sense within this context. In Misty, we know that Masago is avenging her mother, but remain confused as to why she does things in the way she does. However,




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despite its German setting, this is definitely not a film about guilt (Manni, Lola’s great love, is a crook) nor about morality. No one comes out very well: from Lola’s gossipy, disinterested mother (Nina Petri) to her philandering father. Even the people Lola bumps into are revealed to be thieves, drug addicts, religious fanatics, or sexual perverts. The message might well be that in the corrupt world of the late twentieth century, only love has a sort of redeeming power. This is possibly an apt message in post-reunification Germany, but it is not Kurosawa’s point: for him it was the taking of responsibility that mattered. Even so, we never learn if there is one “real” account of the events in Run, Lola, Run. Yet it is worth noting that of all the films we have looked at thus far, it has been only the European films (Quanta Volte . . . Quella Notte, Last Year in Marienbad and given their foreign-born directors, Les Girls and Reversal of Fortune) that leave the “truth” up to the audience to determine. In this vein, the film Memento by the British director Christopher Nolan (2000) is a film that some people have, in conversation, mentioned as being like Rashomon. This is a more difficult one to tackle, since the English director, speaking in an interview on the DVD special features, acknowledges a heavy debt to film noir and the film Double Indemnity (Wilder 1944) in particular. Pushed to name an admired director, Nolan says Orson Welles. In many ways, the film stands as a reminder of how thin the line is between the filmic permutations on Rashomon and film noir as a genre. Memento is a story about one man’s subjective construction of the world, a man who has chosen one way in which to interpret the world and to present himself. This character, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), is, to reiterate Richie’s point about the characters in Rashomon, not able to become anything other than what he is. Leonard, like the characters in the Japanese film, is proud of himself and of how he copes with the disability of not being able to remember anything in the present for longer than ten minutes. There is a hint, in his obsession with the story of another man with his condition, that the state he exists in is psychological and not physical—that it is a self-induced state that serves to conceal his own guilty actions from himself. In this way, it could be said, Leonard as a character seems to be an extreme example of the sort of subjectivity in which the characters in Rashomon exist. Unlike them, however, his amnesia-like condition prevents him from ever having to assume responsibility for his actions: he forgets them almost as soon as he completes them. His system for remembering— notes, photographs, and tattoos on his body—becomes labyrinth,



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subject to his constant reinterpretation and his construction, and, as the character Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) suggests, is only the truth as Leonard wants it to be. Despite his insistence on the “facts,” his ability to forget the why of a fact, its reason for being significant, renders his world meaningful only on his own terms. As the director suggests, Leonard is thus everyman—reliant on his notes, diary, or mnemonic habits in order to “remember” and be able to construct a narrative that makes sense of his world. The story, told linearly but backward and in short segments that are intercut with Leonard telling a long story on the phone (this is filmed in black and white as opposed to the color of the rest of the film), resembles Marienbad in intent, if not in complexity of structure. We, the audience, learn some truths through the flashbacks as they are juxtaposed with the story being told on the phone, but we never learn the solid truths about Leonard: did he accidentally kill his wife? Has he already found his wife’s attacker? Is Teddy a friend, a police officer, a snitch? How many men has Leonard murdered during his investigation? How long has it been since his condition set in? These are details left to us to imagine. Like the narrator in Marienbad, the world seems to be Leonard’s own and no one else’s—how can we ever understand what is true and what is not? Despite Nolan’s assertion of a rather thin genealogy for his filmic inspirations—he also cites Angel Heart (Parker 1987) and The Sixth Sense—it would appear that he has fallen back on the use of “tropes” we might well associate with Kurosawa.

Cop in Rashomon-land John Carpenter’s Ghost of Mars (2001) is a film whose worth is hotly contested by many arguing their case on the Internet. Is it a truly awful film? Or is it tongue-in-cheek and far better than generally appreciated? Whatever side the opponents are on, they all seem to agree that it is Rashomon-like in structure. The story is told by a police officer, Melanie Ballard (Natasha Hensbridge), to an inquisitor (Rosemary Forysth) and told in flashback. Ballard is trying to account for the fact that all her fellow officers have died and their prisoner has escaped. Within her own story, she tells stories that other people have narrated to her and they appear in flashback as well. These flashbacks tell a tale of the awakened ghosts of Mars, who possess the new human colonizers of the planet. So far, rather intriguing it could be said. The heroine is also flawed, her story




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rendered somewhat unreliable by her admitted use of drugs. Add an ending in which we see the film’s two main characters—Ballard and James “Desolation” Williams (Ice Cube)—heading out to face the ghosts, but that leaves us knowing nothing of their fate and we might say that John Carpenter, whose 1982 remake of The Thing (Nyby 1951) was generally considered to be better than the original, is on form. The sepia tones of the film, his attempt to make Mars look different from Earth, are all successful. The film does fall down in its depiction of the possessed humans: the ghosts seem to turn them into poor, even racist, caricatures of aboriginals; and whenever he has any doubts about plot structure, Carpenter puts in a fight scene. The heroine is tough and in the mould of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) from Alien (Scott 1979) to the point of (comically?) being taken over by a ghost only to have her drug-permeated body reject the possession. But as a film inspired by Rashomon there is little to merit the assertion other than the flashback structure and the unreliability of Ballard as a narrator. Yet, just as some have mentioned in passing that Memento is like Rashomon, so too is this a firmly held idea about Carpenter’s film. The next chapter considers the reasons for this before looking at the very last of the Rashomon permutations, the television series Boomtown.



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And on Television . . . “Where to Sherlock?” —Nolan 20001

Introduction If the remakes of Rashomon all took the rape as part of their central premise, the permutations on the film have tackled all sorts of other aspects: murder; memory; the world as hell; subjective understandings of the world; the position of women in society; the (in)ability to accept responsibility; questions of truth, of innocence and guilt. No single film is about all these things, although each film could be said to share the assumption that social reality consists of the stories people tell about themselves: how they choose to remember and explain their actions. Whether this is the same as hard, objective, even Platonic, facts is another question altogether. The films tend to present a contrast between the certainty that facts, in and of themselves can reveal the truth, and the assumption that simple facts can only point to or signify what are more complex events. What is left out of the first assumption, as Teddy tries vainly to explain to Leonard Shelby, is that humans interpret facts. The great flaw in Leonard’s construction of his world is that his lapses of memory make it impossible for him to construct a consistent version from his facts; he is not like the narrator in Marienbad who, if he is lying is doing so consistently, persistently, and thus manages to convince the woman of his version of events. He effectively constructs a new version of reality. Nor is he like Monfriez in Courage under



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Fire who, once his version is challenged, chooses not to live with the consequences. Thus, save for—ironically enough—Reversal of Fortune, most permutations invert the central premise of Rashomon; that is, they assume that subjective points of view all cohere into one grand narrative. There can be one correct interpretation of the facts, one that we all can agree on. This may well be based on a reading of the Japanese film that assumes that the woodcutter’s tale is the true version, that there has been a crime and a solution. However as mentioned in the last chapter, there appear to exist various tropes, repeated themes or techniques, associated with Kurosawa’s work. The use of multiple flashbacks has become such a trope, especially in the genre of police procedurals. This trope has acquired the label “the rashomon technique.” I first heard this term in a long promotional ad for Sky’s showing of, ironically enough, CSI. The actor Paul Guilfoyle (Capt Jim Brass) noted that the program is groundbreaking because it uses this technique: different points of views and flashbacks tell the story in such a way as to lead the audience through to the final solution. In fact, episode twenty-one of CSI’s season six was entitled Rashomama to make the link between the technique and the film clear, although as a reference to the main female character as being “difficult,” the title was also a pun: Demon Mama. This is not what Kurosawa, basing this part of his film firmly on the original story by Akutagawa, posits: he gives us a film in which we never know the truth. Schroeder’s film, telling us a story based on “real life,” reflects this accurately. The other films discussed engage the audience’s dialogic imagination in an entirely different way. Like the novels that Bakhtin was analyzing, they offer endings that could not be called happy—being somewhat true to the idea that we can never predict all of life’s events—they are partial endings. It is up to the audience to decide what happens next. In fact it is not just a question of whether the characters live happily ever after and what that might constitute, but whether the characters even get to live that is often the puzzle we are left with (The Killing, Reservoir Dogs, Run, Lola, Run, Memento, Ghosts of Mars). Mysteries, traditionally, offer us tidy solutions: the criminal is caught, presumably brought to justice (sometimes even within the story itself) and the survivors go on. In contrast, these films appear in part to reflect life as it is experienced: generally we manage to agree on a version of past events, but do not always know what is next; do not always get the complete truth; or we might assume that it will be



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years before the events work themselves to a conclusion. These films are “slices” of life we might say, and, as stories, inconclusive slices that beg for something more to be known or decided. Yet, interestingly, precisely because they reflect the chaos that is real life, they are not films open to sequels—do we really want a definite answer on whether anyone survives the slaughter at the end of Reservoir Dogs or if poor Johnny Clay ends up in prison again in The Killing? Do we want to know if there are really ghosts on Mars, rather than it all being Ballard’s drug-induced imagination? The film ends with her heading out to face the ghosts, but she has taken another dose of her drug of choice just before this: is she hallucinating it all? Does the audience want to know or would they rather imagine their own version? The directors of these films seem confident that we would rather imagine the “what next” ourselves. This is a distinct contrast to what happens in the series Boomtown, which, because of the constraints of the medium, television, takes a somewhat different tack. Boomtown, hailed by the critics as groundbreaking (again), appeared to have taken seriously the concept of “the rashomon technique” and applied it assiduously through its first season eighteen-episode story arch that left some threads dangling at the end, as it were, but that also provided “closure” for some of its main characters. Yet, each episode is the complete telling of one series of events, with introduction, middle, and clear end. With eighteen episodes, it would take too long to unravel all the aspects of Boomtown that might be of interest; it should be enough, however, to outline the premise of the series and to focus on the episode that most resembles Rashomon. The series is another crime show, a variety of programming that appears currently to saturate U.S. television. There have been many variations of the theme in recent years: Homicide, Life on the Street; Law and Order (with spin-offs); The Shield; the already mentioned CSI and its spin-offs; The Third Watch, Brooklyn South, The Sopranos, and Oz to name just a few. If we think of most of these programs as involving the solving of a mystery as well as delving, over the many weeks, into the personal lives of the crime fighters, lawyers, or criminals, we could add others that use this formula: X Files, The Practice, or The Agency (an attempt to reassure U.S. citizens that the CIA knows what it is doing). Add to it light comedy mysteries such as Diagnosis Murder, and reruns of old series like Perry Mason, Cagney and Lacey, Murder, She Wrote, or Columbo (to name just a few) and we might imagine that American viewers watch nothing but crime




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programs. 2 What we can say is that the crime series remains a dominant formula and that Boomtown tried to do something innovative with the basic premise: crime is committed, criminals have to be caught by increasingly human and unhappy officials; then, in some variations on this, they have to be tried by a justice system that is overworked and on the verge of collapse. What did Yost, the series producer, do? He gave the audience the now rather common large cast of main characters—seven in this case—and presented almost every episode from all seven points of view, in, often overlapping, flashbacks. Events from the point of view of other characters—the criminal, a victim—are also included and, in the first two episodes, even dead characters were allowed their flashback version of events. The technique is certainly polyphonic. Some sequences run backward to the moment of the crime, reminiscent of Memento. The main cast of seven are not all police officers; there are four of these: two detectives, Joel Stevens (Donnie Wahlberg) and his partner Bobby “Fearless” Smith (Mykelti Williamson); and two uniformed officers, Ray Hechler (Gary Basaraba) and Tom Turcotte (Jason Gedrick). We also have the deputy district attorney, David McNorris (Neal McDonough); an ambulance paramedic, Teresa Ortiz (Lana Parrilla); and a reporter, Andrea Little (Nina Garbiras). The last character is, in some ways, the most important. For a large part of the series, it is possible to trace all the narratives back to events Andrea has either witnessed or might have been told, afterward, by the other characters. One way or another, she has access to almost everyone in the series (save for the dead!). The series opening credits would appear to offer us a clue as to her centrality as possible purveyor of all the narratives: she appears lying down, dozing—possibly dreaming—and turns in a restless way, the camera pans past her to focus on a framed print of the founder fathers of Los Angeles offering an apple to a “native” girl. Andrea is the granddaughter of the Little who sold all the orange groves of the county to developers in order to make his fortune (an allusion, perhaps, to Polansky’s Chinatown, 1974). In her eagerness to prove herself as something more than a spoiled rich girl, she seems to be always on call, always ready to investigate a story, follow an injustice and get involved. In fact, at the start of the series, Andrea is having an affair with David McNorris, affording her yet more access to all sides of the stories. Although she ends the affair by the fifth episode, Andrea remains close to McNorris, who is still in love with her. She continues to feel guilty about being the other woman; and is



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concerned about his drinking, which reminds her of her own relationship with her alcoholic father. Andrea’s guilt is shared, in different ways, by all the series’ characters. This is an interesting development of Kurosawa’s characters who all feel responsible for the murder. In Boomtown, McNorris feels guilty about cheating on his wife, and about his increasing resemblance to his own father, a corrupt Mr. Fix-it for politicians on the East Coast. Tom Turcotte carries a burden of guilt over his father’s career as well: Paul Turcotte, was a police officer long investigated for corruption and forced to retire before being prosecuted by Internal Affairs. Tom’s partner, Ray Hechler, is still under suspicion for corruption. Ray’s former partner has disappeared with money that some wonder— especially Andrea as a reporter—if he also doesn’t have access to. This cloud of suspicion means that his fellow officers do not trust him and Ray’s relationship with the detectives, Stevens and Fearless, is especially fraught. While Tom’s relationship with his father is occasionally touched on, especially in episodes four (Reelin’ in the Years) and eighteen (Lost Child); Ray’s anger at the others’ suspicion of him is mentioned in almost every episode. We never learn whether he is guilty or not, but his desire to prove himself a good cop drives Ray to acts of bravery, compassion, and sometimes foolishness (e.g., episodes three, The Squeeze; seven, Insured by Smith and Wesson; twelve, Sinaloa Cowboys; fifteen, Storm Watch; and sixteen, Fearless). Fearless Smith, we learn as the series evolves, feels guilt both over the death of his friend Freaktown (Miguel A. Munez, Jr.) in the Gulf War and over his own sexual abuse as a child (episodes six, The Freak; and sixteen, Fearless). Fearless is as interesting a character as Andrea; he has a story for everything it seems, and sometimes he tells the same story with a different ending, depending on what the situation requires. He is both an unreliable narrator in this sense, but also the most reckless and inspired of the police officers (episodes six, The Freak, and eight, Crash). Fearless is also a sympathetic partner to Stevens who is struggling with a depressed wife and with trying to maintain the lie that she was injured in an accident, rather than in a suicide attempt. Stevens, we learn by the end of the series, is also carrying a burden of guilt—not just his increasing attraction to Teresa, the paramedic (e.g., episodes five, All Hallow’s Eve; and thirteen, Home Invasion), but also due to the fact that he feels responsible for the death of his second child, the death being the very reason for his wife’s depression since she feels guilty about what appears to be




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a case of SIDS. Teresa, the paramedic, reveals in episode thirteen that she does all that she does—not just her medical work, but hospice work—because she promised her mother, whom she “helped” to die when the pain from her cancer grew too great, to always help others. The themes of guilt and responsibility are the most dominant in the series and the two emotions are the engines that appear to drive each and every one of the main characters. In this we have a clear development of Kurosawa’s Dostoevsky-inspired ideas: it is not the wrong that we have done that matters as much as what we chose to do in the light of our “sins.” While the bandit boasts, the woman weeps and the dead man bewails his place in hell, it is the woodcutter who acts—he takes on the responsibility of the child. This does not make him less guilty, but it does work toward mitigating his guilt. He is, in a Buddhist sense, making merit. So too, albeit it in Christian terms, are all of the characters in Boomtown—only McNorris, struggling with a drinking problem, ever seems in danger of being paralyzed by his guilt, he is the character most at risk, struggling at every turn to try and do the right thing. Ultimately—as Fearless says in the very first episode, “I don’t have a prayer, but I do have a story”—none of the characters remains as they are, the series is about their stories and, as a result, the changes they undergo: becoming closer as friends and colleagues; struggling to do the “right thing”; to correct old wrongs; and, in almost every episode, to bring the consciousless bad guys to justice. The contrast between the very human good guys and the bad is most clearly made by looking at the episode that deals most directly with issues taken from Rashomon: Home Invasion. This episode, the thirteenth of the series, is about a gang of criminals who find their way into people’s houses, hiding and waiting until the night, when they come out to kill everyone, first raping the wife while the husband watches. The police see a link between two families murdered in this way—they have used the same car parking service when going out to eat in the evening—and try to track down the next possible victims. The case is one that upsets everyone, and in an echo of the opening dialogue in Rashomon, Stevens says: “This is why cops talk to other cops. My wife wouldn’t understand this.” Fearless tells him: “It’s not understandable.” Whatever these men feel guilty about, they have not yet crossed the line that makes the logic of these criminals accessible to them; they don’t understand why criminals do what they do, although they can assess the facts to work out what has happened, in what order, and when it might happen again.



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Andrea has also worked out the valet parking link and insists on being part of the investigation. The first suspect they trace, however, dies before he can be questioned and, working on the clues provided by his belongings, the police set up a stake-out in the house of the family, the Steins, they think has been targeted as next. Joel Stevens is in the house, Ray Heckler outside (Ray cynically implies that Joel has asked for him as back up because he does not trust Fearless not to kill the criminals). Also inside is Teresa Ortiz, who as a volunteer hospice worker, takes the place of the night nurse that the husband, played by Joe Spano, 3 of the household needs as he is in the last stages of cancer. The night is made more complicated, or perhaps more interesting, by Mr. Stein’s refusal to leave his house: since he is dying anyway, why should he flee before the would-be murderers? His wife, then, also refuses to leave. During the night, Teresa confesses to Mr. Stein that she helped her mother kill herself and, admits to Joel that she is interested in him. By daybreak, nothing has happened and the police leave, wondering if they have not made a mistake, and the couple’s daughters return home. A flashback reveals that the murderers are waiting up in the attic, aware of the police’s presence and glorying in the idea that by doing their “work” after they leave, they will have outwitted the cops. Joel, however, sees a meter reader making his rounds and remembers, also in flashback, a report about a meter reader doing the rounds the previous day. He and Ray go back into the house and Joel takes Mr. Stein’s place in bed. When the criminals enter the room and threaten him with a gun, Joel sits up and shoots; then, chasing the other man through the house, he and Ray hear a shot. They find that Mr. Stein has shot the man with a rifle and is preparing to shoot again. Joel tries to stop him: “It’s murder.” Ray uses reverse psychology: “Go ahead,” he says and somehow, this calms Mr. Stein down. They lead him out of the house without his firing again. This episode clearly calls on many of the events of Rashomon: the criminal’s gaze that has the power to turn innocent passers-by (in a car rather than on a horse) into victims. The desire that expresses itself as the impulse to cause others pain: that is the children are killed and wife raped while the husband, bound and gagged, is forced to watch. The rage that the husband feels (interestingly, save for Mrs. Stein’s refusal to leave her husband’s side, we know nothing of what she thinks or feels) at the very thought that this is the criminals’ plan is, in this story, not turned inward nor focused on the woman, but directed at the rapists themselves. However, the idea that shooting in self-defense




Remaking Kurosawa

is justified—a man should defend himself and his family—but also that killing someone in cold blood is murder, are additional themes that draw attention to the thin line between what is right or wrong. Bound up in all this are other ideas about what is allowable: helping a pain-wrecked, cancer-ridden mother to take enough painkillers to die could be wrong, it seems, perhaps even a crime under the law, but in terms of Teresa’s responsibility to her mother, it was the right thing to do. As with all the episodes in the series, Home Invasion considers the rights and wrongs of responsible action and draws a line between what is murder and what is justifiable. More to the point, it makes clear how the characters in the series deal with moral dilemmas not just in their jobs, but also in everyday life—as we all do. Teresa’s dying mother, Joel’s depressed wife and his growing affection for another woman, are not situations unique to them. Nor is Andrea’s guilt over her affair with McNorris; his sense of remorse that allows her to manipulate him; Fearless’ sometimes dangerous subjectivity; or Ray’s tactic of advising others to do their worst—they are all possibilities that any member of the audience might encounter. Even the obvious post-September 11 nightmare of the very prospect of a home invasion (with all its meanings, I would argue, fully intended)—all of this is meant to speak to the audience. In Bakhtin’s terms, the series is densely polyphonic, heteroglossic, and certainly calls on the dialogic imagination. But, this episode aside, is all of this enough to justify the label of being like Rashomon for the series as a whole? The answer to this is only if we are willing to accept the concept of “the rashomon technique”—a concept that appears to have entered the vocabulary of people who work in the mass media of film and television. I have outlined what this technique seems to include more than once and I have also noted that there is nothing particularly “Kurosawa” about aspects of this technique: telling a story from more than one point of view, and through flashbacks was not something he invented. The shock of Rashomon, to repeat, was in its assertion that social reality was constructed through our subjective experiences and that these experiences might not coalesce into a “rational” narrative despite the human desire for cogent stories. It allowed for a sense of responsibility, a sense of guilt, to be shared amongst various people who might well be sure that they are each responsible for the same person’s death. It examined the sin of pride (rather than celebrating it, as the producer and writer of Misty claim to do, cf. Yamaguchi 1997) and the hell that is created by people’s inability or refusal to change.



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Interestingly, many of the films I have discussed consider this last issue—The Killers, Reversal of Fortune, Reservoir Dogs, Memento, and perhaps, if its moral is about the changing role of women in the military, Courage under Fire. But it is only the more drawn out medium of the television series, almost eighteen hours worth of viewing, which explores the possibilities to their fullest extent. However, Boomtown is firmly American in its tenor as well as in its use of dominant tropes: it is a cop show par excellence and many of its themes are not new to the genre. In contrast to a postwar Japan or Europe where history was remade by fascist ideology and then recreated again by a victorious occupying Army, neither Boomtown nor most of the films discussed question the dominant construction of reality. They do not ask “can there be a single truth,” but assert “there is a single truth.” They always offer us a final version, a coherent version in which all the pieces come together and one reality is proposed. Only Marienbad, Run, Lola, Run and because of Ballard’s drug usage, Ghosts of Mars, suggest something other: that reality is what we make of it—Memento also does this but blames it on a disability. Reversal of Fortune does not offer a final truth, but it does offer a caveat about the importance of a justice system that tries to make the right decisions, while The Usual Suspects asks us to be impressed by the most unreliable of unreliable narrators: the camera. In Rashomon the camera may be unreliable but does not lie nor, really, do the humans. It is our subjective interpretation of the facts that is at stake. In this sense, the idea of a rashomon technique misses the point of the original that could be read as a commentary on the human need to use narratives as a way of creating and protecting a distinctive sense of self. That this need contradicts dominant rationalist discourses about an objective reality is not only the point of Rashomon, but also a “fact” of life.4 Novels and films, then, often explore how subjectivity coheres into the consensus we call social reality. Yet, as I argued in chapter one, inherent within the genres themselves is the implicit ability to question dominant constructions of reality. Occasionally these forms of fiction bravely, explicitly, challenge this cozy construction of the world. The explicit challenge, however is not one with which audiences are entirely comfortable—hence the permutations that shift the dialogic question from “what really happened” to “what happened next”? That there is difference between what directors think U.S. and European audiences will accept is a point that needs to be reiterated in relation to the films reviewed here. The question is whether this




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is due to the fact that U.S. society is suffused with Judeo-Christian values in a way that European societies—with a longer history of anti- clericalism and growing agnosticism, as well as a greater experience of the failure of political ideologies—no longer are, or if it is an example of how local cinemas create themselves as different in light of the hegemony of the Hollywood film. The answer is probably that it is a little bit of both. Moreover, uncomfortable as some of these films might make audiences, the films considered here have achieved nearglobal critical and economic success. But why insist on the existence of the rashomon technique? There is much to be said about the modern generation of filmmakers and their desire to establish themselves in the light of an appropriate filmic genealogy. I will elaborate on this in the upcoming “interval” and return to the question in the conclusion, but, before doing so, want to consider other remakes of Kurosawa films: the films spawned or inspired by Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Hidden Fortress each of which presents us with different facets of what happens when narratives are translated across cultures.



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Marge: “You liked Rashomon!” Homer: “That’s not how I remember it.” —The Simpsons, “Thirty Minutes over Tokyo,” May 16, 1999

I have examined Rashomon and its remakes/permutations in some detail and the films merited this close examination for a variety of reasons. The first is that given the “shock” of the film’s initial reception—that something so interesting could come from Japan, that such an unusual story with no clear ending could be so compelling—it is significant that an attempt to remake the film followed within the decade. That is, despite an apparent disjuncture between cultures, as well as a Western postwar sense that Japan was beyond understanding, leading to a “romantic” interaction with this exotic Other that always assumes difference, the story, its narrative strategies and concepts were quickly incorporated into the Western canon. In English, the term rashomon effect is a well-known sociological description of the subjectivity of witnesses’ testimony and, in the media world, the rashomon technique describes a particular narrative strategy. Second, the use of the multiple flashback and several characters’ point of view as narrative strategies in a film such as, for example, Hero, Hoodwinked! or Vantage Point, immediately sets some segments of the audience to discussing the assumed relationship to Rashomon (see the IMDB discussion board for films Rashomon is referenced in). This relationship can often seem tangential. In Hero, the allusion is less to Rashomon than to Kurosawa’s battle scenes in



A Short Interval: Rashomon and the Desire Lines of the Imagination

Remaking Kurosawa

general; and the flashbacks are interesting only in relation to how the emperor sees through a series of fictive narratives and manages to construct a single true version rather than to the subjectivity of the each story. It is tempting to analyze the film in terms of a particular modern Chinese sensibility about authority and the need for strong if tough leaders. Yet the sense that Kurosawa’s film is somehow the inspiration remains. In Hoodwinked! and Vantage Point the rashomon technique is used to solve a mystery. In the former it is part of a strategy to make the film interesting for adults as well as children. In the latter film, the bringing together of the different points of view reveals the identity of the terrorist at the heart of the plot, speaking clearly to an American post-9/11 sense of fear, but not to Kurosawa’s original intent. Vantage Point, in contrast to the original film, seems intent on portraying hard and fast truths. Film critics in the United Kingdom, for example, were quick to dismiss the rashomon reference and yet as a technique several of the actors refer to it in the DVD interviews. Thus the comparison to Rashomon is an intertextual reference that is made about any number of films. In short, we cannot ignore the propensity to make connections between films. This leads to my third point: referring back, either as filmmaker or a as member of a film audience, to the work of a great director is part of our modern knowledge capital. I use this term as a corollary to Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of cultural capital. I have already discussed how, in a business sense, knowledge capital refers to way in which knowledge can be used as capital in profitable ways by filmmakers. In a more quotidian manner, when discussing audiences, I am referring here to knowledge used as capital in order to assume superiority over others who may, in general, possess more cultural capital. For someone to argue that something about the film Hero is like Rashomon is a strategy used to display a wide knowledge of films in general and foreign films in particular. In this sense it is not so much about how we are formed by our access to cultural capital, but how we use knowledge as cultural capital to make ourselves in ways that are not part of a dominant ideology. To be better educated may no longer be simply enough in the daily human interactions that often seem to resemble primate chest thumping. Being well educated and knowing about art, music, and foreign films is part of the status-making process within the capitalist class system. To be well educated, know about the classical arts, and to be able to say something about popular culture, as well as to see the relationship between the two, is a description of a different sort of status, one that



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may have little value in the wider world of class hierarchies, but that relates to subcultures and their formation. Such uses of knowledge capital signify a certain lifestyle in the Weberian sense and appear to be fundamental to our understanding of how commodities work in postmodernity. Knowledge capital can also be subversive, undermining cultural capital. Internet discussions of films often come down to this sort of arguing, question asking (“Does anybody know . . .?” someone will begin), disputes over interpretations offered and all to what end we might ask?. What does it matter if “anonymous of Toledo” is sure they have understood the film, can explain it, and are able to support their reading by making film connections? In modern Western societies where to be able to critique is almost as important an ability as to create, there seems to be a great deal of significance attached to this sort of knowledge capital. As Logan has argued in relation to the Internet: “We’re all critics now” (1999). In its more positive light, such an ability to critique, to display our knowledge capital is as much part of an impulse to create connections between people who share the same interests/obsessions as we do, as it is an attempt to assert dominance. Displaying this capital is both a way of knowing and being in the world, evidence of the desire lines that makes popular culture matter no matter what the theorists say about its being only the opiate of the masses (cf. Adorno 1991). For the film directors I have discussed thus far, knowledge capital relates to a further issue: the establishing of one’s filmic genealogy. As Kurosawa noted, a wannabe great film director watches the great films of the world. For the independent filmmakers I have thus far discussed (and most have been independent of the Hollywood system, although they may have come to be incorporated into it), knowing one’s films and film history is important. In an odd battle between those who studied at film school and those who just studied the films (Quentin Tarantino being a vociferous advocate of the latter), knowing one’s foreign films matters to both sides. To remake a great but otherwise unknown foreign film might well be the province of the studio or producer who just wants to make money, but to play on and play out the intertextal relationships between one’s film and a great film is the mark of the would-be auteur. The desire line here is the line that links knowledge, creativity, and recognition in the broader world. When it comes to a film like Rashomon, which subverts a dominant Western philosophical understanding about “the truth” and reality, the fact that the narrative needs reworking in order to sit comfortably with



A Short Interval

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both filmmakers and audiences matters less than the initial impulse, which acknowledged the possibility of the story—or some aspects of the story—translating. The variations in the basic story, the visual techniques and narrative strategies that we get in the permutations of Rashomon do appear to give us a divide within Western understandings of the film. European directors (Cukor, Resnais, Bava, Schroeder, Tykwer, Nolan) seem content with the idea that narratives are inherently subjective, while U.S. and modern Japanese filmmakers want to offer us a “true” solution. Yet even this generalization is too neat: Kubrick, Tarantino, Carpenter, and even Singer, in so far as their films are like Rashomon, seem to offer us endings that resolve nothing in substitution for the subjectivity that makes all the stories in the Japanese film true. For them “not knowing” what happens next appears to be analogous to Rashomon’s radical critiquing of the construction of social reality. The Japanese film’s question, how can society function when everyone seems to live so within their own versions of the truth, becomes a query about how we never know what might be just around the corner, an uncertainly about life. In their dialogic relationship with the audience, both formulas allow viewers to make a decision of sorts, either to decide who did it or what might happen next. However, for all the filmmakers, save for The Usual Suspects or the series Boomtown perhaps, the female appears as a problem and the circumstances of that problem vary between societies and eras. Is she telling the truth, manipulating us, too earthy for her husband, a murderess, a heroine, too lost in her own construction of self to be honest—all these are not only questions we can ask of Masago, but can also be applied to the women who appear, as central or minor characters, in each of the remakes or permutations. In short, as I have argued elsewhere (Martinez 2007:34), woman “as a sign remains unreadable and unknowable, the illusion that structures our social reality” because we can read anything we would like into this sign. Perhaps of all the films that I have discussed, Les Girls, Reversal of Fortune, Run, Lola, Run, and to some extent, Courage under Fire, best illustrate this. Thus, as I have already noted, Rashomon as a narrative is opened out, allowing filmmakers and audiences to invest the story with a myriad of meanings and interpretations. The next three films that will be discussed differ from Rashomon in that the stories have often been appropriated with less variation because their meanings appeared to be, I will argue, more immediately accessible to audiences. As we shall see, in contrast to Rashomon, the



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remakes and permutations of the Seven Samurai build on already existing Western constructions of the heroic group. Yojimbo’s relationship to U.S. detective fiction with its antihero, whose morals are somewhat questionable, presents us with a different problem: how to limit an analysis of all the intertextual relationships that are possible because tales about the lone hero appear everywhere (cf. Campbell 1949) in some incarnation or another? The universality of the heroic quest, the need for a wise mentor, the treasure to be retrieved, the romance of the adventure, and the role played by the “ordinary” side-kicks, all of which can be found in folktales everywhere will be discussed in relation to the final film I want to consider: The Hidden Fortress. With themes as near universal as those of The Hidden Fortress, we appear to enter the domain of fairy tale or fantasy, realms where the ability to tell a new story or an old story in a new way will lead me back to a discussion of the human imagination and creativity.



A Short Interval

Source: Kurosawa 1954. Toho Co., Ltd. Courtesy of The Criterion Collection

Figure 5 No Welcome in the Village, The Magnificent Seven Source: Sturges 1960. MGM. Courtesy of MGM Home Entertainment



Figure 4 No Welcome in the Village, Seven Samurai

The Group Western “Well, I guess we’re really seven now” —Heihachi in Seven Samurai

Introduction If Rashomon is remembered for its narrative techniques as well as for its astonishing cinematography, Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai, 1954) might be considered more important in terms of its plot and some of the visual techniques that have inspired directors from the 1960s onward. Prince (2000) has written an essay outlining Kurosawa’s influence on Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah, especially, so I will do little more than refer here to this at the chapter’s end—my focus will remain firmly on the remakes and the permutations that this acknowledged masterpiece of Japanese cinema inspired outside Japan. It is worth noting, however, that since the story and the plotted development of its elements have “translated” relatively easily across space and time, this chapter will consider the reasons for this ease of translation.1 At the time of its making, as Richie (1996) and Galbraith (2002) note, Seven Samurai was the most expensive Japanese film ever produced—although the expense did not extend to the use of color film stock. The film took over a year to make, was filmed mostly on location, and presented the director with endless problems: not enough horses, constant rain, and an increasingly worried production company (Toho Studios). It was part of Kurosawa’s effort to make a historically accurate jidai-geki (historical drama). As



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Richie notes:

Kurosawa, then, wanted to present the past as meaningful, but do it within a framework of the jidai-geki . . . at the same time, he says, he wanted to make a picture that was also completely entertaining. (1996:97)

In wanting to make a realistic film, Kurosawa referred to the realism he admired in Mizoguchi’s historical films (Richie 1996). Coming after his brilliant story of a dying man, Ikiru (To Live, 1951) and a failed version of Dosteovsky’s The Idiot (Hakuchi, 1952), Kurosawa’s motives appear to remain the same: the Seven Samurai is not only an attempt at realism, but is also another social critique of modern Japan with a debt to Russian film epics. It also shares with Rashomon the theme of guilt, although this is a subplot not generally understood by Western audiences who saw a shortened version of the film shown from 1955 onward. It is only with the restored three-plus-hour version and the newly translated version issued on DVD by Criterion that the true nature of the story is revealed (cf. Martinez 2008). The story and its plot can be summed up quite simply: the inhabitants of a village that is periodically raided by bandits decide to hire professional warriors to protect them. With nothing more to offer other than room and board, they manage to “hire” seven men who teach the villagers how to fight the bandits. In a series of skirmishes and, eventually, in one large battle, the forty bandits are defeated and the three samurai who survive leave the liberated village. In the main, the screenplay, as written by Hashimoto Shinobu, Oguni Hideo, and Akira Kurosawa, is about peasants’ experience of oppression by roaming bandits during the Civil Wars of sixteenth-century Japan. The story is clearly set after 1542 (when muskets were accidentally introduced into Japan by shipwrecked Portuguese sailors) and before unification of Japan under Tokugawa Hidetoshi—an important point, as we shall see. The farmers in the story suffer not only because of the bandits who raid their village regularly, but also because of the taxes that their lord exacts in order to fund warfare. They are clearly a downtrodden lot, beaten into submission by the near constant wars, the bandit raids, the difficulties of farming, and the disinterest of their lord who cares only about what can be squeezed out of them. It would not be



. . . fully half of all Japanese films made were jidai-geki, the “real” ones were very rare. Most of them were . . . chambara, simple sword-fight films . . .

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farfetched to see an analogy between the situation of the farmers and the plight of most Japanese before the Second World War. This depiction of how tough life was before 1950 was at odds with most jidaigeki—which, even today, show rather contented farmers whose lives are only periodically beset by problems. For example, the country doctor Saga published his collected interviews with elderly Japanese in order to document how Japan “had, until only recently, a very different type of society” (1987:19) and it is noticeable how many of his interviewees referred to television samurai dramas only to debunk their romantic portrayal of the past. “It’s absolute nonsense” says one elderly woman (Saga 1987:116). U.S. documentaries made after the war, during the Occupation, also attest to the poverty of rural life: they detail the illnesses of the farmers, tapeworms, ringworm, rickets, and malnutrition of all sorts as well as an average life span of fortyseven years for woman, forty-five for men. It is this “quality” of life that Kurosawa wanted to depict in his film. However, the film has another level to it. There is a story within a story that was, to Western audiences, lost for almost forty years. That is that the Seven Samurai is no simplistic apologia for “oppressed” Japanese. At the heart of the film is the story of the villager Rikichi’s (Tsuchiya Yoshio) missing wife (Shimazaki Yokiko). From the opening of the film it is clear to careful observers that something is “wrong” in the young farmer Rikichi’s relationship with the others. 2 When he speaks for action at the very start of the film, urging his fellow farmers to do something about the bandits, to arm themselves and kill them, there is something shamefaced in the way they avoid his gaze and eventually give in to his demands. Then, in town to recruit samurai, there comes a point when the other farmers want to give up, but Rikichi stops the incipient mutiny by taunting Manzo (Fujiwara Kamatari) with the idea of appeasing the bandits by giving them his daughter, Shino (Tsushima Keiko). That the women in the village themselves are concerned is also clear: it is a woman crying and screaming who brings all the villagers together, at the film’s start, to discuss what they might do about the next bandits’ raid. If we add the historical knowledge that pre-Tokugawa farmers could not only arm themselves, but also frequently did (cf. Hane 1982), rising in rebellion against their feudal lords, it becomes even more apparent that there is something wrong with this village, which is not resisting the bandits and where the women feel that “There are no gods here any more . . .” (Richie 1970:70). Kurosawa hints at this when Rikichi says to Manzo, right at the start of the story: “You manage to kill all



The Group Western

Remaking Kurosawa

the samurai you catch, all right, but you can’t kill bandits” (Richie 1970:71). Why aren’t the villagers fighting against the bandits? The answer comes in bits and pieces through the story strand that concerns Rikichi’s missing and very beautiful wife. In a single sentence (in a scene initially cut out of the Western version and then mistranslated in the BFI version), it becomes clear near the end of the film why the farmers have not been resisting the bandits. When Manzo’s daughter Shino is caught making love to the young samurai, Katsushiro (Kimura Isao), Rikichi tells the furious father: “At least it was something between two people who like each other. She wasn’t given to bandits.” Rather than fight against the bandits, the villagers initially tried to buy them off, giving them their most beautiful woman in the hope that they would go away. Not only has this not worked—the film opens with the bandits planning to return after the barley harvest—it has somehow emasculated the farmers—all the fight, the viciousness that they can bring to resisting roaming unemployed samurai (ronin), has gone out of them. In its commentary on modern Japan, the film is not only a harsh look at how elites can oppress peasants, a continuation of Kurosawa’s concern with class (Prince 1991), but also at how victims can be complicit in their own oppression. If the film is a comment on 1950s Japan, it is one that does not excuse their participation in the war. As with Rashomon, the 1950s Japanese audience, to the extent to which it identified with the farmers, had to identify with a people who are responsible for the situation in which they find themselves. The seven men who come to the village then, are not just professionals come to teach the peasants how to defend their own home, they are somehow healers, come to restore the village to its former self. It is tempting in this light to see, as some have, the samurai in the film not only as representatives of the best values of Japaneseness, but somehow also like the Occupation Forces. The message at the film’s end—that the warriors cannot stay in the village—is double-edged and, as Yoshimoto (2000) notes, one that Kurosawa knew was historically inaccurate. During this era Kambei (Shimura Takashi), the samurai leader, would have thought nothing of settling in the village, taking it over and, making it the basis of an attempt to build up a feudal domain of his own. Katsushiro, the young apprentice, would have stayed as well, taking Shino as a concubine. But, in this story, when the job is over, the samurai leave a village that is free from oppression and its own sense of guilt. Two years after the end of the Occupation this might not have had the emotional force it may have had when



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the screenplay was being written. If this is one possible reading of the film, it is the reading that has “translated” most readily in the film’s remakes. Not just the notion of a group of professionals who do not fit into normal society, but as Carroll (1998) notes about some Westerns in the United States, foreign professionals who come to the aid of a people with whom they seem to have nothing in common. While Carroll speculates as to whether these 1960s sorts of Westerns attempt to ideologically justify U.S. military involvement abroad, I find the concept of the roving professional killer also intriguing. Seen in this way, Seven Samurai shares with some U.S. Westerns and later detective/police films what was to become an important theme post-Vietnam: what do we do with ordinary men trained to kill once we no longer need them to be soldiers? The various remakes of the Japanese film has the men dying and/or leaving the village, while the theme, as it developed in other sorts of Hollywood films, pits the good ex-soldier, now become a detective or police officer, against the bad one, now become a mercenary or master criminal. In these films the good and bad protagonists are often old friends, comrades in arms who have taken different paths postwar, and who—in their violent temperaments, inability to have normal relationships and loneliness—are more alike than not. This theme of the state trained killer’s alienation from “normal” society is not a theme Kurosawa introduced to Hollywood—we might trace this storyline back to the first postwar films from 1918 onward3 —but it is one shared by his film and others. Where do the bandits come from if not from the ranks of farmers, foot soldiers, and unemployed samurai? The postwar concern with how to incorporate the nonprofessional soldier, who is nevertheless trained in combat, back into ordinary life, is common to both Japanese and Western societies and might well account for how comprehensible this film is seen to be by foreign audiences.4

“Nowadays Men are Cheaper than Guns”5 The first remake of the Seven Samurai—The Magnificent Seven (1960)—is probably also the best known. The story of how the remake of the Japanese film came about exists in two versions, as the special features documentary on the DVD notes (Heaton 2000). The actor Yul Brunner claimed that he immediately realized the potential of a remake when he saw the Kurosawa original, and got his lawyer in Japan to buy the rights. Lou Morheim, the associate producer, claims that he had the idea that the Japanese film would make a classic



The Group Western

Remaking Kurosawa

American Western and that he got the rights to remake the story from Toho. Initially the new screenplay was closer to Kurosawa’s with the story set just after the American Civil War—Martin Ritt, who went on to make The Outrage, was first brought in as the director and the blacklisted Walter Bernstein produced the first draft of the screenplay. The script was rewritten by Walter Newman and John Struges finally directed the film. Walter Mirisch, the producer, claims that the film was set in Mexico because by filming there they could escape an actors’ strike. This seems too simple an explanation: given its team of young, mostly unknown stars—including a German, Horst Buchholz, as Chico and a well-known Mexican actress, Rosenda Monteros, as Petra—and its location, it would seem that the studio was trying to keep costs down while making a film that would do well in Latin America as well as Europe. To understand why MGM took this strategy, it is important to remember that The Magnificent Seven was made at the very end of the “golden era” of Hollywood Westerns, in an era when television was saturated with weekly series set in the West6 and film versions of the genre had decreased in popularity. The narration in the documentary Guns for Hire (2000) calls the film the “pivotal movie” made between the Western’s golden era and its death by television. However Westerns were still doing well outside the United States and it seems likely that this was uppermost in the studio’s mind when casting The Magnificent Seven. The decision to set the story south of the border can also be as an extension of the reasons I gave in chapter four for setting the new version of Rashomon in a similar location. Not only is the potential of such mythic events occurring somehow more possible in this “exotic” location, but also the very undemocratic premise of the story makes “more sense.” Although Westerns were often about farmers getting into range wars with cattlemen, or cattlemen with evil scheming railroad barons, and the lone gunman who arrives on the scene is crucial in getting rid of the villain; the idea of peasants—as opposed to independent hardworking citizen farmers—oppressed by the social system just did not sit well with the U.S. version of its own history as the country where the downtrodden of other societies came to be free. Mexico, on the other hand, still had peasants who were even called that, peons. The only problem was that the Mexican government was sensitive about how Hollywood represented its past and gave permission for the company to film only if the script was vetted by their censors and if changes were made whenever they encountered



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an inappropriate representation of Mexicans. On the more ludicrous side this included not showing the peasants as dirty or sweaty, but on the more serious side there was raised an objection that echoes the central problem of the original story. Why would Mexican peasants hire professionals to defend them against bandits when the country’s history was full of examples of rebellious peasants more than capable of defending themselves?7 With the edited version of the Seven Samurai being the one Hollywood writers were working from, the subplot of Rikichi’s wife was not available: there was only her brief appearance as a kidnapped wife who kills herself rather than return safely home. So the theme of communal complicity and guilt was not apparent and if it had been, it is possible that the Mexicans would not have accepted it, since this too might have seemed to besmirch Mexican honor—what sort of man would give his wife away? It would seem that a kidnapped wife was also problematic, for this version of Rikichi’s story is not incorporated into the U.S. film, although there is a reference to how the bandits “take our women.” Hilario (Jorge Martinez de Hoyos, another well-known Mexican actor), Rikichi’s Mexican counterpart, seems entirely free of family ties. The new writer, brought in to cope with all the requested script changes, William Roberts, added the story twist that the peasants go north to buy guns, but since men are cheaper than guns, they end up with seven professionals instead. That the original film was appreciated in terms of Orientalist stereotypes, as Yoshimoto (2000) argues, seems true. For the actors, especially James Coburn, the samurai represent ideal men who strive for perfection. He says, in the documentary, that his character— Britt—was based on the character Kyuzo (Miyaguchi Seiji): “. . . the greatest swordsman in Japan.” Seven Samurai never makes this claim for Kyuzo, describing him only as “a fine swordsman” who is “not interested in killing, only in perfecting his skill” (Richie 1970:101). So too does the title of the remake miss the point of the original: the samurai in Kurosawa’s film might appear magnificent by the time they have finished and four of them have died, but they are not represented as extraordinary warriors.8 The leader Kambei is down on his luck, old and having made and lost his fortune; his sidekick and old friend Shichiroji (Katô Daisuke) admits to having survived a battle by hiding; while Heihachi (Chiaki Minoru) frankly admits to running away if his enemies are too many; and Kyuzo is not interested in killing even if it is his profession. The young apprentice Katsushiro is not trained as a warrior, and the wannabe samurai Kikuchiyo (Mifune



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Toshiro) is just a farmer who has probably served as a foot soldier. Only Gorobei (Inaba Yoshio) appears to be acting out of altruistic intentions, but even he tells Kambei “I know what the farmers have to put up with, but it’s not because of them that I accept. It’s because of you” (Richie 1970:95). The U.S. version has equally flawed characters, perhaps, but there is no question about their abilities, even the now-frightened and somewhat shaky Lee (Robert Vaughn) is represented as a skilled gunfighter. The American gunfighters are not warriors out of a job because a war has ended, they are the men who have done their job, taming the West, far too well and so have maneuvered themselves out of a livelihood. When Chris (Yul Brunner) asks about the refusal to bury a Native American in the local cemetery—“How long’s this been going on?”—the local undertaker sums up the era succinctly: “Since the town’s got civilized.” It becomes clear that the West is no longer wild, it no longer needs men like Chris and Vin (Steve McQueen)— but Mexico, it seems, remains “uncivilized.” That there is a tension between this Hollywood stereotype and what the Mexican censor thought permissible is clear in the elaborated role of the bandit chief, Calvera (Eli Wallach). In contrast to the Japanese bandit chief, not only does the Mexican have a name, but he is loquacious and somewhat urbane. He explains in great detail, much as does the bandit in The Outrage, that he is only a man with responsibilities to his men. A man who has to feed his charges—and how else is he to do this if not by preying on the sheep-like farmers? To justify his position as villain he constantly tells the seven hired men that he and they are alike: that men like them live and die by the gun—they do not belong in villages and towns. This is a theme only implied in the original film where only Kambei’s final speech “We’ve lost again” gives a hint of all the regrets a professional warrior might have. In the U.S. film, often wordy where the Japanese is not, this is summed up in a rather pithy speech given by several of the men in response to Chico’s query: “How can you talk like this? The gun has got you everything you have.” Vin: Home: none; wife: none; kids: none. Prospects: zero. Chris: Places you’re tied down to: none. People with a hold on you: none. Men you step aside for: none. Lee: Insults swallowed: none. Enemies: none. Chris: No enemies? Lee: Alive.



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This, in conjunction with O’Reilly’s (Charles Bronson) speech to the children of the village of what courage really is, to carry the weight of responsibility to others, makes it clear that the gunfighters’ inability to live with others is as much a flaw as it is somehow magnificent. In the Japanese film there is no question of the men staying on, although their time spent in the village somehow humanizes them—in the U.S. version the offer is made and only Chico, in love with Petra and a Mexican himself, takes up the offer. That the men have achieved some sort of redemption through their involvement with the villagers is made clear during Harry Luck’s (Brad Dexter) death scene. He dies saying “I’ll be damned” to which Chris responds: “Maybe you won’t be.” Lee, who has been too frightened and shaky to take part in the fighting, also dies in a blaze of glory, redeeming his past cowardice. The various sequels to the film, Return of the Magnificent Seven (Kennedy 1967), Guns of the Magnificent Seven (Wendkos 1969), and The Magnificent Seven Ride! (McCowan 1972),9 indicate not only the desire to cash in on the success of the original film, but also pick up the possibility hinted at by the end of the film: Chris and Vin, so purposeless at the start, have now found a new direction in life—an altruism that leads them to protect others. This is certainly the tack taken by a later version of the film that I will discuss below. There is one further, fundamental way, in which the Japanese and U.S. remake differ and that is to do with the issue of class. While interestingly the idea of a class difference was introduced in The Outrage where it was not a major theme in the original, The Magnificent Seven does away with what Prince sees as the major concern in the Kurosawa film; that is, that the farmers are the subjects in a feudal system, and the samurai are a part of the class that oppresses them.10 This point is made repeatedly throughout the film with references to the villagers’ hatred of samurai, to the way in which samurai have been attacked and murdered by villagers and, finally, in an impassioned speech by Kikuchiyo: Well, what do you think farmers are? Saints? They are the most cunning and untrustworthy animals on earth. If you ask them for rice, they’ll say they have none. But they have. They have everything. Look in the rafters, dig in the ground. You’ll find it. Rice in jars. Salt. Beans. Saké. Look in the mountains, hidden farms everywhere. And yet they pretend to be oppressed. They are full of lies. When they smell a battle they make themselves bamboo spears. And then they hunt. But they hunt the wounded and the defeated. Farmers are miserly, craven, mean, stupid, murderous!



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You make me laugh so hard I’m crying.

And each time you fight you burn villages, you destroy the fields, you take away the food, you rape the women and enslave the men. And you kill them when they resist. You hear me—you damned samurai! (Richie 128–129)

Chico’s analogous speech in the U.S. film does not quite have this power: the gunslinger is generally represented as working alone, his capacity for causing the sort of devastation Kikuchiyo ascribes to the professional soldier was somewhat more limited and has been largely depicted as town-centered violence. In many ways, the gunfighter was part of the changing Western landscape—he existed not in the isolated ranches or farms, but in the growing towns before they “got civilized.” He was also symbolic of a proud U.S. form of individualism—and so the gunfighter as part of a class of oppressors, as with the undemocratic existence of peasants, just does not fit into the dominant ideology of the 1960s. Thus, in the context of this film, it just does not work. If it had been a speech about the U.S. oppression of Mexico, then perhaps it might have carried a similar political force. While ethnic identity is a problem raised in this film— the Native American refused burial because he is not white; Calvera saying that his punishment for crimes committed in Texas would be greater than it would be for Chris—it is not explored. In 1960 such issues had yet come to carry much weight in U.S. society. However, by the time The Magnificent Seven was rewritten as a television series in 1998, the issue of ethnic identity and race could not be avoided.

“Life’s Tough and Then You Die”11 I suggested above that Prince (1991) is incorrect to argue that Rikichi is framed in his scenes so as to “reinscribe” him within the group. Yet, it cannot be denied that the group as a functioning unit is an important theme in Seven Samurai. The Japanese attitude toward groups, however, must be more clearly understood. As Gill (1998) points out in an article about children’s superheroes, the group in Japan is seen to be made up of different types of individuals: the leader, the brainy one, the great fighter, the girl (in these politically correct days), and the passionate, somewhat dangerous one. What makes one person the leader is their ability to use everyone’s skills to solve a particular



But then, who made animals out of them? You! You did—you samurai! All of you damned samurai!

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problem in the best possible way. The group is not a bunch of mindless drones, all alike. One of the differences between the samurai and the villagers, then, is that the seven who come to the village rather quickly, perhaps as part of their professionalism, form a coherent group that can work together. The villagers, as shown in the second scene of the film, are divided, they cannot decide what to do: the women rail and weep, saying that they might as well be dead; the men sit with heads hung and only one young man, Rikichi, has a plan of action. That the village elder (Kodo Kokuten)—a man way beyond the age to be village leader, although old enough to be considered wise—agrees with Rikichi is a surprise to the others. In the Japanese film, then, we do not know who or where the village leader is. The Magnificent Seven picks up this point by having the old Mexican man (Vladimir Sokoloff) saying that he is not interested in life any more, the people in the village bore him—he lives outside the village and is not really part of it. That Hilario might become the leader is the way the film ends, as does the Japanese version: Rikichi beating the drum for the women to plant rice is playing an important ritual role that indicates his rise in village politics—he has now become the village head. But if we want to see this as an inscription into the group, it would be somewhat inaccurate—he now heads the group and can change its character, as he has already done through his insistence that they resist the bandits. He is somewhat young for the role: Manzo, the anxious father, is of the generation that generally provides leaders. If the village is of the sort that is always led by the eldest son of the richest family, then this would have to be the son of the old man—who seems to be missing, perhaps killed by the bandits?12 If there is a postwar, post-Occupation message here it is that the youth of Japan must be allowed to show the way. I raise the issue of the group because it is a point about the Japanese film that would appear to make it antithetical to the U.S. Western as a genre. In the main, in Westerns, the bad guys always come in groups while the good guy is generally a lone hero. Sometimes there is the good group, the farmers or townspeople who do not know how to do deal with the gang of bad men, but they need the single hero to help them. Much of the thrill of the Western is often to be found in the way a single man can face down the many. From time-to-time, the hero is allowed one or two buddies or sidekicks.13 The group of helpers might occasionally include a young untrained fighter and an unhappy drunk or a courageous female (interesting as alternative options) as in High Noon (Zimmerman 1952), Rio Bravo (Hawks 1959) and its



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remake, Rio Lobo (Hawks 1970), as well as Unforgiven (Eastwood 1992) where, of course, we have the black sidekick. The “lone crusader” is a huge theme in U.S. fiction that can be found in comic books, Westerns, and detective fiction. The recent Troy (Petersen 2004) pushes the history of this sort of hero all the way back to Achilles in the fourth century B.C.E. while ignoring the point of what has long been the dominant representation of the independent hero in much of Western literature: he might be strong and able to face the many, but this ability to act without the group also bears a price. As with Achilles, such heroes often die in the service of the greater good (think also of Roland and El Cid). This theme remains strong in Japanese fiction (Standish 2000) where lone heroes often die. In Hollywood films, the lone hero generally lives to fight another day. Yet there is a model that makes the narrative plausibility of the heroic group translatable from Japan to the United States. If we take Robin Hood as another stereotypic hero who appears in many forms, it is the man who knows how to be part of the group, even in Western fiction, who most often survives. The Western as genre often subverted this English theme in praise of the rugged individualism that “won the West”; a sort of homage to the sometimes almost insane pioneer spirit that transformed a “wild” landscape, albeit by wrestling it from the natives and killing off the buffalo. Given the existence of Robin Hood type heroes as well, The Magnificent Seven is not groundbreaking with its representation of the group who acts heroically; yet, that such individualists might not find working together easy is one of the elaborated themes of the U.S. film. In the Japanese film, it is only Kikuchiyo, the fake samurai, who is problematic, the cog that exists to remind the others of how they are responsible for the situation of the farmers. The central problem, we might say, in turning this into a Western was how to get a group of actors with their diverse talents to work collectively. It is interesting that this is also a theme of the documentary about making the film: how the director had to get the young stars with their massive egos to work together. McQueen tried to upstage Brunner, all the men started to add to their portrayals in order to draw notice to themselves, and the director was seen to be favoring Buchholz. Film editing might well take care of the problem of individualistic actors, but it took some reworking of the plot to get this theme to work for the Magnificent Seven. For example, Chris and Vin, unlike Kambei and Shichiroji, don’t know each other. They agree to help bury the dead Native American



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and find that they work well together. Yet, once this job is done, they go their separate ways. It is only the plea by the farmers that brings them back together. Kambei and Shichiroji, on the other hand, are old friends who are overjoyed to find each other still alive, their relationship as leader and sidekick is never problematic. The same cannot be said of Harry Luck, whom Chris does know of old and only trusts as far as he can keep the man interested in the mythical treasure he is sure the village is guarding. So too with Lee, of whom Chris has heard, both he and Vin wonder if they can rely on this southerner who appears to have lost his courage and Britt remains very much his own man, while O’Reilly seems to form a stronger bond with the children of the village than with his fellow fighters. Chico, in both the role of young accolade and native informant (bringing together the roles of Katsushiro and Kikuchiyo), is shown to be constantly tempted by the young Mexican girl whom, if he had stayed at home, he might have already married. We have a group of seven who work well together and will even fight for each other, but unlike Seven Samurai, the group they form always seems in danger of splitting up. In fact it is interesting that at the end there remain only two—Chris and Vin, leader and sidekick it might be said, the unit most often found in the Western. This is the problem also encountered by and resolved in the television series The Magnificent Seven (Beers et al. 1998–2000), although it could be argued that there are very good functionalist reasons for the way in which they solve the problem of making the group work within the context of the Western as genre. The program was an MGM production, sharing an executive producer with the film— Walter Mirisch—and used Bernstein’s score from the original as well. Elements of the film script written by William Roberts were used, as well as the original storyline mentioned by Mirisch in the documentary Guns for Hire. Moreover, the television series seems very much a post-first Gulf War narrative, a new attempt to understand the professional fighter who “helps” the foreign other. This version is set just after the American Civil War, giving us the theme of soldiers and men of violence set free upon the landscape, and brings together seven men who find themselves defending a Seminole reservation against a crazed confederate colonel who is convinced the villagers are concealing gold treasure. The problem of how to find an underclass in the U.S. Western is resolved, in the 1990s, by the recasting of the plight of Native Americans: they are no longer savages who have to be subdued, but people who have been wronged.



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Like the Mexican peasants of the original, these natives know how to fight, but do not know how to defend themselves against the cannon that Colonel Anderson’s troop uses on them. Moreover, they are portrayed as a tolerant people, having taken in escaped slaves—the other underclass in revisionist Westerns—and intermarried with them. This allows for one of the seven to be black as well: a young man, Nathan (Rick Worthy), who has medical skills, joins the seven precisely because he knows that the Seminole have given refuge to others of his race. Chris (Michael Biehn), now surnamed Larabee rather than Adams, meets up with Vin (Eric Close)—who is now allowed a last name, Tanner—when they decide to save Nathan Jackson from a lynching. Vin is working as a grocery clerk (something Vin threatens to do in the film), but puts down his broom and quits the job in order to save Nathan. The two men are spurred to action by Mary Travis (Laurie Holden), the town’s widowed newspaper editor who tries and fails to defend Nathan in the first place. Once the men take on the job of defending the Seminole, Vin suggests a friend of his, Buck Wilmington (Dale Midkiff) who is a ladies’ man. Nathan suggests Josiah Sanchez (Ron Perlman) who is a preacher with a violent past. They are followed in all of this by the Kid, John “J.D.” Dunne (Andrew Kavovit), a dude just come from the East. Quite by accident they encounter a southern gambler, Ezra Standish (Anthony Starke), a man who is better at talking himself out of situations than at shooting his way free. As a group they have, as would the Japanese, their individual personalities. The cast list not only gives the characters’ names but their attributes: Chris is “The Leader,” Vin “The Sharpshooter,” J.D., “The Kid,” Buck “The Lover,” Nathan “The Healer,” Josiah “The Preacher,” and Ezra “The Gambler.” Moreover, the characters have deeper back biographies than in the film—given that the series had a two season run, this would be seen to be necessary. Chris, we learn in the first episode, has lost his wife and children: “Burned half the soul out of the man.” Nathan turns out to be a former slave and falls in love with one of the Seminole/black women (Dana Barron), but leaves her behind in order to doctor to the wounded men at the end of the film. “Go ahead,” she tells him. “They need you. I’ll wait.” The preacher regrets his life of violence but cannot resist fighting and drinking. Buck always has angry husbands after him and “The Kid” turns out to be the illegitimate son of a chambermaid, not the rich dude that the others have assumed him to be. As the series unfolds



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more of the men’s personalities are revealed. These men become a sort of substitute family for the bereaved Chris. But the problem of the group is not just resolved by Chris’ fatherly attitude as much as it is by the way in which the men form friendships within the group: Chris and Vin are a pair, as are Buck and J.D. The Preacher appears to confide first in The Gambler, but the southerner appears to be the real loner of the seven, more at home doing card tricks for the children and running off to search for gold just as Colonel Anderson’s troop returns to attack. Nathan, as the healer of the group, also appears to be an odd man out in the first episode, but forms his bound with the woman. His role becomes essential to the continuation of the group, without him they literally would not live to fight another day. Thus the group’s existence is always seen to be in peril, through the work they take on and the very men’s personalities. If we compare this to the Japanese concept of the group, it is someone’s ability to work with the group that might be in question, but not the idea that the group continues to exist. We might say that there is a key difference in this basic assumption about groups. Yet, in Japan, groups grow and break up, factions are an interesting feature of Japanese society, so it is not necessarily a large difference. Moreover, the success of a television series depends on the continuing and growing bonds between the members of the group—in this case Boomtown might be seen to be both an example of this sort of storyline, thus a possible heir to the Seven Samurai as well as Rashomon. That the idea of sequels was not part of Kurosawa’s vision is made clear by all the deaths in the film. Yet there exist many television samurai dramas with a group who, from year to year, right the wrongs of society. There also exist series about the lone samurai hero—it would be unfair to say that one type of storyline is Japanese and the other is American. Slotting The Magnificent Seven into the category of a continuing group—out to “tame the West”—does, however, ignore one key part of the first two films: the men in the village who learn how better to defend themselves, men who are remasculinized, it might be said, through their taking action. The television series chooses not to portray the Native Americans in this way, introducing the storyline of the cannon as the superior weapon that renders them helpless in the face of men they could otherwise easily fight, following the film to a point. But in the film, the subplot of O’Reilly’s friendship with the children who must be convinced of the moral worth of their fathers retains something of the original story where the villagers need to recapture a sense of pride in themselves. This theme of



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fearful men taught to have pride in their fighting ability is the one most frequently focused on by the various permutations of the storyline, which often also appear to pick up on the comic subtheme of the original— although to understand the transition from drama to comedy that the storyline has undergone in films such as A Bug’s Life (Lasseter 1996) and Galaxy Quest (Parisot 1999), we need first to consider the 1980 remake of the Seven Samurai, Roger Corman’s production entitled Battle beyond the Stars (1980).

“Right Now Your Offer Seems Very Attractive to Me”14 According to Galbraith (2002:519–520), Corman had long been a Kurosawa fan, and if not for him, Dersu Uzala, Kurosawa’s first independent production, would have never made it beyond the cult festival circuit in the USA.15 Battle beyond the Stars, directed by Jimmy T. Murakami and written by John Sayles, is not just a remake of Seven Samurai, but calls also on the special effects and some of the storyline of Star Wars, Lucas’ permutation on Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress to be discussed later. The film, definitely a “B,” if not a “C,” film is worth considering for the changes it made to the basic plot of the original film, changes that seem to have had enough currency to continue to reappear as important themes in the permutations of the film. The most significant change was to the idea of the seven group members. In this science fiction film, the seventh member of the team is the lone “villager” Shad (Richard Thomas), who sets out to recruit the fighters needed to defend their besieged planet. This is an interesting elision of the idea that the villagers must learn how to fight and that, as a result of their contact with the warriors, one villager appears to rise to obvious prominence. In the Japanese film it is Rikichi, in the 1960s film it is Hilario. In the Corman version made twenty years later, Shad is part of the gentle community of the planet Akir, whose religious tenets, the Varda, forbid fighting. The plot thus incorporates the issue of pacificism and refers to the peace movements that had attempted to challenge U.S. politics from the mid-1960s to 1975. However, like Luke Skywalker, despite his pacificist upbringing, Shad has learned to be a crack spaceship pilot, taking instruction from the old warrior Zed (Jeff Corey) who has settled amongst them. When the planet is threatened by the evil Sador (John Saxon with black pigmentation over one eye and a body that needs



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constant transplants), it is Shad who agrees to go out and find seven warriors to defend the planet. His first attempt to recruit an old friend of Zed, Dr Hephaestus (Sam Jaffe), fails, but his daughter, Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel)—in a role reprising that of the scientist’s daughter in the remake of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a science fiction film, Forbidden Planet (Wilcox 1956)—decides to aid Shad in his quest. Together they recruit different members: Nanelia encounters the reptile-like Cayman (Morgan Woodward) and his two sidekicks, the Kelvin. Shad brings in The Cowboy (George Peppard), The Nestor (from society of telepathic clones, five of whom have gone out in search of adventure), and Gelt (Robert Vaughn, who basically re-creates his role as Lee in the Magnificent Seven). The Valkyrie Saint-Exmin (Sybil Danning) fills the Kikuchiyo/Chico role of the annoying outsider who insists on joining the fight. Nanelia, with whom Shad falls in love, is quickly relegated to the role of technician and it is Shad who is the seventh warrior, battling Sador with the help of Zed’s talking space ship, Nell. In contrast to the original film, none of the six warrior recruits survives the fight—each and everyone giving up their lives for the Akirans, leaving Shad with Nanelia to finally destroy, a la Star Wars, Sador’s battleship with its deadly weapon the Solar Converter. It is clear that the film refers to and inadvertently parodies any number of films, not just Seven Samurai. As such it stands as an example of knowledge capital in which the director, producer, and writer of a B film work hard to remind a subculture—an audience of science fiction fans in general and Star Wars fans in particular—how well versed they are in filmic history, while attempting to produce something new. Battle beyond the Stars is not meant to be a comedy, but given its hero, played by a television star famous for having been the good but poor boy on the television series The Waltons (1972–1981); its reliance on science fiction clichés—reptile-like aliens, telepaths, a sleazy bar, a very sexy and barely dressed female warrior; a reference to all the Star Trek episodes where a peaceful people with a bizarre religion/moral code need help; and its cheap version of Lucas’ special effects, it has the effect of parody. Gelt’s reprise of Lee’s alienation certainly seems very tongue-in-cheek and the whole idea of noble heroes, honorable men come to do a job out of some sort of altruism, is undercut by the fact that script allows no time for the main characters to interact. In fact all these films narrow the time gap between their recruitment and most of the warriors’ deaths in a final battle. The long weeks spent fortifying the village in Kurosawa’s film



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becomes a few weeks, then days. Thus the heroes are very underdeveloped characters. It seems that as audiences become more familiar with the story, the men can be sketched out as mere stereotypes. In Corman’s film, the heroes seem to have come along for the thrill or revenge, while the main emphasis is on the growing love between Shad and Nanelia: the ending implies their incorporation into the peaceful life of Akir and married domesticity. There is, of course, something of the original in this. While James Coburn might well have been entranced by what he saw as his character’s ideal representation of the code of the bushidô (literary “the way of the warrior”), Kurosawa had actually set his story in the era before the codifying of the “way of the warrior.” That is, it was during the peaceful years of the Tokugawa era, when the samurai were often the bureaucrats of the military regime, that they found the time to think of and write books about honor, reifying martial arts and practicing Zen. Before this time, as Kurosawa liked to note, the warrior was just one step up from the peasants. His seven are not meant to be especially honorable, they are, as Gelt says to Shad “. . . strictly business.” That they need to eat is reason enough for them to take on the job. The samurai who refuse even the offer of food and lodging are depicted as too arrogant to have anything to do with peasants. Their job is to fight for a warlord, not to look after “little people” and this is the precisely where Kurosawa’s seven become heroic: they are ignoring their warrior ethic to take on the job. They are acting “out of character” (as do the characters in Rashomon) and it is this idea, as well as the film’s comic interludes, that help form the premise for the comic versions of the Seven Samurai. More important than some medieval code of honor remains Kurosawa’s concern with responsibility and people’s ability/inability to accept their duty to others. This is what the samurai learn: that their “job” as soldiers has repercussions and it is interesting that the youngest of the group, who also appears to be the most pampered, perhaps an aristocrat, has the most to learn here. Still, at the film’s end he hangs his head like a child when confronted by the woman he has seduced/been seduced by and so it is obvious that he needs to follow Kambei and Shichiroji—Katsushiro is still an immature novice. The farmers learn that sometimes it is better to fight than to try and comply—that they need to be responsible for their land, women, and children and not to look to others for protection. The themes of the group assuming responsibility and the place of professionals in times of peace combine in such a way that it is difficult



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to argue for Seven Samurai as being as dialogic in nature as is the more intellectually ambitious Rashomon. The latter film questions the nature of reality, while the former explores how one group of people can be entirely ignorant of how others live. If the samurai’s reality is subjective, it is framed by the larger social system that sees the separateness of these groups as essential to the way society works. There is little ambiguity in the film and the central mystery of the story; Rikichi’s missing wife was a lost subplot for foreign audiences. It is no surprise then that the permutations on the film are not as varied as in the case of Rashomon. Once you establish the existence of three groups of people—bandits, peasants, and warriors—who are interdependent, but have nothing in common and you bring them together in a situation of conflict, there seems to be only a limited way of going about the storytelling. In the main, the remakes focus on the sadness of these brief relationships; the nobility of the warriors who leave or die; the bandits who are destroyed; or the villagers who, in an insular sort of way, return to their lives—yet everyone learns something from the encounter. These films are, more or less, tragedies. Yet, Kurosawa used humor as the cement that helped seal friendships amongst the samurai and between the villagers and samurai. Sturges’s film is also full of humor, sharp one-liners that cover any feelings the gunslingers might have. The television show developed the comedy by introducing women, children, parents, and situations that balanced the violence of the weekly gun fighting. Battle beyond the Stars is inadvertently funny. All of this appears to lead to the development of the story as comedy—it seems it was the only new direction left to explore. Yet, as with Rashomon, it is the comic versions of the story that lay bare the mythic core of the original story.

“It’s You Who Need Us”16 The sleeve notes for the Magnificent Seven DVD cites another film permutation of the films, ¡Three Amigos! (Landis 1986), which is the story of three silent film actors who play heroes and who are mistakenly hired as the real thing by some Mexican villagers.17 While elements of this film are important to the next two films I will analyze, I will not discuss it in any detail because the dynamics of a group of three are not the same as that of a group of seven. Moreover, the theme of mistaken identity might well be said to be prefigured by Kurosawa’s point that the samurai are acting out of character, while the issue raised by mistaking actors for the real thing, the confusion



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between myth and reality, is the central point of the original only in relation to audiences’ expectations. Kurosawa wanted to make a film about real samurai, not the fictional representations of samurai as filtered through the ideals of the bushidô, a code, as noted, created in times of peace. This too is meant to be a key feature of the Magnificent Seven—the morality of being a gunfighter, generally represented as being romantic and heroic, is questioned. Poking fun at the myth is a topic taken up more clearly by the television version of the film where Buck tells The Kid: “It’s not like the dime store novels.” As Knight and McNight (2002) note, the Western is “the most mythologically driven of American film genres,” and the link between Westerns and science fiction films becomes important in this context as we shall see. As I noted in the Introduction, myth has its ideological elements as well. Rashomon’s contestation of the construction of reality has led to an inversion in which the rashomon technique reaffirms the coherent construction of “the truth,” but it has not resulted in the creation of a mythic narrative. There are no great heroes in this story, everyone is potentially the villain. Seven Samurai, on the other hand, simpler in its construction, aiming to be an “entertaining” film, easily crosses the line between simple narrative and myth. Kurosawa’s story about ordinary men regaining their dignity, warriors confronting their morality and mortality, and everyone cooperating to defeat the enemy—while aiming for historical accuracy—is the stuff of legends. The serious versions of the storyline try to undermine the ideology of pure, honorable heroes, but the flawed human versions they offer instead appear to appeal to audiences as well—they are easier, perhaps, to identify with than a hero who is the son of a god (Achilles, Hercules), especially chosen by God, or a superman imported from another planet. There is then something very twentieth century about the idea that any one of us might be heroic if need be: everyman— and, since the 1980s, some women as well—could be superman.18 Or as that great icon of the American Western, John Wayne, said in the film that made him a star (Stagecoach, Ford 1939): “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” A Bug’s Life (1998) takes the audience firmly into the terrain of myth rather than questioning it and yet manages to retain the theme of social critique. A large part of this may well have to do with its target audience—children—and its chosen mode of representation: pixar animation.19 The story also owes a debt to an old folktale, Aesop’s The Ant and the Grasshopper, as much as it does to Seven Samurai.



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You could stay . . . Only the farmers have won. They remain forever. They are like the land itself . . . You helped them get rid of Calvera. The way a strong wind helps rid them of locusts. You are like the wind blowing over the land and passing on.

In A Bug’s Life there are no locusts, but grasshoppers seem close enough. That they are meant to be the bandits of the original is made clear by the way the leader, Hopper (Kevin Spacey), calls out “Let’s ride!” when it is time to leave. They also spend the summer partying in Mexico. The working out of the plot as part of an old folktale not only makes the film more palatable for children, but it solves the problem of class—ever a sticking point even in 1990s America. Ants are the group insect par excellence, all working, mindlessly it is assumed, for the good of the colony. In the film, the colony is ruled by a Queen (Phyllis Diller) who is training her daughter, Princess Atta (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), to take over. The unquestioning, hardworking attitude of the ants is undermined by a single worker, Flik (Dave Foley), who is always full of ideas that will make work easier. When one of his inventions destroys the offering to Hopper’s gang of grasshoppers, the “royals” of the colony decide to get rid of Flik, while they work to store up food again, by sending him to recruit some fighter bugs to protect them from the grasshoppers. They do not expect him to succeed; it is solely a plan to get him safely out of the way. In the “big city” (a dump outside a single trailer), Flik manages to hire some professionals. Only in this case it is a group of inept circus performers who have just all been fired by their boss P.T. Flea (John Ratzengerger). In terms of numbers, they come to more than seven professionals—as was the case in Battle beyond the Stars, in which the number of space ships came to seven, while the fighters numbered a few more. In this film we have a stick insect, Slim (David Hyde Pierce) who works with a ladybug, Francis (Dennis Leary); a black widow spider, Rosie (Bonnie Hunt) who works with a dung beetle, Dim (Brad Garrett); a moth, Gypsy (Madeline Kahn) who works with her praying mantis husband, Manny (Jonathan Harris); two pillbox acrobats with no English who work together, Tuck and Roll (Michael



Its starting point, that the bandits are lazy grasshoppers who every year take their winter food from the hardworking ants is also prefigured by a monologue in The Magnificent Seven. At the film’s end the old man tells the remaining gunfighters:

Remaking Kurosawa

McShane); and a caterpillar, Heimlich (Joe Ranft) who appears to have no partner. There is no way to make the group add up to seven. The film plot uses an interesting device that allows the mistake to occur: Flik heads for a bar to find fighters and in the bar are the performers, depressed over losing their job. When two flies pick a fight with them, Francis tells the others: “To do the Robin Hood” act. The link between the Japanese group and a Western tradition of the heroic group is thus made explicit for the children in the audience (and perhaps a few adults too!). At the end of the fight, that other mythic band of Western heroes is referred to when Francis brandishes Slim like a sword, a single light focused on the stick insect—King Arthur, Excalibur, and the Knights of the Round Table are given to us in that single shot. Seeing the act, Flik is convinced that he has found a gang of very tough bugs indeed. When they arrive on Ant Island the circus troupe come to realize that they have not been hired by talent scout, but have been mistaken for warriors; they tell Flik the truth, and it is the ant, after urging them to stay, who comes up with an idea of how they can fight the grasshoppers. Hopper, his brother Molt (Richard Kind) has revealed, is afraid of birds. Flik decides that they will use a fake bird to scare the grasshoppers away. The performers present the idea as their own to Princess Atta who then gets the whole colony to help, telling them: “I know it’s not our tradition to do things differently.” Together, the performers and the ants work hard to make a bird—the period of work being one that brings them together, creating a warm

Figure 6 The Finale to the Robin Hood Act, Referencing King Arthur, A Bug’s Life Source: Lasseter 1998. Pixar Animation Studios. Courtesy of Disney Collector’s Edition



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relationship between the two groups. In the meantime, Molt tries to convince Hopper that they have enough food and do not need to return to the colony, they can stay in Mexico. Hopper then explains to his “dumb” brother: “You let one ant stand up to us, they all might stand up to us. These ants outnumber us a hundred to one. If they figure that out, it’s the end of us.” Spelt out in this children’s film, then, is the central paradox found in the original as well as in many heroic tales: why should the many fear the few? That the good might outnumber those who are bad or evil seems to be a truth, and yet, entire societies can be held in check by the few, the elite, the criminal. Kurosawa compounded the problem by having the farmers do something wrong in their fear—giving a woman away—but also, more sympathetically, presented the situation as a historical dilemma depicting the tyranny of the elite. Why should such elites have this power? Access to weapons and advanced technology were the answers offered by previous versions of the story, yet the peasants, it is revealed, have weapons stolen from samurai so the question is not answered in the Japanese film, although the representation of the villagers at the end hints at peasants who might have learned to act and think for themselves. The need for a professional class who know how to handle weapons and who can fight for the “weak” is the solution we seem to get in Westerns. The children’s film is much more proactive. When the plan with the bird goes wrong and Hopper seems in danger of having won, Flik finally stands up to him. Hopper says: “Ideas are very dangerous things . . . You were put on this earth to serve us.” Flik challenges him: “It’s you who need us. We’re a lot stronger than you say we are. And you know it, don’t you?” The message seems almost Marxist, although the inclusion of “ideas” and the portrayal of Flik as a creative thinker puts this revolution firmly in the terrain of the American tradition of quirky individualism. The colony had no need of professionals, it just needed to be open to the voices of its own members. It had to be able to follow a different sort of leader (and the masculine challenge to the female leadership of a mindless colony is worth a feminist rant all of its own), in order to be free. Galaxy Quest (Parisot 1999) takes a similar tack: the Thermians, sweet, naive if somewhat repulsive octopi-like aliens (when their appearance generators are turned off), need to learn the difference between history and drama, the truth and lies, and, ultimately, what it is to joke. Once they have begun to master these dichotomies, they are able to find their own heroic leaders and are able to defend themselves.



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This notion that an ability to tell lies underpins what it means to be civilized or advanced is one that I have already noted is important. Knowing how to tell stories is how reality is constituted, but knowing that different types of narratives are evaluated differently is also important. When the humans who encounter the aliens find out that they think that all television series, including Galaxy Quest, are historical documents, one of them, Gwen (Sigourney Weaver), asks: “Surely you don’t think Gilligan’s Island is real?” The Thermians hang their heads and one of them says: “Those poor people . . .” The joke is that such an unrealistic and rather silly television program could be taken seriously. It might also be said that the joke is on the humans as well, for through their cynicism about what constitutes “good” versus “poor” drama they have lost all sense of respect for themselves as actors and for their profession. They are perfectly aware that as regulars on a science fiction series they play caricatures of the heroic types found in other sorts of narrative tales. In fact, since the 1990s it could be said that the science fiction genre has taken over from the Western as one of the dominant genres found on U.S. television, competing with detective series. In the late 1960s the groundbreaking program parodied so effectively in Galaxy Quest, Star Trek (Roddenberry 1966–1969), was populated by actors who had all done some work in Westerns. William Shatner was the preacher in the Outrage, and De Forrest Kelly had guested on various Westerns as had many of the guest performers who appeared each week. Galaxy Quest unlike Star Trek is a postmodern tale. Just what does that mean? Not only does Galaxy Quest refer to and parody a large number of modern icons (the serious British actor, the sexy yet powerful woman, the token black, the “guy who gets killed in scene two”); it refers to numerous films (any number of science fiction films including the Alien series, Kurosawa, television programs), and lifestyles (the science fiction convention phenomenon, people who role play, teenagers who are obsessed with making the fictional real), while regarding them all with a certain amount of nostalgic affection. The film fulfils many of Harvey’s (1990) criteria for a postmodern film. But unlike Blade Runner (Scott 1982), the subject of Harvey’s wellknown essay, Galaxy Quest’s nostalgia is not for the bleak, postwar 1950s film noir, but for the more optimistic late 1960s working out of Kennedy’s20 vision for the future of the United States: democratic, caring, and noninterfering action in “Space, the final frontier.” That this vision ignored cold war politics and a divided modernity is pointed



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out in one of the later Star Trek films, The Undiscovered Country (Meyer 1991), by a Klingon leader who toasts the current peace with the Federation with the words: “To the end of history.” References to Fukuyama (1992) aside, the key theme of all the Star Trek series, even in its more politically complex Deep Space Nine (1993–1999), has been how the decent values of middle-American will always win out. Carroll’s theory about the group of foreign professionals in Westerns who aid helpless others as representing an U.S. ideal about its role in global politics would seem to be supported by the continued use of this trope. Thus, by the time we reach Galaxy Quest, the basic plot has been thoroughly imbued with American symbolism, ideals, and concerns. In this sense, then, the actors of the now-cancelled television series Galaxy Quest represent a generation of Americans who are no longer are optimistic about their values, and have lost faith in that better future that, in its mythic way, Star Trek portrayed. They are depicted at the beginning as rather sorry figures, depending on appearances at science fiction conventions to keep them going. At the film’s start, the Brit, Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman), who plays the alien Dr Lazarus bemoans his—and their collective—fate: typecast forever as a crewmember of the NSEA Protector. “To think I once played Hamlet,” he cries at the sight of himself fully made up in the mirror.21 Gwen DeMarco, who plays Lt. Tawny Madison, has no sympathy for Dane—he at least, she tells him, was not just on the program for the sake of his breasts! Others from the program vary in their cynicism: Fred Kwan who plays Tech. Sgt. Chen (Tony Shalhoub) appears to be the only one of them who is content, but he is portrayed as blissfully, perfectly, almost transcendently stupid (or, as some IMDB comments would have it, stoned). While Tommy Webber, Lt. Laredo (Daryl Mitchell), is an adult child actor who has nothing else in his life; and Guy Fleegman (Sam Rockwell) has made a career out of once having been on the show and dying: “To show that the situation really was dangerous.” Jason Nesbith, the actor who played Captain Peter Quincy Taggart (Tim Allen), appears to balance an affection for his fans with a disdain for his mediocre acting career. The tension between his love of the role and the disregard in which the “serious” world holds such examples of popular culture seems to fuel his drinking. It is these six who will go to the aid of the Thermians in their fight against the evil General Sarris (Robin Sachs, another English actor who seems to specialize in playing villains), the leader of an insect-like



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race of aliens who have been systematically destroying them for generations. Led by Commander Mathesar (Enrico Colantoni), the last remaining Thermians beg for the aid of the heroic crew of the NSEA Protector. Initially thinking it is a part in a private role-playing gig, Jason Nesbith goes along only to discover that the Thermians are not only real aliens, but that they have based their entire technology and culture on the “historical documents” of the Galaxy Quest. By the film’s end not only could we count a tortured and masculinized—that is, he learns to act violently—Mathesar as the seventh of the warriors, but we get a neat inversion of the original: in love with the Thermian Laliari (Missi Pyle), tentacles and all, Fred Kwan brings her back to Earth with him. The new version of Galaxy Quest, now back on air, includes her, a real alien, as one of the actors. This film shares not only its basic plot with Seven Samurai, but in some part also with Preston Struges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941). This depression era film tells the story of a successful director of comedies, played by Joel McCrea, who wants to make a serious film and goes off to research the life of hobos on the road. During his misadventures he learns an important lesson: audiences depend on his comic films to make life bearable. The point is taken further in Galaxy Quest: for the Thermians life itself is made possible, their extermination as a race is avoided because of the values they learn from a fictional television program. A similar point is made about the future of Earth. While the actors take their plot lines and made-up technology for granted, part of an entire generation of obsessive teenagers study the technology with great seriousness: it is they who will make the future (cf. Penley 1997). When Jason Nesbith needs to know how the ship the Thermians have constructed actually works, he has to “call” these kids, led by Brandon (Justin Long), who have the blueprints on computer and who have also solved the “problem” of what the Omega 13 drive actually does. While this is a funny sideswipe at a subculture, it also is an example of knowledge capital; that is, it postulates a use for the kids’ obsessive knowledge accumulation that is beyond that of status making. By giving the “helpless” Thermians the possibly superior technology, the film also comes to the heart of Kurosawa’s original: the farmers need to change the way they think about the world in order to succeed. In contrast to Rashomon, where, as Richie noted, the main actors cannot change, they are who they are, the farmers in Seven Samurai learn to change as do the Thermians. Advanced technology does not matter; it is humanity that will win out.



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Figure 7 The Not So Magnificent Seven, Galaxy Quest Source: Parisot 2000. Dreamworks SKG. Courtesy of Dreamworks Home Entertainment

This cheerful optimism about technology is a contrast to 1980s films such as The Terminator (Cameron 1984)22 as well as Blade Runner and, it might be said, sadly marks it as pre-dating September 11. However Galaxy Quest does share with these two films a question about what constitutes humanity. The evil General Sarris may look like a bug but walks upright, knows what a joke is, and understands the difference between history and fiction. Yet, it is the much more alien Thermians who are the more likable. Their very desire to be like humans (for which read, Americans) is enough to make them worthy of help; by the film’s end their future looks bright. Such a rosy outlook is not part of any historicized viewing of the original—the Tokugawa era brought peace to Japan, but it also, by the end of its 250 years, managed to squeeze many of the farmers even more tightly through taxes than in previous eras. The ending of the Kurosawa film, with the samurai leaving the village and their dead behind, reflects an ambiguity about the years of peace that were to come. The idea that there is a large gap between myths and reality is missing from the comic versions of Seven Samurai, instead we are given the idea that life is better when we try to live life as mythic heroes. That even this version of the heroic is problematic was best explored by Sergio Leone in his remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, to be discussed in the next chapter. These comic versions of the film also sidestep the issue of violence—one by being animation and the other by enacted violence on insect-like aliens. They are thus not part of the wider influence Seven Samurai has had terms of narrative techniques.



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As Prince (2000a) argues, Kurosawa’s use of multiple cameras, 23 slow motion montages, and longer takes influenced both Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah. More to the point, along with “disjunctively angular cutting, and reliance on telephoto lenses” Peckinpah found in Kurosawa’s work the “exploration of slow motion within scenes of violent death” (2000a:180). Both Penn and Peckinpah pushed the boundaries of this stylized approach to filmic violence in their respective films Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969), adding squibs that exploded fake blood and made the scenes “more realistic.” Through the work of these two Hollywood directors, we could trace any number of modern films that use these techniques back to Kurosawa: from Matrix Revolutions (Wachowski 2003) with its final fight in the rain (another Kurosawa technique that many have tried to emulate) to Lord of the Rings (Jackson 2001–2003). While the idea that slow motion one-on-one fighting comes from martial arts films inspires Tarantino, it could also be argued that Hong Kong/ China got it from Kurosawa and Japan as well (Yau Shuk Ting 2005, 2006). There is, then, the entire issue of the aesthetics of violence that must be addressed and no films are better suited to use in this discussion than Yojimbo and its Italian remake A Fistful of Dollars.



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The Lone Hero “Is this a play you wrote?” —Gonji asks Sanjuro in Yojimbo

Introduction Yojimbo (Yôjinbo, The Bodyguard, 1961) raises different issues related to translation than the previous films: Rashomon’s screenplay was based on two Japanese stories and Kurosawa cowrote Seven Samurai as an original screenplay. In short, it could be argued that the stories are firmly Japanese. Yojimbo however has its roots in Dashiell Hammet’s novel, Red Harvest (1992),1 and, perhaps also—as Leone argued during the copyright battle over A Fistful of Dollars— Goldoni’s eighteenth-century play A Servant to Two Masters (1753). It is clearly structured as a Western; that is, as Kurosawa would say, it uses the visual grammar of the Western and certainly recalls High Noon as well as Shane (1953). Its morally ambiguous hero, the bodyguard (Toshiro Mifune), seems to refer more to the world weary, aging Ringo (Gregory Peck) in The Gunfighter (1950) than to the boyish, clean cut Alan Ladd in Shane. As a Japanese jidai-geki, Yojimbo, with its dark humor and tough hero, revitalized a moribund industry—just as the Western in Hollywood had lost its box office appeal because of television, so had the samurai drama in Japan. Moreover, as Yoshimoto (2000) and others argue, Yojimbo is an attempt to overturn the rather stale kabuki-based conventions of most samurai drama, although they are not just subverted in this film, but—as we shall see—also used in a very interesting way. What might seem notable in this film is its use of



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a Western style lone hero in a society that prizes the group. There are two points to make about this. As I argued in the previous chapter, just as groups of heroes had long existed in the Western imagination, allowing for the story of the Seven Samurai to translate, so too was there a history of the lone hero in Japan (Dore 1965, Ikegami 1997, Ohnuki-Tierney 2002) that allowed for the Western tale to be used by Kurosawa to revitalize the Japanese samurai genre. Most familiar to non-Japanese would be the historical character Miyamoto Musashi (c.1584–1645), author of The Book of Five Rings (Go Rin No Sho), about whom several films have been made, including one in 1954 starring Toshiro Mifune. 2 Moreover, the figure of the loner who has made fighting his profession (warrior, police officer, assassin, etc.) is one that appears not just in the United States but across societies. What could be said to be different from modern Western depictions of the lone hero is that the Japanese version is invariably tragic, even when in a comic tale. That is, the sorts of arguments made in the film The Magnificent Seven pointing to the loneliness of the gunslinger are also taken as common features of the lone hero in Japan: no family, no permanent lovers, no friends, and no enemies—alive. While any society might see this as a high price to pay for hero-hood, in Japan (and other East Asian societies), there is a further cost: no family means no one to pray for the dead hero’s soul to make sure he makes it to Nirvana. In short, lone heroes, unless they change their ways, are doomed to continue to wander after death as hungry ghosts. Thus the individualistic hero in traditional Japan is not a problem if he acts for the well-being of the social whole, but he might be a problem if not cared for after dying. The fact that the villagers in Seven Samurai have buried the dead samurai and will probably care for them in death is a significant point often missed out by the Western viewers of the film. Even the dead will benefit more from having protected the village than the living samurai who leave it. In contrast, many, although not all, lone heroes in the U.S. tradition finally get the girl, signifying, perhaps, an end to their loneliness and their readmittance to “normal” society. Even when this does not happen, the fact that the hero is remembered as a sort of savior within the community they have helped ensures them some sort of salvation as Vin murmurs about a dying Harry.3 What can be seen as common to the depiction of heroes across societies is that they are, on the whole, difficult to deal with: haunted by the past, moody, tortured, lacking social skills, more skilled at the arts of death than at making small talk.



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But there are some interesting twists to this very “ordinary” lone hero that Kurosawa adapted from the above sources. First of all, this hero has no name—he makes one up on the spot, Sanjuro Kawabaki (Sanjûrô—thirty-year-old, kawabaki—mulberry field), but we never learn a single thing about him as a person. In many ways this is a clear reference to the continental operative of the Hammett novel who narrates the story and, in a tour de force of stylistic writing, is never referred to by name. While Frayling (2000) uses Orwell’s great essay on the English murder (1995) to argue that Hammett’s heroes (along with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe) were the tough, morally ambiguous detectives that distinguished the traditional British crime mystery from the American detective novel, the continental op in Red Harvest actually turns out to be extremely loyal and morally virtuous, bringing down both the gangsters and the corrupt union boss in order to avenge the death of the man who hired him in the first place. The continental op is, in Chandler’s words, a modern knight errant who owes his loyalty to either his master or a cause and will battle all in order to see justice done (1944). The link then between the samurai as a type of Japanese knight and a Western type of heroic character is very clear. There is another aspect to the film, however, which Galbraith (2002) notes as “folkloric elements,” that makes the story in some ways very Japanese. First of all there are the references to Kabuki theatre in Yojimbo: the town constable/timekeeper Hanasuke (Sawamura Ikio) calls out the time, using the sort of clappers found in Kabuki. At two points in the film actors are framed in shots to look as if in Kabuki make up—Mifune beaten and battered looks like one of the more demonic characters in his graveyard scene, while Unosuke (Nakadai Tatsuya), the beautiful but psychotic villain, stands laughing against a blazing brewery at one point, his face painted by shadows as if he were also a Kabuki character. Yet by being filmed on an outdoors set instead of the stagy indoors sets so often used by jidai geki, the rigidity of Kabuki as a genre is undermined. Moreover, unlike the traditional Kabuki tale, which are either historical dramas or love stories, this is not a tale of a hero or love triumphing, but another sort of story altogether. The key lies in Japanese folklore. Sanjuro, blown into town on a seeming whim (he tosses a stick to decide which direction to take at the start of the film); is clearly a wandering stranger, a masterless samurai (ronin), but he could also be a marebito, a wandering Shinto deity (kami) or possibly a bodhisattva in the Buddhist



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tradition. This is certainly not the way the film is generally analyzed—save by Richie who likens him to a Greek deus ex machina (1996:149–150)—but any understanding of this Japanese folk belief gives us startling similarities. Marebito are mysterious strangers who appear in a town or village and who must be treated carefully, they bring blessings if they are treated well—giving them food and drink in the main—but can destroy a person or place if treated badly (Yoshida 1981). They are trickster deities, hard to pin down, playing jokes, unreliable. The film is framed as if it is this sort of folk tale: at the very start Sanjuro watches a young farmer fight with his father because he wants to leave home in order to be a gambler in town. The son departs and Sanjuro asks for water to drink, which the old man gives him. As Sanjuro takes water from the well, he eavesdrops on the old man and his wife who are clearly aggrieved over the situation in the town as well as by the loss of their son. The wife says something important at this point, at least if you are a Shinto deity: “At this rate there will be no silk festival in town this year.” Such village festivals also involved religious observances; not to hold them would be to invite disaster for a village or town—if the deities are not worshipped and allowed to bless the area, much chaos will result. At the film’s end when all the criminals are being slaughtered by the seemingly superheroic Sanjuro, he spares one quivering young man and tells him to return home to his farm: he is the old couple’s runaway son. In terms of Japanese folklore, the marebito has repaid the favor done him by the parents of the boy. Similar is Sanjuro’s relationship with Gonji (Tono Eijîro), the town’s barkeeper. The old man feeds the stranger for free and then begs him to go on his way, explaining the mess the town is in and how it came to be, but Sanjuro insists on staying: “I like it here, I’ll stay.” When Gonji pleads a little more, Sanjuro replies: “I understand. I get paid for killing. It would be nice if all these men were dead. Think about it.” At the end he saves the life of the old man and tells him: “Now this town will be quiet.” He has granted Gonji’s wish for there to be no more killing in the town by killing every one of the gamblers. Sanjuro also saves another family, an interesting subplot in light of the story of Rikichi’s wife in Seven Samurai. Tokuemon (Shimura Takeshi), the town’s sake brewer, has taken as a hostage/mistress Nui (Tsukasa Yôko), the wife of Kohei (Tsuchiya Yoshio) a farmer who has gambled everything away. As with Rikichi’s wife she is very beautiful, but unlike the woman in the previous film, she has a son and it



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is this child whom Gonji pities. While Sanjuro claims to despise this young man who has lost everything and now lives next to his wife, suffering daily beatings whenever he tries to see her, he eventually rescues the woman and reunites her with her husband. It seems fair to assume that this is another wish granted to Gonji who seems to care for the young couple. In contrast to the shamed wife of Rikichi, however, Nui seems not to have any problem with returning to her family: her love for her son is so strong that at one point when she is bound up, she manages to drag her captor behind her as she tries to get to her child. In short, Nui represents the highest virtues of Japanese motherhood: suffering in silence, strong when she needs to be, and totally devoted to her son. We get to see a different sort of mother altogether in Orin (Yamada Isuzu) the wife of Seibei (Kawazu Seizaburo), a brothel keeper and henchman for Tazaemon (Fujiwara Kamatari) the silk merchant. It is Seibei, in wanting to give all his territory to his son, who has started the feud in the town. His right-hand man, Ushi-tora (Sazanka Kyu), has objected to this and broken with Seibei. With the support of Tokuemon, the sake merchant, Ushi-tora hopes to take over the town. In the meantime Tazaemon, the silk merchant refuses to help “his” henchman and so Tokuemon hopes to be able to defeat Seibei and eventually take over from Tazaemon as headman of the town. Spurring on Seibei in his plans to fight back is the very tough Orin, who, when she hears that her husband has hired Sanjuro at a very expensive price (50 ryô), argues that they should kill him and take the money back. When Orin’s son is kidnapped and finally exchanged for Nui (who has also been kidnapped from Tokuemon), she rewards her son’s cry of “Mother” with an annoyed slap. Orin’s hospitality to Sanjuro is always suspect and perfunctory— she is the sort of person whom a marebito rewards with disaster. Moreover, the division of the town into two reflects an aspect of traditional Japanese villages (Matsunaga 1998). These village sections are often used to organize civic events, but are also important during religious festivals when the men (usually) of the town might engage in a tug of war or sumo bout: these sorts of “battles” are meant to represent the cosmic battles of the gods (cf. Yamaguchi 1998). So it would seem that the two halves of this fictive town are engaged in a real battle and that the fray has been joined by an actual deity. In fact we could say that it is joined by two deities. For when Unosuke, Ushi-Tora’s younger brother, finally appears in town, it is in a gust of wind so strong that Hansuke says to him: “Even the winds



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welcome you.” Like his two brothers his name indicates the year of his birth—Rabbit—but, as Gonji says of the three “he’s the bad one.” Worse than bad he seems mad and takes great pride in carrying a pistol,4 which he uses to kill men without warning. Handsome as he is, there is nothing noble or honest about Unosuke. As he lies dying, he begs Sanjuro to give him his gun to hold and promises that he cannot shoot; he has used all his bullets. Once the gun is in his hands, however, he tries to raise himself and fire. As a character Unosuke is a Kurosawa critique of the rising cult of the yakuza in film and television. The mass media’s and the yakuza’s own attempt to link themselves to samurai values is certainly mocked by the portrayal of all the gangsters in the film, but Unosuke especially is antithetical to the growing media representation in the late 1950s of gangsters as basically decent people who just operated on the wrong side of the street. That he might be something more, as might be Sanjuro, is hinted at by a question Gonji asks the latter man: “Why did you come? Is this a play you wrote?” Sanjuro replies: “Half of it. Unosuke’s changed the second half.” That both men have the power to shape events is interesting as is the final thing Unosuke says to Sanjuro: “I’ll wait for you at the entrance to hell.” Not in hell, but outside, as if he has the power to choose where he will spend his afterlife. There are two final clues that would appear to make clear Sanjuro’s possible supernatural origins: when beaten near to death he chooses to hide in the town cemetery, an area no ordinary human would dare

Figure 8 Yojimbo Requests Two Coffins, Yojimbo Source: Kurosawa 1961. Toho Co. Courtesy of The Criterion Collection



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stay in beyond the time required to do the necessary rites for the dead; and he accepts a dead man’s sword to fight with—something that no samurai would ever comfortably do.5 Kurosawa himself admitted that Sanjuro is meant to be a sort of superhuman character, but most analyses of the film note his similarity to a film director, using the “Is this a play you wrote” line combined with the fact that we see everything from Sanjuro’s point of view to prove the point. Yet the very thing we might assume could never translate, the possible religious underpinning to the story, is precisely the aspect of the film that seems to have transcended in the two remakes.

Figure 9 No Name Requests Two Coffins, A Fistful of Dollars Source: Leone 1964. Unidis s.a.r.l. Courtesy of MGM Home Entertainment

Figure 10

John Smith Looks into the Funeral Parlor, Last Man Standing

Source: Hill 1996. Lone Wolf. Courtesy of New Line Cinema



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In his book on Leone’s life, Frayling (2000) argues that all the religious elements we see in the Italian version of Kurosawa’s film are truly original additions to the Japanese story. Given how few writers seem to have understood the possible religious elements of the original, this might well be true. Yet Richie’s point about Sanjuro being like a Greek god is useful here: if nothing else, classical Western literature does provide us with a model of characters like the Japanese hero. We might not know what a marebito is, but certainly can recognize a man who seems more than human. In whatever way it was that Leone came up with the idea of making these changes to the story for his film A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari 1964), it is an interesting coincidence that these “changes” reverberate well with the themes of Yojimbo. The changes to the narrative are easily summed up by describing Eastwood’s character, Man with No Name, as Christ-like. He arrives in the town of San Miguel on a mule and is greeted by Juan de Dios (John of God) the town’s bell-ringer. Like Sanjuro he is beaten near to death and appears to rise again in order to fight the town’s villain. Frayling (1998) jokes that rather than being a version of Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars is a version of Christ Stopped at Eboli (Rosi 1979). This is reinforced by No Name’s championing of the kidnapped woman, Marisol (Marianne Koch), whose name is a variation on Mary and whose son is called Jesus. What Leone has done then is to pare down the original—the story of the farmer’s son who runs away does not happen at all—to the story of the kidnapped wife. It is her son whom No Name first spots, as he stops to drink from a well outside town, trying to sneak into the house where his mother is held captive. He sees the husband, Julio (Daniel Martín) beaten when he tries to retrieve the child and then glimpses Marisol looking out the window. Their eyes meet and we are to assume that he is captivated by her beauty. In Last Man Standing (1996), Walter Hill goes a step further. The film opens with a first-person voice-over narrative that firmly links it to Hammett’s detective fiction, while the camera settles on a destroyed church in which a woman, Felina (Karina Lombard), is desperately praying. As she says her prayers, the wind blows and, coming up the road is our drunken, on-the-run hero played by Bruce Willis. Unlike the Leone version, he might not be a Christ-figure, but he certainly 10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez


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seems to be a sort of avenging angel—impossible to kill even when it is his ordinary gun pitted against the villain’s machine gun. Both Leone’s and Hill’s films take place in that liminal area already discussed: around the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. In both films the border occupies an important place: it is the permeable membrane through which not only the characters travel, but which makes it possible to commit crimes. In the spaghetti Western, exchanging guns for gold and then taking both from the Mexican army is the crime committed by the devious Ramon Rojos (Gian Maria Volonté), while in Hill’s film, there is a similar dirty double-cross involving corrupt Mexican authorities. But whereas in the later film the border is also an excuse that makes it possible to bring Chicago gangsters to the town of Jericho (making this version closer to the Hammett original novelette) so that they can run guns and alcohol during Prohibition, in the Italian film the Mexican border allows Leone to puncture the myth of the ultimately altruistic professionals in U.S. Westerns. Leone (Frayling 2000) often commented on how his image of the heroic, selfless American—fostered by his film viewing—was destroyed for him in postwar Italy by his experience of the real thing. The wonderful soldiers who had come to liberate the country were, in his memory, as human and corrupt as anyone. The good guy in a white hat of the U.S. Western, then, became an image that he longed to dethrone. Leone became a rather good, if amateur, historian of the U.S. Civil War and the years after as well, and it is this era that is the subject of his best-known films including For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). While he was clearly influenced by Yojimbo—no matter how much he tried to protest about this when Toho sued him for copyright infringement—and its portrayal of a hero who is somehow almost as bad as the villains, Leone’s desire to make his own version of the story grew out of his own life’s experience. His is a European comment on an American myth: that the West was won by basically decent people. Just as Kurosawa portrayed the gangsters as grotesques straight out of Dickens (Frayling 2000), so did Leone portray all his “heroes” as morally corrupt—even the handsome Eastwood is not to be trusted. Leone’s debunking of the myth, like Kurosawa’s, was based on a fairly strong knowledge of the genre and the visual grammar of the U.S. Western. The surprise success of the Leone film speared on the nascent industry of spaghetti Westerns in Europe, often Italian-German



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productions made in Spain (Frayling 1998). It was also the film that brought Eastwood to fame as well as setting his persona for much of the work he was to do in the following decades. Whether as No Name, Harry Callahan, or Josie Wales, the characters Eastwood has portrayed over the years are morally suspect. They seem to be fighting for the side of good, but like the original continental op upon whom Sanjuro was based, seem not to mind the means that they use to achieve their ends. Because of the court case over copyright, A Fistful of Dollars was released in the United States late in the 1960s, gaining an audience who seemed to understand the story as a sort of critique of the Vietnam War. Not only does the good guy seem to be somewhat like the bad guys, but also he is willing to do anything, it appears, for money. Over time, this sort of crazy antihero has changed in the popular imagination; think of his incarnations in Mad Max (Miller 1979, 1981, 1985), Escape from New York (Carpenter 1981), or Desperado (Rodriguez 1995) where the protagonist may have a personal motivation for what he does—the death of his family, or bargaining for his freedom—but, then again, may not, as in Vin Diesel’s films. The moral problem presented by men, whatever their intentions, who use violence in order to solve problems is central to all these films. Is the dead but quiet town really worth it? In Last Man Standing this is a point made very graphically by Sheriff Galt (Bruce Dern) declaring the whole town dead. Unlike the first two versions of the film no one can live there any more. This evolution of the theme is certainly a Judeo-Christian twist on the marebito theme of the original—that the town in Hill’s film is called Jericho is a clear pointer to the Old Testament Jehovah who was willing to destroy entire towns. Willis’ John Smith is much closer to portraying “the wrath of god” than he is to the earlier incarnations of his characters. Destructive as Mifune and Eastwood were in the earlier films, they do not depopulate the entire town. Yet, of the three characters, his motives appear to be the most human. Richie notes of Sanjuro that “his human generosity is a weakness” as part of the way of arguing for how the character only resembles a Greek god figure; in contrast, the voice-over narration and other characters’ comments make it clear that human generosity is both the weakness and the virtue of John Smith in Last Man Standing. A key change to the narrative, the addition of a prostitute, Lucy (Alexandra Powers), reveals Smith’s weakness. Smith decides that everyone would be better off dead after the drunken Italian gangster Strozzi cuts off Lucy’s ear for “having a big mouth.” The Sheriff says to him at this point: “I think



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I’ve just spotted the chink in your armor. When you go down, it will be over a skirt.” The useful reference to being like a knight aside, Leone’s and Hill’s films share the notion that it is men’s relationships with women that constitute the “problem” that set events in motion. This, I would argue, is not a theme in Yojimbo, although it is in Seven Samurai. If the idea of Sanjuro being a marebito is to hold water, then it is the old couple at the start of the film who set events in motion. It is the destruction of the family unit by the modern greed for money— Kurosawa’s stated aim in making the film—that is central to the plot. It is the same greed that drives Kohei to gamble his house and his wife away. If Sanjuro is a wrathful deity, he is one who stands against modernity and all its evils. He is not tempted by the woman—any woman it would be appear—nor does he seem to pity her. While his duel with Unosuke may have homoerotic elements, these are minor in comparison to the central role such themes play in A Fistful of Dollars and in Last Man Standing. As Richie notes, Mifune’s character seem to be totally objective, only caring whether events are omoshiroi (interesting, amusing) or not. This is Kurosawa’s concern as well: this rather bloody film in which we see arms cut off and blood spurting for the first time in a jidai geki, a genre that had been, like most Westerns, bloodless, is also omoshiroi. That is, there is a lot of intended humor in the film; Leone picks up the humor of the Japanese film and translates it neatly into an idiom capable of amusing both European and U.S. audiences—although Eastwood claimed credit for thinking up some of the pithier lines. The humor of the Japanese film is black, and not necessarily understood by all viewers. In comparing the structure of A Fistful of Dollars to Yojimbo, Frayling (1998) points out the sardonic jokes that Leone added to the story. What Leone seems to have understood, but Frayling does not get, is that Kurosawa’s film was full of such jokes as well. For example, Frayling uses the family consultation scenes to make a point about the difference in acting styles between Japan and Italy—the latter being more melodramatic. What he appears to miss is the joke of a Japanese family consultation in which a father says to his son “Remember you can’t get ahead in this world unless folks think you’re both a cheat and a killer.” Then: “Your mother is right. After all, you have to kill a few men or folks won’t respect you.” In the more serious Hill film, this conversation becomes one of Mafioso honor and there is no humor intended in the contention that a man gains honor by killing other men.



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The biggest “joke” of all is in the way Mifune portrays Yojimbo. As a young actor he could, if need be, appear handsome if not downright beautiful, but by his forties, Mifune was just as happy to play dirty, scruffy, and possibly louse ridden. The samurai of Seven Samurai might not have been magnificent and Mifune’s character in that film is a bit of a drunken fool, but none of them appear as down and out as does Sanjuro. This is not just an inversion of Kabuki conventions, but also of those of the Western. As Mitchell (1996) notes, the camera’s fascination with the male body, as well as with the strong and handsome male face, is one of the most striking themes of the U.S. genre. The camera lingered on the body, on the face and jaw; it generally did not start by showing us the hero’s dirty feet. Kurosawa’s camera lingers on Sanjuro the most when he is thinking, face screwed up, chewing on a straw, or being beaten to a pulp and he is not “easy to look at.” This visual joke does not translate into Leone’s film where Eastwood is only marginally scruffy7 and Volonté, the actor who plays Ramon Rojos, is one of those men who can appear both ugly and handsome depending on the shot. So too are the minor characters in Leone’s film peppered with virile-looking handsome men—Mr. Baxter (Wolfgang Lukschy), his son Antonio (Bruno Carotenuto), Ramon’s brother Esteban (Seighardt Rupp), and Marisol’s husband—to an extent that the Japanese film is not. Leone might have been cynical about the altruism of the U.S. hero, but he still loved the look of the Western. The tension between what he wanted to portray and the way in which he films it is such that all those close-ups of eyes, feet, and twitching fingers with dirty nails—the close ups even tighter than in the Hollywood films—have become a visual signature all of their own.8 There is a sort of beauty in these duels to the death, something like a bullfight we might say. In contrast, Kurosawa frames his shots in what one Japanese reviewer termed “artistic simplicity” but seems less in love with the looks of his actors. It is this aspect of the original that Hill tried to recapture in Last Man Standing.

Mi miedo es mi maldición (My Fear is My Curse) 9 Mentioned above was the fact that one major change in the remakes is the role the kidnapped woman plays. She is central to the plots of the remakes from the beginning of the film in a way that Nui is not. That is not to say that Nui is not also important: her rescue by Sanjuro sets the final actions of the film into motion. But she is not the start



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of the story as are Marisol or Felina in the remakes. The film is not just about Nui and her family, but also about the farmer’s, Seibei’s, and Ushi-Tora’s families as well. Leone picks this theme up to some extent by having two families involved in the feuding: the Baxters and the Rojos. Just as in Kurosawa’s film, he makes the first a family that includes a tough woman, Conseulo Baxter (Margarita Lozano), and the second a rather pathetic male-only family. Unlike the Japanese film where it is the boss who wants Nui, the Rojos are weakened by Ramon’s obsession with Marisol. There is a terrible irony in Ramon’s taunting of Sheriff Baxter when he tries to surrender: “Have you asked your wife?” the implication being that Baxter is less of a man for being married to a rich, strong woman. But Ramon will also be undone by his love for a strong woman, although she is poor.10 In Last Man Standing, as already noted, it is women that are seen to be the weakness in John Smith’s character. Every woman who appeals to him for help (or even if they do not) is rescued by Smith: Wanda (Leslie Mann) the overtalkative hooker; Lucy with her missing ear and, last but never least, Felina the woman who prays. Willis, it could be argued, was chosen to play the Sanjuro character precisely because he was more like Mifune than Eastwood— not necessarily handsome and much more likely to appear morally ambivalent. Hill’s camera is never quite as in love with him as Leone’s was with Eastwood (although we do see him prone and naked in the bath—a stock scene, as Mitchell argues, in the genre’s love affair with the male body) and that has much to do with the nature of the postmodern revisionist Western. Yet Last Man Standing as our third version of Red Harvest is also more faithful to the original novel. What could be more indicative of this than by casting the actor who became famous for playing a comic version of the tough detective in Moonlighting (Caron 1985–1989)? Willis’ strength in his first incarnation as the would-be heir to Hammett’s and Chandler’s detectives was his ability to be funny. Hill however takes much of the humor out of the Kurosawa original, leaving us with a rather dour, ultimately moralistic version of the tale. Just to make the point clear the film begins with “Funny thing, no matter how low you sink there’s still a right and wrong and you always end up choosing.” Men’s vulnerability to women, which in Leone’s version only leads to trouble—hence Eastwood does not even kiss a woman in the film— becomes the moral salvation of Smith who says “I was born without a conscience.” Moreover, in contrast to both the Mifune and Eastwood characters, Willis has two “affairs” while in town—although his first



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time, with Wanda, ends by his having to jump off her body, naked, to kill his would-be attackers. It is in his interaction with these women when they are in trouble that we see a pattern in his life: he cannot resist helping women and that is why, we might assume, that he has no money, no job, and is always on the run. It is the supposedly tough females, the ones who end up wounded in the world of violent men, who seem to appeal to him most. “I always liked sinners better than saints” he says as he watches Felina leave. Leone has been accused of being a misogynist for his portrayal of women as either saints or sinners, but Hill gives us only wounded women in his film. Orin and Mrs. Baxter might well end up dead in the first two movies, the usual fate for the strong female in the Western, but at least they are not victims in every aspect of their lives. Last Man Standing gives us not a single woman who is strong and, noticeably, there are no families portrayed either: the closest we get is the character Giorgio Carmonte (Michael Imperioli) who is Strozzi’s (Neil Eisenberg) cousin. We only see a picture of Felina’s child (a girl) because the husband and child are somewhere in Mexico. Outside of that, Jericho seems to be a town populated entirely by men and a few prostitutes—if the whole town is finally destroyed what should it matter? This last is an interesting playing out of the Western myth. The story of the revisionist Western is often largely a tale of how the gunfighter’s way of life cannot continue to exist in a time of change, of becoming civilized, in an era when women come to town and men have families. Or, as Leone put it, “When men lost their balls.”11 In Hill’s film, Smith leaves town sure that something will always turn up, that there will always be work for a killer like him to do. By transposing the story to the era of the Prohibition, the times of gangsters, and combining the genre of the Western with that of the mobster, Hill appears to be making a statement about modernity just as Kurosawa was. Corrupt men, law keepers, and towns exist at all times and in all places. In contrast to Mifune who appears to stand against this simple fact, fighting against the corruption of modernity, Willis’ character is a product of this sort of society. He might not belong to a gang, but he is a criminal just like the men in Strozzi’s and Doyle’s (David Patrick Kelly) gangs. Eastwood, in contrast, is on the run, but we do not know why. He clearly is not part of the sort of family business that the Rojos and Baxters represent—by being free of family ties, it would appear that he is able to do good. That he is outside of everything is made apparent by the final joke of A Fistful of Dollars. Noting that the Mexican army and the U.S. army are both about to



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descend on the town of San Miguel, Eastwood chuckles at the idea of his being in the middle. Having just destroyed two opposing forces in San Miguel, what might he not be capable of doing with two armies? While Leone’s message may well have been political—the United States and Mexico as opposed rather than the former as the savior of the latter—this does not take away from the fact that No Name appears to consider the possibilities. Would it be a good thing if he ended that conflict? He never says, it is left to us to wonder. Hill, on the other hand, gives us utter destruction; all the women gone; Smith wounded and yet driving off into the sunset; and a town where all the remaining male inhabitants are planning to leave. If it is not the apocalypse then it is something close to it—it is about the sterility that leads to the end of a male-centered society. It could well be that Hill is underlining the essential dead end nature of the Western as a genre—once you kill all the bad guys and the women run off in fear, what is left? The answer might well be: only a story that seems to endless repeat itself in countless variations. Kurosawa revived the story with the humor of Yojimbo; Leone revitalized it with historical details and a new style. Hill, a long veteran of the genre, seems to mourn its falling into endless special effects. His attempt to give us something new with a voice-over narrative and a human yet powerful hero fails as well. He would have been better served by Willis in his Fifth Element (Besson 1997) incarnation as a hero nagged by his mother, rescued by the goddess who is the Fifth Element, and hounded by the authorities for his traffic violations. Or Willis as the family man in the Die Hard (McTiernan 1988, 1995; Harlin 1990; Wiseman 2007) series. The lone hero, in the Hollywood film, is no longer allowed to be so solitary and women are no longer so easily deposed of12 —it is the logical outcome of the civilizing West: he has been domesticated. As discussed in the previous chapter, this is the solution explored by the television remake of The Magnificent Seven, yet it is rare for the Western as film to explore these issues: in Unforgiven, for example, the events of the film mark the end of Eastwood’s attempts to be a family man. Thus critics have continued to lament the end of the Western, saying it is no longer a viable, exciting genre, often seeing films such as Last Man Standing as rather ponderous self-referential pastiches. Even on television the genre exists best as a self-contained miniseries rather than an open-ended drama, although Deadwood (Milch 2004–2006) could be the exception that proves the rule. Something similar has been happening with samurai drama (Karatsu 2007): viewing figures for television audiences are down



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and the occasional film seems to have lost appeal as well. Karatsu attributes this to audiences wanting more than fake stage settings and cites the recent successes of Last Samurai and Zatôichi as indicative of what audiences prefer: attention to historical detail, better use of special effects, and something original added to oft-repeated story lines. No film would appear to fit the bill better than Takeshi Kitano’s prize-winning Zatôichi (2003), a film for which he was happy to discuss his influence by Kurosawa.13

“Even With My Eyes Wide Open, I Can’t See a Thing”14 The story of the wandering blind masseur who is also a great swordsman has had a long play on Japanese television (1974, 1976, 1978– 1979) and has been made into at least twenty-six films. Its basic structure incorporated several elements found in Yojimbo: weekly a person or family found themselves prey to some problem that could only be solved by swift swordplay and the justice meted out by a wandering professional. This wanderer should not stay in town however. The blind swordsman, a master of his art, reliant on his hearing in order to fight as if he were sighted, is perhaps one of the more original incarnations of this variation of the marebito, and, we might argue, the masseur does need some god-like skills in order to perform as brilliantly as he does. Kitano, directing and starring in the latest film version of Zatôichi, takes this basic story and combines it with a few other stock plots from the jidai geki genre: the gangsters who overstep their bounds; two young adults seeking revenge for the slaughter of their family by a gang; the ronin who is looking for work; the reckless nephew who is wasting his time gambling; the kind widow who is happy to take in a stranger; and the fatherly, gentle barkeep who is the center of village life. Kitano, however, gives each of these subplots a new twist: the gangsters never see the face of their boss. The children seeking revenge, Okino (Daike Yûko) and her transvestite brother Osei (Tachibana Daigorô), have become murderous geisha. The ronin, Gennosuke Hattori (Asano Tadanobu), is a former bureaucrat whose loving wife, Oshino (Natsukawa Yui), hates his bloody bodyguard jobs but, ironically, she is slowly dying of tuberculosis, which forces him to continue to seek employment in order to pay for her medication. The nephew, Shinkichi (Taka Gadarukanaru), is almost too interested in



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the transvestite geisha; and his widowed aunt, Ôme (Ôkusu Michiko), is not a bent old crone, but a rather attractive woman who says “no” to any romantic ideas the blind masseur might have. The bar keeper (Emoto Akira), too, is more than he seems. Add to this a “mad” neighbor’s son who spends his days running about as if leaping into battle, dressed as a foot soldier because “he wants to be a samurai”; peasants who tap dance in the mud a la Monty Python; a hero with bleached blond hair; and a final scene that reminded many viewers of Busby Berkeley musicals—but that has a touch of Kurosawa, referring to the fire festival sequence in Hidden Fortress—and we have an energetic, vibrant film. As Karatsu (2007) notes, Zatôichi balances life and death through humor, a technique she thinks comes straight from Kurosawa. There are other, clear visual references to Kurosawa as well: the outdoor settings, the attention to period detail, the care with which most of the characters are accurately costumed for the era, and, finally, the violent fighting that has realistic consequences. Being filmed in color, it is a more stylized mise-en-scène than that of Kurosawa, owing something, it could be said, to Tarantino and modern special effects departments. The blood glistens as it flies, spurts, or drips from wounds—in a suicide scene it stains the floor as elegantly as anything Mizuguchi might have devised. But like Yojimbo it is a film not above poking fun at its relatives within the jidai geki genre: the nephew tries to teach some young boys how to fight in a traditional seeming scene, but ends up teaching them moves that finish with all three hitting him on the head. The widow tells the masseur not to get any ideas, and the next scene cuts to him asking her if it is “Hard enough?” He is, of course, giving her a massage. Moreover, it has a rather complex structure of flashback sequences that occasionally can lose the viewer. But it has a very basic Yojimbo-like plot: there are two gangs in town vying for power and the authorities seem to do nothing; it is the end of the Tokugawa era when the samurai who had become bureaucrats were forced out of jobs and, perhaps, some were forced to be warriors again. It also has a Kurosawa-like message: despite all the bad things that happen in the film, most ordinary people are basically good: the gambling nephew, the murderous geisha, the cowering townspeople, and, interestingly but sadly, the very skilled ronin who ends up working for the gangsters. That Zatôichi manages to appear original is certainly similar to the films previously discussed: all the permutations on Rashomon, or the comic versions of Seven Samurai. It speaks to a point made



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by Todorov (1990) about how innovation occurs within genre: it is only by the mixing of old forms that something new might be created. What is intriguing from the point of view of whether a film is successful or not is that Last Man Standing does this precisely as did Yojimbo, faithfully mixing the gangster genre with the samurai drama in the case of the latter, and the Western with the Mafioso film in that of the former. Yet, Last Man Standing was seen to fail and Walter Hill, according to Galbraith (2002), refuses to discuss Kurosawa’s story that is credited in the open sequences. What seems to have gone wrong is, as already suggested, that the humor that was another aspect of the film that had somehow translated in the Leone version and that surfaces in the Kitano permutation disappears from the Hill film. That humor, that culturally contextual intangible, does somehow make it into the translation or remake is a puzzle to be solved in relation to the films that will be considered in the next chapter. First, however, the issue of film, violence, and aesthetics needs to be briefly considered.

The Aesthetics of Violence Can there be an aesthetics of violence? I noted earlier that Tarantino argues that the use of violence in his films should be read in terms of their aesthetics rather than in any moralistic way. It is a very postmodern point to make: the look of the thing matters, but the viewer is not meant to find an internal meaning. It is this “emptying out” of meaning that has been used in the arguments against the depiction of violence in films, games, or television (cf. Prince 2000b): the vulnerability of children to such nihilistic depictions is an issue about which parents in the United States are much incised. Yet, as I argued, Tarantino’s films seem to me to have similar moralistic points to make about men and their relation to violence as do, in this case, Kurosawa, Leone, Hill, and Kitano. Depictions of violence, whether beautifully composed, carefully framed, and realistically enacted or not, are, in and of themselves, meaningless. It is the context within which the violence occurs that renders the act meaningful and, frequently, moralistic. Thus, when Sanjuro’s apparent objectivity, his amoral stance, is pitted against the mad glee of the killer Unosuke, his “playful” challenge to the authority of the gangsters who are occupying the town turns into a cosmic battle between good and evil. Similarly, No Name’s declared disinterest in the rights and wrongs of the feud between the



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Rojos and Baxters is turned into a moral challenge when he finally meets Ramon who is clearly psychotic. Hill uses the same motif in Last Man Standing, when the petty criminal, con man, and killer John Smith finally encounters the monstrous Hickey (Christopher Walken). Moreover, Smith’s determination to clean up the town stands in stark relief against the Sheriff’s (Bruce Dern) corruptness disguised as neutrality. Finally Zatôichi is thrust into a complex situation by the cruelty of others who assume that a blind man is an easy target. While it could be said that the use of special effects, the concern with the composition of violent scenes, the efforts to render them both realistic and accessible to audiences robs such scenes of their shock value for some, the fact remains that the stories, in and of themselves, make certain moral assumptions about justice in the world. To argue, then, that an aesthesized violence, stylistic and stylish, robs narratives of any meaning, is to miss the point: meaning is not, as Ricouer (1981) has argued, to be found in single constitutive elements, but in the relationship of these elements to each other. In Kurosawa’s films, and in many of the remakes, adaptations and in the variety of permutations that come out of his work, the concern with social injustice remains at the core of the story. That violent means are sometimes the only way to deal with injustice is dwelt with as an issue in Seven Samurai: men who are professionals in the world of violence have no place in “normal” society. Yet, paradoxically, in all versions of the stories, Japanese, European, or North American, men of violence can somehow find a sort of purpose or redemption in fighting for just causes. This has long been the theme of heroic tales. It is the villains who die meaningless deaths, while the heroes are remembered with gratitude and might even live on to fight another day. The pacifist hero is, perhaps sadly so, rare in our modern mythologies. To argue, as some like Tarantino do, that the concern with technique and style—the look of the thing—is inherently apolitical ignores the engagement that audiences may have with a film. Leone’s “beautiful” men aside, his attempt to comment on U.S. immorality was read as a commentary on Vietnam by late 1960s audiences. The “failure” of Last Man Standing might well be that it failed to engage with 1990s concerns about violence and drugs (referenced to by the bootleg liquor) in a way that made sense, while Zatôichi’s playfulness and humor sit well with its darker message about the ways in which modern Japanese seem to be too cut off from each other and their “traditional” values. Given such possible readings of the films, the framing of the violence acquires meaning and makes a moral point;



The Lone Hero

Remaking Kurosawa

however, this moral point, when so aestheticized might well lead to an inversion of the director’s original intent: “war as hell” can also be read as being about the glory of war, or the nobility of heroic interventions. It was the possibility of violence to change the world in ways associated with divine or supernatural intervention, however, that crossed over in many versions of the film. This theme of change born from violence is also central to the final two films to be considered in this book.



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Cloning Kurosawa The life of man should burn as if on fire, the life of an insect should be thrown into the fire. Ponder and you will see that the world is dark and this floating world is a dream. Burn with abandon! —The lyrics to the fire festival song in The Hidden Fortress

Introduction It was argued in the previous chapter that combining genres was the one way to come up with something new. Certainly this is the interesting point of adaptations, remakes, or permutations: they always result in something new while maintaining the connection to the old. Or to elaborate on the reference to Lucas’ Star Wars series, unless the clone is raised in a manner identical to the original, it is not going to be the same person, although there will be resemblances. Cultural context, which includes the historical and social as well as language, means that even the most faithful remakes or adaptations become something else. Both the combination of genres as well as the ability of a text to mutate would seem to be Lucas’ (The Hidden Fortress DVD) reasons for arguing that Star Wars is not his version of the Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san akunin or Three Villains of the Hidden Fortress 1958). Lucas admits that his film is



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Remaking Kurosawa

about a princess and a “treasure” (in this case information) that need to be got to safety; but in the Kurosawa film, there was only General Rokurota Makabe, played, ever reliably, by Toshiro Mifune, who was responsible for accomplishing this mission. There are no young men vying for the feisty Princess Yuki’s (Uehara Misa) affection, although the Japanese film does offer us two downtrodden peasants turned foot soldiers in the place of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamil) and Hans Solo (Harrison Ford). These two men are Tahei (Chiaki Minoru) and Matakishi (Fujiwara Kamatari), both regular actors in Kurosawa films. Just in the four films considered for this book, Chiaki played the young priest in Rashomon, and Heibei in Seven Samurai; while Fujiwara played Manzo in Seven Samurai and the silk merchant in Yojimbo. Both were versatile actors and brought comic overtones to their portrayal of two “friends” who have left the village to make their fortunes at war. However, as they discuss right at the film’s beginning, war has done nothing for them except made them poorer and almost got them killed. That they have suffered is clear—they witness, in the film’s opening scene, a lone samurai, run down and speared by the enemy, his death played out for the audience in Kurosawa’s signature slow motion. They know, if captured and recognized as deserting soldiers from the army, that they too might be killed and they come up with a plan to make their way home, across enemy territory. But the journey, traversing a deserted plain that looks almost as if devastated by nuclear fallout, is not without its perils, including the disasters wrought by the men’s own personalities. They bicker, attempt to betray each other, run off, and end up being captured and sent to work digging for the missing treasure of the Akizuki clan. The scenes in the pit in which they are set to dig and the shots of the enslaved soldiers marching up and down the steps of the captured Akizuki fortress are clear references to Kurosawa’s engagement with the social realism of the Russian filmmaker Eisenstein. So far the film seems to reflect many of the themes of Kurosawa’s 1950s oeuvre: the way in which the peasants are oppressed and used by aristocratic elites; how the peasants themselves are complicit in this oppression and are not innocents; the savagery of war; and, in the figure of the orphaned princess, how it is women who suffer the consequences of men’s heroism. Yet The Hidden Fortress, once Tahei and Matakishi encounter General Rokurota, is more like a fairy tale than it would be expected given its first third. This may well be due to the fact that Kurosawa wrote the screenplay with three others:



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Hashimoto Shinobu, Kikushima Ryuzo, and Oguni Hideo. The film is also symptomatic of an interesting shift that appears to have occurred generally in his work. In the early 1950s, films like Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Stray Dog, Scandal, Throne of Blood, and Ikiru explored the twin themes of guilt and responsibility. In these earlier films, the main (guilty) characters have to learn (or fail to learn) how to accept responsibility for their actions, how to live in society with others, how to make the world better. By the time we reach the 1960s, with Yojimbo and Sanjuro, Kurosawa seems to have worked through much of his ideas about guilt (although this theme would resurface in Ran and Rhapsody in August) and was more interested in the acceptance of responsibility as the way in which true heroism is made. Sanjuro shoulders the burden of righting wrongs for the various families in Yojimbo, but seems to have no guilty secret of his own; then he tries to teach a group of overeager young samurai how to act responsibly in the sequel Sanjuro. The concept of the lone gunman who is really a sort of knight errant is one that translated fairly straightforwardly, as we saw, in later versions of Yojimbo. But as Richie noted (in conversation) how could you “translate” the plot of Sanjuro? You would need to make it about a troop of boy scouts! Thus, The Hidden Fortress would appear to be a pivotal film between the earlier work that focused on issues of guilt and the later films that were more interested in the theme of responsibility. It is also an interesting departure for Kurosawa. It was his first film in widescreen, as well as a more lyrical film, calling on a style that evokes a sense of “fairy tale” as Richie notes (1996:136–137). Yet it is not a pure fairy story; in fact, it might appear, from the first section of The Hidden Fortress, that the two cowardly, sniveling, weeping, and, frankly, dishonest peasants are the characters who must learn about responsibility. While they are completely human, they are also comic creations and so they never really develop as characters; in fact they seem to regress, at one point drawing straws to see who will have the first go at raping the mute maidservant (Princess Yuki in disguise). There may be, at the bottom of these roles, some reflection of the disdain Kurosawa felt for people who would not learn to be responsible for themselves. Whatever the reason for the portrayal of these two, it is no surprise that Star Wars changed these characters into robots. This solved the problem, which also arose for the remake of Seven Samurai with its portrayal of peasants, of how to represent an underclass in the “classless” United States as well as a presumably classless future.



Cloning Kurosawa

Remaking Kurosawa

The two farmers are also problematic as human beings for, despite providing a few laughs, there is little likeable about them. Lucas does away with the second problem by making them loyal retainers, R2D2 and CPO—the former speaking only in squeaks and the latter comically British, a complaining, whining servant who is, nevertheless, a faithful follower (he is programmed to it). In contrast, there is nothing loyal about Tahei and Matakishi in the original, they would not only sell each other out if it profited them, but also have to be threatened every step of their journey by General Rokurota. It is Rokurota’s seemingly callous nature, happy to use these very “amusing” (omoishiroi again) peasants in his escape with the Princess and the Akizuki gold, which will fund a new campaign, that makes him the apparent third villain of the Japanese title. The general however is not the character who has the most to learn in this film. The character who must learn to shoulder the burden of responsibility is Princess Yuki. She is barely sixteen, a spoiled young princess, whose doting father raised her as a boy, letting her run wild. When news comes that one of her body doubles,1 Rokurota’s sixteen-yearold sister, has been killed by the Akizuki clan, she berates him for not expressing any emotion.2 Her old lady-in-waiting apologizes for the Princess’s tirade—she recognizes Rokurota’s suppressed grief. Princess Yuki, however, not only does not see this, but does not care that her words might cause her general any further hurt. Yuki is a character, it could be said, whose heart is in the right place, but who does not know how to best express or restrain her feelings; she does not know how to deal with others except to give them orders; she has empathy for her dead stand-in, but has no compassion for the woman’s grieving brother. As the last member of her family, she must shoulder the responsibility of heading the clan, but she is still immature. In short, she is a teenager who must learn how to rule and command others. There is nothing of Princess Leia in her; Leia seems older, long used to command, young but clearly more sympathetic and mature in her outlook. Princess Yuki, undisciplined tomboy, has none of these qualities. She is so rash that Rokurota has to try to trick her in order to disguise her royalty, he says that he assumes that she would not be capable of playing a mute. No fool, despite her immaturity, Yuki immediately guesses his ruse: “I’m contrary, so you say I couldn’t do it in order to get me to argue that of course I could.” Agreeing to the “disguise” (Japanese aristocrats speak such a formal version of the language that it almost constitutes a dialect in itself), does nothing to



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dampen the Princess’ basic toughness: she escapes the curious Tahei and Matakishi by leading them through the worst part of the forest; remains capable of silently bullying the peasants when they try to run off with the gold; and quite happily pulls Rokurota aside to give him information or to order him to buy one of the former Akizuki peasants who has been sold into prostitution. This last, a tall and ungainly female, played by Higuchi Toshiko, is as close to anything The Hidden Fortress has to offer as a Wookie. Along the way, seeing life in the city, being touched by the fierce loyalty of the slave they have freed, taking part in a fire festival in the forest, learning something as well from the baseness of Tahei and Matakishi, Yuki begins to grow up. But it is the steadfastness of General Rokurota, determined to get their little group to safety, forced to play the villain with Tahei and Matakishi and yet so clearly noble, who seems to teach the princess the most. In one of the most exciting scenes from amongst all of Kurosawa’s film, he shows us just how great the general is. 3 Discovered by some Akizuki guards on horseback, Rokurota chases them on foot, kills one, takes his horse, and, in series of quickly edited pans, rides the other man down and ends by riding straight into the arms of the enemy.4 There, he and General Hyoe Tadokoro (Fujita Susumu) engage in a duel. They are both old enemies and yet respect each other almost as friends; the fight is not to the death, so when Rokurota bests him, Hyoe lets him go—until they meet again, he promises. This sequence, exhilarating and displaying all of Kurosawa’s mastery at depicting men at arms, seems to contradict the initial message of the film (and of many of the films before it): that there is nothing glorious or wonderful about war. This single combat, however, might well fall into the category of samurai values that Kurosawa did admire: the mastery of the lance and sword. It is this mastery that makes Kyuzo so admirable in Seven Samurai; he is not interested in killing men, just in the technique of the fight. It is the moral Mifune tries to impart to the young men in Sanjuro, skill is one thing, killing another, and death in any event is horrible. What this example demonstrates is that Kurosawa, fiercely critical of Japanese militarism, still remained enthralled by the skills of the samurai as a warrior class, he wanted to present his heroes as ordinary humans and yet they become heroic through the use of their skills. In Seven Samurai and Yojimbo we had examples of how these skills could be used for good, rather than being ideologically reworked for “evil.” The price remains a high one: people lose their lives, and it is only the possible marebito



Cloning Kurosawa

Remaking Kurosawa

Sanjuro who gets to enjoy the process in the later film, Yojimbo, and not suffer any consequences. In The Hidden Fortress, the general is reluctant to kill others, but he does “what a man has to do.” It is this measured reluctance that wins their freedom at the film’s end. General Hyoe is punished and disfigured by his Lord for letting Rokurota go. When the princess, the young servant girl they have bought, and Rokurota are captured and sentenced to death, Hyoe comes to berate the general for the punishment he has received. He first appears in the doorway, dark and definitely frightening and then reveals a scarred face that is reminiscent of Darth Vader without his mask in The Return of the Jedi (Marquand 1983). But the princess, no longer required to be mute, is not cowed by the angry general, and she lectures Hyoe on what his punishment tells her about his Lord. A true nobleman would never punish a vassal, whose loyalty is necessary, for an act of honor—to do so seems to her cruel and a waste. She would not treat her vassals so, she argues. Life, she goes on to say, is both too precious and fleeting to waste in such petty acts of vengeance, and she sings the fire festival song that she learned the night before while dancing with the peasants in the forest. The princess has grown up: Rokurota bows to her in respect. Hyoe, after a night’s pondering on her message, turns coat and frees the party the next morning. Lest the energy and pure fun of some parts of the story appear to be Kurosawa wandering far from his favorite issues, the film ends with Tahei and Matakishi being rewarded for their help by the princess, who asks them not to argue over the gold she gives them. But, at first, they do not recognize Yuki and her general, who are dressed in the formal robes of the nobility, and sit before them as if on a stage. They look like figures out of a painted scroll, or actors in a play. The two peasants have stumbled into someone else’s story. They have been witness to and temporary actors in this unreal adventure with its impossibly happy ending and, as in a fairy tale, they too have been rewarded. As they leave the palace, gates shutting behind them, cutting them off forever from this unreal world, they begin to bicker once more. True, it is about trying to give each other the gold, but it is pure slapstick again. Perhaps they have learned to be better people; perhaps the princess will be a good ruler—yet there is something so forbidding about the gates and castle behind them that the nagging feeling of whether anything has really changed surfaces. Somehow, in this very successful film—it was a great hit for Kurosawa—that seems pure romance (in its original use of the word),



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there lies a parallel story about what war, capitalism, and modernity do to ordinary men. The message is not about bravery or nobility at all, in fact, it is about how men are reduced to their most base by the experience of fighting. In this final scene of The Hidden Fortress, my earlier point about myth and ideology being part and parcel of each other is graphically illustrated. The fairy tale world of the elite has political repercussions for the ordinary people who must endure a brutal feudal system. It is only in stories, in fairy stories, that nobility exists in its purest form, perhaps this is the reason why the film has been remade as The Last Princess (Higuchi 2008).5 In post-recession Japan, comedy and fairy tales are needed and have to be retold, or, as the Japanese trailers would have it, get “Reborn.” In the original, it is Tahei’s and Matakishi’s inadvertent stumbling into this other sort of story that “saves” them from the effects of their desperate pursuit of wealth, and, in turn, Yuki’s sojourn in their world makes her a “better person,” one able to understand the poverty and misery of her subjects. Kurosawa shows how the existence of the ordinary world is essential to the survival of the elite—each constitutes the other, although ideologically they should remain separate. The film depicts a collusion and collision between the two very disparate worlds—themes that Kurosawa reexplores when the soldier substitutes for the feudal lord in Kagemusha (1980) and when the Fool takes the Lord in hand in Ran (1985)—and this situation gives the film its energy, despite its unwieldy plot. It would be interesting to see how the remake, released in May 2008 in Japan (and not available for viewing at the time of going to print), speaks to a Japanese youth that has adopted different material values than those of their parents (Mathews and White, eds. 2004). Another Kurosawa theme is that of the thin line between villain and hero, as implied by the “three villains” of the title. As with the four main characters who all claimed guilt in Rashomon, the samurai, bandits, and farmers in Seven Samurai; and Sanjuro in Yojimbo, no one is purely noble or purely evil in this film. This is an aspect of the film that Lucas used as the basis for not only the character of Hans Solo, but also as the impetus for one of the most extensive “flashbacks” or prequels in movie history: the story of Darth Vader. If in The Hidden Fortress the two farmers stand for the Japanese, who, seduced by the promise of the rich spoils of war (a variation on Weber’s pirate capitalism), have become the very worst they could be, then Darth Vader, the poor boy made good, who is seduced by the dark side of power and increasingly fascist politics, is an analogous



Cloning Kurosawa

Figure 11

Remaking Kurosawa

Princess Yuki Sleeps, The Hidden Fortress

Source: Kurosawa 1958. Toho Co., Ltd. Courtesy of The Criterion Collection

Figure 12 Princess Leia Awakes, Star Wars IV Source: Lucas 1977. Lucasfilm Ltd. Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox

American. What Lucas might owe to Kurosawa then is the desire to give a more nuanced depiction of villainy and heroism than Hollywood is generally credited with.

From Medieval Romance to Science Fiction Past6 As with the various permutations on Rashomon, Lucas took the Kurosawa film as a jumping off point for his own vision. Acknowledging the Japanese director’s visual influence, the use of wipes especially, Lucas not only turns the story inside out, but also combines a few genres in his own way: Westerns, particularly in the figure of Hans Solo; early science fiction serials such as Flash Gordon; and flying sequences from Second World War films. There also is a bow to the



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Japanese with the design of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s and Luke’s kimonolike clothing, as well as in the sword-fighting sequences. Yet Lucas had specific concerns of his own that were very much of his generation. He has called Star Wars, in interview, his Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979), and a film he would have liked to make. In conversation with audiences, I have found a general consensus that this is a strange thing to say: for many audiences Star Wars is a Cold War parable about the dangers of the “Evil Empire” and the triumph of American values. Yet the film that preceded Star Wars, American Graffiti (1973), gives some clues as to the truth of Lucas’ assertion. The end credits with their potted histories of “what happened next” includes the death of at least one character in the Vietnam War. Vietnam was on Lucas’ mind. The question of whether the Jedi are meant to be the Vietnamese or the Emperor is meant to be a sort of symbolic representation of communism is less important than a theme that is shared between both the Japanese film and Star Wars: in a time of crisis, of war, the main character must mature, learn to face their responsibilities. Princess Yuki must learn that people will die to save her and to accept the burden of their deaths without blaming others. In Star Wars there is an echo of this when Princess Leia’s home planet is destroyed just to show her the power of the Death Star. However, it is Luke, hunted by storm troopers and, eventually, Darth Vader himself, who must learn the most. That this process of maturation was impossible to depict in a single film is as much a reason for the sequels as was the box office success of the first film. Like Kurosawa, Lucas was also challenged to make his film look as real as possible. For Kurosawa this meant both meticulous historical research as well as a fascination with filming in the rain and mud, getting blood to spurt out when limbs are cut, or accurately depicting the pathos of death. Yet his concern with getting it to look right on film led to a certain aesthetization of the very thing Kurosawa was trying to critique: war might be hell, but it looks heroic in his films. Lucas as well, in his attempts to rise to the challenge of making the future and fighting in space look realistic, has been critiqued for creating the computer-reliant special effects blockbuster. Just as Kurosawa’s attempts to offer a social critique of Japan are often misread as the glorification of the samurai by foreign audiences, so too is Lucas (along with Spielberg) often tarred with spawning a monster of his own: the summer blockbuster. Star Wars however was a fairly low-budget film that cheered many of my generation. The independent filmmakers of the 1970s had created a cinema that seemed moribund, without much



Cloning Kurosawa

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energy, obsessed with what it meant to be a post-Vietnam United States (often without ever referencing the place), or with an emphasis on romance that seemed to be fairly sterile. The effect of Star Wars’ brio on the young audiences of the late 1970s can only be understood by those who were there: it offered a positive vision of the future. The effect on subsequent filmmaking is also immeasurable. Lucas, along with Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, always generously acknowledged the work of Kurosawa (and other foreign filmmakers) and championed him in a time when financing his films was becoming more and more difficult. Without them, Kagemusha, Ran, Dreams (1990), and Rhapsody in August (1991) probably would not exist. And it is through the permutations on Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo, that the work of Kurosawa could be said to be constantly referenced by many directors, some of whom are only aware of the influence of the remakes on their own work— Robert Rodriguez, for example, always talks of Leone’s trilogy and its influence on him without mentioning Kurosawa’s original. In some cases the reference might be in terms of a plot line, in others in the narrative techniques that are used when filming battle scenes. From Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg 1998) to Lord of the Rings (Jackson 2001–2003), rare is the war film that is not judged as to whether its battle scenes live up to Kurosawa’s standards of realism. The idea of a Kurosawa influence pops up at the oddest times as well. Think of The Terminator (Cameron 1984) that many write about as a variation on the final girl horror theme (Clover 1993). The heroine has her treasure, the son she is to have one day, and she is aided in her escape by a single warrior. Is this a permutation on The Hidden Fortress? If there are any pathetic clown-like characters it is in the fleeting moment when the police realize that Kyle Reese (Micheal Biehn) has been telling them the truth all along. I have already mentioned Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, whose heroine and British advisor share the same sort of relationship as General Rokurota and Princess Yuki, and whose heroine took seven years to grow up. Her quieter cousins survive in Japanese films like Kaze no Tani no Naushika (Miyazaki 1984). Or take Shanghai Noon (Dey 2000), a film that I found myself citing when a student said that The Hidden Fortress needed a modern kung fu remake. Here a kidnapped princess and missing treasure are rescued by the two clownish heroes, one of whom is in love with her. Watching the Matrix Revolutions (Wachowski 2003), it becomes impossible not to think of Kurosawa when Neo and Smith begin their



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fight in the rain. Seeing the opening battle sequences of Hero (Ying Xiong, Zhang 2002) it becomes clear that China is one of the few places left where men and horses are cheap enough that some real Kurosawa-like framing can take place. Read the IMDB notice board on Seven Swords (Chat Gim Tsui 2005) and find a blogger’s warning that it has nothing to do with Seven Samurai. What is interesting about Kurosawa is that despite his relationship with what has become the Hollywood old guard (Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas), he has remained a hero to a whole new generation of 1990s independent filmmakers who are now, a decade later, becoming a bit of an establishment themselves. This is an example of individual history and genealogy-making that aims to separate the serious young filmmaker from the stereotypic Hollywood director. If we accept Foucault’s point that “genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival” (1984:386), it becomes obvious that this claim of “descent” from Kurosawa and the use of tropes that seem to come from his body of work are part of a process of fitting one’s artistic genealogy into a single history (also meaning story, of course) about film, which since it is narrated to/by its descendants, leaves it open to the riotous generation of competing new narratives. Such genealogies are shortcuts; desire lines in fact, a way of establishing one’s “street cred” and describing what sort of filmmaker one is: someone who is open to many influences, with a broad store of cultural capital and the ability to use it in creative ways (knowledge capital). The display of this knowledge happens at both the level of the filmmaker and the audience: watching the trailers for The Last Princess, for example, it seems obvious to me that Darth Vader references abound. The flow of knowledge this represents—from Japan to the world, especially the United States, back to Japan and out to the world once more—will be considered in my final chapter.



Cloning Kurosawa




Thinking with Films “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .” —Opening titles to Star Wars IV

In my thinking with the films of Kurosawa and the remakes and permutations they have generated, I have taken as a starting point the perception of audiences, critics, and filmmakers themselves that there exist relationships amongst all the films used, and I have described the films themselves as if they were my ethnographic data. It is the perception of relatedness, which had to be supported by discussing the films, that is the true core of my argument about global imaginings. To make my argument I have referred not only to the abundant theory on narrative and translation, but have used the concepts of desire lines and knowledge capital, albeit, not in the manner that they might be used by geographers or businessmen respectively. I have used desire lines to describe the desire of human beings to see connectedness by assuming a similarity of meaning that cuts across any problems in translating from one language, as well as cultural and historical contexts, to another. Translations and perceptions of relatedness become conceptual bridges leading to something new, while retaining the old. I have used the term knowledge capital to describe a subcategory of cultural capital—many filmmakers may well claim a relationship to the “great” filmmakers from previous generations as part of their cultural capital, but the decisions as to how to use this knowledge in their own work represents a different level of knowing. While a straightforward remake could be just a business decision (it did well in the



Conclusion

Remaking Kurosawa

original foreign language, let us try it in English) for Hollywood, the permutations represent a variety of strategies by the director: have they reused the story, the plotted elements, and the narrative techniques, emulated the camera work, or put in a jokey reference? The decisions taken and the references made can, at the level of the individual, be used as a way of subverting current conventions as Lucas did in Star Wars, and as many of the 1990s generation of independent filmmakers, whose work may only refer to Kurosawa, see themselves as doing. Ironically, as discussed above, subversive moves in filmmaking often end by becoming incorporated into the mainstream canon, just as filmmakers often make the move from independent productions to working in the mainstream global film business. What remains at the end of such discussions and at the end of tracing through patterns of relatedness is the fact that the processes of filmmaking, while firmly part of the financial and technological “scapes” of globalization, are the closest we have to an example of the workings of a global culture. Yet such a statement is problematic for many. A recent IMDB discussion on the fact that the third film in the Nightwatch trilogy would be made in English rather than Russian, despite keeping the same director, evoked the very accurate observation by a German discussant: as far as he was concerned Russian and English were both foreign languages. Thus, either production of the film was a foreign production. Such an example highlights how the flow of global films constantly encounters the local. The problem, I would like to argue, is not in this clash of global and local—that is natural we might say—but in the assumption that culture at the local level is ever homogenous and single. While it is essential to nationalist ideology that the state’s “culture” be represented as a shared national culture, within the nation-state differences in class, locality, generation, ethnicity, religion, and even gender mean that the national culture is never as monolithic as it might be represented. If this is true of culture at the “local” level, than it is also true of the global version: despite competing versions of reality, different languages, histories, religions, and so on there is something we might call a culture in an equally loose sense. For theorists such as Jameson (2006), this culture is that of capitalism and assuming the pernicious triumph of capitalist ideology as the basis of this global culture means that all films are subject to an interpretation that is political. To take such a line, however, is to land us back in the camp of a hegemonic global culture. If instead, we take culture to be ever contested, ever fluid, ever changing, and imbued with the possibility of subversion, while



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appearing singular and hegemonic, then it is possible to make the case for a global culture as an active imagining on the part its denizens— and this is in the end, as any anthropologist will tell you, the simplest definition of culture: an active imagining. For filmmakers the flow of great films is global, a resource to which they are often lucky to have access (although there exist historical moments when a country might close itself to the foreign), but so is the flow of not-so-great, or even mediocre films since the advent of video, DVD, and the Internet. That so many of the films made in other places, at other times, remain accessible to so many different audiences, speaks more to the ability of a film—as with any art form—to mean different things at different times while somehow retaining a sense of its original uniqueness, than it does to the brainwashing qualities of the medium. This heteroglossic aspect of films results in the new versions of any given story. That this is possible with films is not unusual: this is after all a feature of narratives in general. Heath quotes Branigan on this (from what must be class notes since the reference is to a mimeograph): “To the extent that the camera is located in an ‘impossible’ place, the narration questions its own origin, that is, suggests a shift in narration.” Heath goes on to note: “ ‘Impossible,’ of course, is here decided in respect of the ‘possible’ positions of the observer moving about, the disturbance involved seen as a disjunction of the unity of narration and narrated, enunciation and enounced.” (1986:401). Thus while the processes of translating stories and retelling them are two sides of the same coin, the processes can appear impossible to do accurately despite the desire for understanding that fuels it. The adventures of Princess Yuki and Princess Leia, or of Tom Thumb and Little One Inch are not the same; the fight of Buffy against vampires is very different from Mina’s in the original. Yet, we recognize the similarities that make the stories kin if not actual translations of each other. It is the film director’s role as a bridge within this process that is interesting. In a recent homage to Michelangelo Antonioni, Martin Scorsese (2007) summed up how this happens by discussing his first experience of seeing an Antonioni film: The people Antonioni was dealing with, quite similar to the people in F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s novels (of which I later discovered that Antonioni was very fond), were about as foreign to my own life as it was possible to be. But in the end that seemed unimportant. I was mesmerized by



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“L’Avventura” and by Antonioni’s subsequent films, and it was the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional sense that kept drawing me back. They posed mysteries—or rather the mystery, of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul. That’s why I kept going back. I wanted to keep experiencing these pictures, wandering through them. I still do.

The watching of a foreign film, for many directors, appears to feed into their creative processes—they are always looking for some way to express, visually, the story that many of us take for granted were originally written down. By melding together the visual experience with narrative causality, directors seem to assume that they can understand what they are seeing. It might well be broken down into techniques, a question about knowing how to do that—and yet the underlying assumption seems to be that repeating the process is not only possible, but necessary in order to reproduce a similar experience in another film. Seeing is assumed to be, if not believing, somehow understanding. Death is not pretty—so showing the goriness of an amputated arm or hand makes the point whether in a Japanese, Italian, or Hollywood film. Battles are messy, frightening events, so the mud, the chaos, panicked horses, stoic men marching straight to death are all images that appear to clearly make that point across cultures. Film directors, then, seem to be working at the level of some assumed meta-structure of what modern life and experiences are like and how these experiences have been shared around the world. While the experiences may well be similar, there are also the felt differences that need to be articulated. So it is that when asked about their relationship to Kurosawa, many filmmakers say that they feel flattered that they are mentioned in the same breath, but always stress how what they have done is from their own perspective. Tom Tykwer wondered if Run, Lola, Run owes anything to Kurosawa save the repetition of the story (private communication); the cinematographer for Hero, Christopher Doyle, spoke (in interview to Charmaine Chan) of how Kurosawa painted; Bryan Singer says, in the DVD interview for the Usual Suspects, that it the lie of the camera, rather than the human lie that is the difference in his work; George Lucas speaks of his admiration for Kurosawa and yet denies the label of remake. It is clear that referring to, adapting, or reworking Kurosawa is part of a larger process in which filmmakers are always involved: looking for the place in which to tell their own version of a story, in their own way. Rarely does a filmmaker speak



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of the commonality of human experience—that is not to say that they are unaware of it, but rather they take it for granted, if this commonality did not exist, their films would not make money. What is globalization about if not about shared structures and the shared experience of these structures? Such an argument might appear to be taking us away from the idea of translating Kurosawa, but it is in the direct remakes of the films that we begin to see how stories have not only been somewhat reworked to fit a different time or place, but that interesting moments, slices of experience we might say, remain shared. Women as a “problem” or a mystery, enigmas that cannot be understood or trusted, is a theme that travels across not only the remakes of Rashomon, but also, we can say, many of the permutations. Moreover, in the more interesting permutations on Rashomon such as Les Girls, Courage under Fire, Reversal of Fortune, Last Year in Marienbad, the problem of men’s relationships with women also surfaces. If there is a problem of understanding, it does not occur in a vacuum, but lies at the heart of the very relationship that makes it possible for societies to function and reproduce: the male and female as couple. Can we ever know the truth? The police procedural variations on Rashomon, as well as the last two “remakes,” cannot resist telling us that we can, if the topic is murder. But if we want to know about men and women as such—well, that can never be solved. The Seven Samurai, in contrast to Rashomon, presents us with another issue: what does it mean if the most commonly available version of a film is truncated? If we are going to be purists, then the argument is clear: the original is not understood and has been poorly translated. However, the core of the story seems to have traveled not only well, but in case of the remakes, not to have changed very much at all. Professionals come to the aid of a village, the villagers learn to take responsibility for their own protection, while the professionals realize, once again, how they do not belong in regular society. Even the comic variations in which the professionals are actors or circus performers retain much of the same message: any man (note the gender bias) can be a hero if they are willing to take on the burden and responsibility of fighting, but professionals are still necessary to teach us the mechanics of fighting/winning. What makes a hero, even if it is the common man as hero, seems to remain fairly constant across time and societies. Yojimbo, which began life as a Western novella, looks at the antihero, that problematic individual, who does the right thing, but



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perhaps for the wrong or unknowable reasons. What Kurosawa added to the Hammett story was the folkloric possibility of Sanjuro being a marebito, a bit of religion, that surprisingly, traveled from Japan to Catholic Italy, and on to the more religiously mixed United States. In all three films, someone’s prayers appear to be answered by the appearance of the stranger in town. In the Japanese film, the prayer is implied in the argument the father has with the son who runs away to be a gambler; in A Fistful of Dollars, the implication remains in the way in which the woman and her family are named, Marisol, Jose, and Jesus; while in Last Man Standing, the theme is fully articulated at the very start of the film. The way in which elements of Yojimbo have been fairly accurately translated leads to the very heart of this book: how is it possible to keep some of the meanings of these narratives constant across cultures? I have already provided two answers to this question: the similarity of human experience, or the presumed similarities, and the fact that we build new stories from old. Lucas’s opening line to Star Wars reminds of this last: the fact that stories resemble each other allows us to speak of shared experiences across time; the assumption of shared experience leads us to tell similar stories. Reality is constructed through these narrative processes; the stories shape our experience as much as we shape the stories (Bruner 1986). One way to understand this is to return to the point made in chapter one about the difference between stories as basic structures, plots as a way of organizing these structures and narratives as the techniques used to tell the story. There may be only seven basic plots in the world (Booker 2004), as has been famously claimed, and, as a result, few “grand stories.” I use the term here explicitly referring to Lyotard’s (1984) phrase the “grand narrative,” but with a difference. The grand stories—the one-world histories, the religious foundation tales about gods—are undermined by being narrated, a process that always introduces difference. Stories then resemble the paradox I offered in chapter one about dominant ideologies and the readings of film: they seem both familiar and easy to understand and yet are always undermined by their narrative reiterations—this is how we get contested histories, resistances to ideology, heresies, and new religious movements. The grand narrative has not ended precisely because it never existed. In the eras when grand stories appeared to be the most plausible, whenever, wherever that was, they could only do so by ignoring the essentially polyphonic narrativity of human experience. What has been challenged in postmodernity is the social assumption about the



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correctness and superiority of the grand story that prohibits alternative narratives. In this sense, we are, at the least, modern if not postmodern when we argue for the possibility and necessity of various narratives coexisting: traditional societies were/are aware of competing narratives, but fought/fight for the single grand story to be held to as “true.” The brilliance of Rashomon may well be that it was the first film to portray this postmodern condition and its consequences, the shock of the priest, woodcutter, and commoner, symbolizes the distress caused by the postwar awareness that we had come to live in a world where difference had not only to be acknowledged, but had also to be accommodated, and that more than one version of the truth might exist. That this awareness does not sit comfortably with the way in which social reality is constructed around a grand story is demonstrated by all the remakes that cannot resist offering us a solution to the murder. We may acknowledge that reality is subjective when it suits us as individuals, but cannot bear the implications of this as social beings, we want the possibility and certainty of human continuities and so we make them. Thus, to return to the example of reading films cross-culturally, the sense of the familiar that is found in a “foreign film,” or in a Hollywood blockbuster shown outside of the United States is possible because audiences look for the shared meaning in the narrative. This leads to a global sharing of stories that are also constantly breaking down into new narratives, permutations on the originals, jazz-like improvisations, riffs on what is already known and understood. This constant reworking is possible because the film business is global, but also because film directors are engaged in the global and local in a manner that makes them creative “bridges,” This is not to deny the teamwork that is part of any film production, nor to ignore the film producers who finance the remaking of these stories, hoping for a profitable return, but to anchor these processes within the vision of the person responsible for bringing the story and its plot together in a narrative structure that is meant to be visibly distinctive. Or, to put it in terms of the loss of identity of which Kurosawa and other great directors have been accused, the successful translation of these tales relies on the artist being willing to be both global and yet local simultaneously. This is not a loss of identity, but a willingness to have more than one simple identity. Obviously, this is not an analysis that could be made of all films, nor is every film easily translatable. What is a frightening story in



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one society, for example, may or may not terrify in another nor succeed at the box office. Focusing only on differences, however, loses sight of the fact that telling stories about the things that we fear is an attribute shared by such “different” tales, it ignores the fact that there are human continuities as the filmmaker MacDougall (1998) argues. These continuities, however, have to be constantly made and remade, shoring up the social construction of reality against the entropy of our individual narratives. In other words, conceptual bridges, if not maintained, will fall. While we value the individual, differing, narrative as “unique” and “original,” the building blocks of these bridges remain other narratives and shared experience. In the case of Kurosawa, the human continuity was the twentiethcentury experience of a modern form of warfare in which the concepts of humanity and moral responsibility were called into question (Arendt 1994). This was followed by the ideological maneuvering required of the citizens in the defeated countries (a post-Vietnam and post-socialist experience as well) that gave birth to or inspired a renewed impetus in tales about ordinary heroes, while concurrently calling into question the construction of reality and the nature of such heroes. In his concern with these issues, Kurosawa has long been called a humanist. Thus Kurosawa’s very Japanese concerns about war, violence, guilt, responsibility, and ordinary people managed to translate again and again into a genealogy of films that speak to our sense of shared humanity. This is, of course, a more optimistic version of global culture than that found in works such as Global Hollywood 2 (Miller et al. 2005), which documents how the number of films made by Hollywood constitutes about 20 percent of the world’s total, often outnumbers the locally made films watched by audiences, and how Hollywood also invests in many local cinemas. This bald picture of the media and financial ‘scapes involved certainly brings us back to the “Hollywood as Godzilla” scenario. However, if we see films as not only heterogeneous, but also as heteroglossic in the Bakhtinian sense (Bakhtin 1981), and thus dialogic in nature, then it becomes apparent that “global culture” cannot be simply described as a hegemonic force, nor as simply a form of Americanization. As with all culture, global culture is problematic and, while often essentialized, it is in fact sometimes vague to the point of seemingly disappearing, and only really experienced as having reality when contrasted to one’s own or someone else’s culture. Thus it may seem to represent the power of, in this case, Hollywood, but in truth it always is fragmenting, evolving, and



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changing—while frequently being just what we want it to be. Global culture, like all culture, is the product of human imagining; and films, as narratives, are just one example of how paradoxically this act of the imagination is both simple and complex. Like Simmel’s bridges and doors, films connect and disconnect, act as thoroughfares at the same time as they represent boundaries, while allowing us to perceive and articulate both similarity and difference. All of that built on the technology of light and shadow, contained on strips of fragile celluloid or magnetic tape, encoded on a DVD, or invisibly transmitted over the air—what greater proof of human creativity and the desire lines of the imagination do we need?



Conclusion




Prologue 1. For Japanese names I have generally used the order used in Japan: surname followed by first name. However, for personages that are well known outside Japan, I have referred to them as would film critics, theorists, and audiences: first name followed by surname. 2. In fact North American cultural anthropologists have tried to do away with the “culture concept,” thereby essentially undermining their own discipline— much to the amusement of sociologists—and certainly contravening the empirical trend found in most societies, which firmly insist on the existence of their own unique cultures. 3. Although I wonder if the financial is really ignored. Recently my own children startled me by announcing that they could not believe that a certain famous director had helped produce what they thought was a terrible film. They expected him to have a better sense of where to put his money. 4. Bruner, of course, relies on the work of many others—Barthes, Ricoeur, Chomsky, Kermode—to make his points.

1 Setting the Scene 1. In contrast, the science fiction writer William Gibson (2001) seems well aware of such conceptual loci and even situates them on actual bridges—the metaphor made real—in his novels. Building on Augé’s (1995) terms, non-places become the birthplaces of innovation. 2. Silent nonnarrative films were shown throughout the end of the nineteenth century. For example, Japan saw its first film in 1898 (cf. Anderson and Richie 1982). The first narrative film was The Great Train Robbery (1903) directed and photographed by Edwin S. Porter in New Jersey. Interestingly, the first continuous narrative film (sixty or more minutes long) was made in 1906 in Australia by Charles Tait. This was the story of the notorious outback bushranger Ned Kelly, The Story of the Kelly Gang, a film that has been remade numerous times since. The first feature-length film made in Europe was by the Frenchman Michel Carre (L’Enfant prodigue, 1907). D.W. Griffith directed the first film made in Hollywood, In Old California (1910). The move from the



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3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

Notes East to the West coast in the United States was to have important consequences for the development of the film industry (for more details, there is an excellent online source at www.filmsite.org/grea.html). As Atherton (n.d.) has argued in relation to photography, as a modern “art” filmmaking is global largely because of its short history, no one society can claim superiority in the art by virtue of having been doing it longer than anywhere else. I am thinking here of Sessue Hayakawa in the silent era and various Latin Americans such as Carmen Miranda or Desi Arnaz in the sound era. France and Italy especially pushed for trade protection against U.S. films and, later, television programs as part of their postwar cultural reconstruction in 1946–1947. Recently the U.S. film maker Quentin Tarantino has waded into this debate, blaming British actors for the collapse of the British film industry! The actor Sir Ian McKellen has responded by pointing out the role of financers and producers who don’t fund the local. On the need for a mass education system to achieve this, theorists as diverse as Althusser (1984) and Gellner (1988) are agreed. Ivy devotes two chapters in her Discourses of the Vanishing (1995) to an analysis of the work Yanagita Kunio put into the tidying up of the originally rather gritty and incoherent Tales of Tono, the collection of folktales that has come to stand for the peasant “soul” of Japan. He did no more than the brothers Grimm had done in Germany, a century earlier. As I will discuss below, I am not happy with the concept of ideologies as generally understood; I prefer the notion of dominant mythologies. In arguing that myths are also dialogic, I am arguing here against Bakhtin who believed myth was an “absolute form of thought” (1981:367) along with ideology. I would argue that both myth and ideology aim to be absolute forms of thought, but are defeated in this by continuing to be expressed in everyday language, as well as through rituals, despite their existence in formulaic stories. Traditional rituals might not be dialogic, but by Bakhtin’s own definition language always is: “Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form” (1981:291). Even children as young as eight years of age, in my experience, are capable of this. I did a small research project on children’s opinions about the first Harry Potter film and found they held a vast array of opinions about the movie, many of them deeply critical about what had been done to a story they knew very well. O’Flinn (1999) disagrees with the notion that Dracula is polyphonic in the sense in which Bakhtin means it, since all the characters are British, but this seems an odd caveat since Bakhtin’s analysis was partially based on Dickens’ novels with their huge casts of British characters. I take up this point in more detail in Chapter ten. For a detailed discussion of these relationships and how they are used in film, see Bordwell (1985).



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1. A brief list of this Japanese work includes Tasogawa’s Kurosawa vs Hariuddo (Kurosawa versus Hollywood) (2006); Tsuchiya’s Kurosawa-san (2002); Nishimura’s Kurosawa Akira: Oto to Eizo (Akira Kurosawa: Sound and Image) (1990); and Sato’s Kurosawa Akira no sekai (Akira Kurosawa’s World) (1969). 2. The historian Miriam Silverberg (2007) nicely documents this era, borrowing the term “montage” from film editing, in order to capture the heterogeneity and rapidity of the urban lifestyle in prewar Japan. The anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (2006) documents the wide Western and Eastern education that elite young men of the era had. 3. Kurosawa’s relationship with Dostoevsky and his films as dialogic and intertextual are best explored by Goodwin (1993). 4. Cazdyn offers us an interesting analysis of Rashomon in which he asserts, “What finally emerges is Kurosawa himself—Kurosawa the risk-taker, Kurosawa the free agent” (2003:242). 5. Galbraith (2001) notes that Kurosawa wrote many “typical” war film scripts during this time. 6. It remained a favorite irony of Kurosawa (1982), that his film They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail (Tora no O wo Fumu Otokotachi, 1945) was banned by both governments for different reasons: once for its irreverence toward samurai traditions and later for its reverence of samurai values. 7. Kurosawa notes that after one of two important strikes at Toho Studies in 1946, communist party members came to dominate the union (1982). 8. Benshi did not just translate or read the storyboards, but elaborated the entire story—often narrating the interior states of the characters (see Standish 2005). 9. On this see Yoshimoto (2000), whose massive book on Kurosawa is an attempt to rescue his work from the orientalist and eroticizing theorizing of Western film specialists. 10. In a recent UK poll of the greatest films of the twentieth century, Rashomon and Seven Samurai both came in the top ten. Directors and critics such as Denys Arcand, George Armitage, John Boorman, Lewis Gilbert, Taylor Hackford, Ann Hui, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Lester, Gillies Mackinnon, Babak Payami, Philip Saville, and Santosh Sivan voted for the latter; while Ray Anderssen, Gillian Armstrong, Jana Bokova, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Joe Dante, Ernest Dickerson, Randa Haines, Norman Jewison, Paul Mazursky, Janvir Mokammel, Digvijay Singh, and Paul Verhoeven voted for the former. Critics had Kurosawa at number six of the top ten great filmmakers of all times; directors placed him third behind Orson Welles and Frederico Fellini. 11. In his book (1995) Peter Dale deconstructions some of the most idiosyncratic and persistent themes of this discourse. 12. Oshima wrote a scathing essay on the American film and the cultural danger it poses to non-U.S. filmmakers (1992).



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3

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1. The commoner in Rashomon says this when he hears the final version of the story (Richie 1987:86). 2. I refer here to what was in the year 2004 the number one television drama series in the United States: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Anthony Zuiker, 2000–present). CSI made clear its own imaginative link to Kurosawa with its episode Rashomama, aired April 27, 2006. 3. Eco’s Holmes-like investigator in The Name of the Rose (1983) famously misreads clues all throughout the novel, finally only discovering the murderer almost by accident, like Sam Spade, after various adventures and near-death experiences. The truth, it would seem, is never easy to discover. The reference here to Dashiell Hammett’s detective is also relevant since Kurosawa knew Hammett’s work as we shall see in chapter nine. 4. There was a complex hierarchy within the samurai as well as a division between samurai (as warriors) and aristocrats in ancient Japan. A high-status couple would not have been travelling alone, nor would the woman have been exposed to the elements—she would have travelled inside a litter with the screens drawn. 5. The Japanese verb used by Masago to describe what happened to her, okasu (to rape), also means to commit an error, to sin, to break, and to violate. The use of this term rather than the more legalistic gôkan, which does not have the sense of sin or error, indicates what she is feeling. 6. Many theorists who work on Kurosawa have been quick to point out that the convoluted narrative structure of the film is not nearly as complex as Citizen Kane (Welles 1941); nor was the idea of the flashback within a flashback at all new to Western audiences, who might have seen the more psychologically complex B picture The Locket (Brahm 1946). 7. Richie’s translation of Rashomon (1987:86). 8. The link between war and alternative versions of the truth is made quite powerfully by the many Web sites that link Rwanda and Rashomon. Telling the truth in the aftermath of war is, clearly, difficult in all sorts of ways. Can any society bear to hear the truth about the acts of violence committed during war? 9. The term is used both by sociologists and anthropologists (cf. Heider 1988:73–81; Mazur 1998; Roth and Mehta 2002)

4 Remaking Rashomon: From Subjectivity to “the” Truth 1. The psychiatrist says this at the end of Quante Volte . . . Quella Notte, (Bava 1969). See the next chapter. 2. It is interesting that the attempt to understand human consciousness can reduce a scientist to speculating about the role of imagination, something intangible that cannot be mapped. 3. Suggested to me by D. Gellner’s (n.d.) comments on blood sacrifice in South Asia. 10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez


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4. The other possibility, never explored by The Matrix, is to wonder: What if we are all dreaming and dreaming a different dream? 5. In this, I am arguing against Sontag (2004)—the possibility of understanding, whether afforded to us through narratives or visually through images, must always be considered along with the impossibility of creating shared meaning. 6. As Prince notes about the film that won the Venice Film Festival in 1951, the essays on Rashomon “now fill several volumes” (1991:128). For readers interested in the initial reception of the film as well as the various attempts by critics to “solve” the crime in the film, Richie’s discussion in The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1996) is important and his edited Focus on Rashomon (1987) is also essential. Prince (1991), Goodwin (1994), Yoshimoto (2000), and Galbraith (2001) also have substantial sections on the film. 7. There was also a 1961 BBC version directed by Rudolph Cartier, in which Tani Yoko played the wife, Lee Montagne the bandit, and Robert Hardy the husband. 8. A 2004 production of the play at the Asian American Theatre not only acknowledges this in its publicity, but is also designed as an attempt to return the story to its Japanese origins—costuming the actors in Kabuki style. 9. For the fans of The Outrage it is James Wong Howe’s cinematography and Martin Ritt’s command of black and white film that make it worth the watching. 10. Castle (2003), in an odd article on Rashomon in the online journal Film and Philosophy, tries to argue for the possibility of some sort of strange time jump in the story: that the baby found in the gate is Masago’s and the bandit’s child, proof of which, he notes, could be the amulet case left with the child. I only mention this possibility because it suggests another more plausible intent on Kurosawa’s part: the bandit and wife could well have been executed and the child, born soon after, is meant to be her, reincarnated immediately and given another chance at life. If so, she is truly the character who would appear to merit the most compassion from the audience. 11. As already mentioned, the verb for rape and to break or violate, okasu, is the same in Japanese. 12. This might be an odd reference to an entirely different Kurosawa film, Sanjuro, in which the actions of the silly-seeming wife and cheerful young bride-to-be ultimately help to save the day, but only after a long argument about what color camellias should be send down a stream as a signal. In frustration, the hero tosses all the camellias he can find into the water. 13. It is tempting to try and argue for some sort of real connection between Clint Eastwood as a star of a Kurosawa remake (A Fistful of Dollars, Leone 1960) and as director of this film. It could be argued that Play Misty for Me is a working out of the frightening consequences of the sexual revolution that stands in contradistinction to the playful film by Bava (to be discussed in chapter five) and that, having worked in Italy, Eastwood was not unaware of the latter’s work. But that is a jump, as it is a jump to posit that Saegusa, despite the general Japanese admiration of Eastwood, was influenced by this early example of his directorial work. It is interesting, however, to note that 10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez


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5 The Battle of the Sexes: Or, the One Scenario when Subjectivity is Acceptable 1. The comment on the sandwich board glimpsed in the opening and closing scenes of Les Girls 2. The Webster dictionary defines a permutation as an “often major or fundamental change (as in character or condition) based primarily on rearrangement of existent elements (the system has gone through several permutations); also: a form or variety resulting from such change [technology available in various permutations].” In its mathematical usage, a permutation is “the act or process of changing the lineal order of an ordered set of objects; also: an ordered arrangement of a set of objects.” Both the normal usage and the more precise usage of the term in mathematics, it seems to me, apply to film permutations. 3. Lord Wren in Les Girls. 4. The psychiatrist in Quante Volte . . . Quella Notte.

6 Permutations on the Theme of Murder: The Search for Solutions 1. The unseen judge in The Outrage utters this single phrase when the bandit’s storytelling gets too ornate. 2. Dershowitz talking to his client Claus von Bulow. 3. Bakhtin, who saw the epic as a “closed” type of genre, would not agree with me on this depiction of the Odyssey as polyphonic, because of the way in which the voice of the storyteller dominates in the epic. However, the potential for Odysseus’ story to be polyphonic is revealed both in its novelistic and film versions where the flashback comes into its own and opens the narrative up for the audience. 4. The film was made years before the OJ Simpson trial (1994–1995), but appears to reflect an attitude that colored the public’s reaction to that event. 5. Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) is also often cited as being like Rashomon because one of its scenes is shown from three different points of view. However, each retelling is a way into a “what happened next” scene for each of the characters involved and not about a subjective interpretation of events. Given that the story of the film is about a woman turning the tables on her male persecutors—none of whom is an honest human being—it could be argued that this story, unlike Misty, is a skilful working out of female vengeance that does not involve her killing anyone: she leaves the men to do the violent work. This may owe much to Elmore Leonard’s original novel Rum Punch (1992). 6. Only one woman has ever been awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor, Dr. Mary Walker, who won it for the courage she displayed in treating the



many Westerners to whom I have mentioned the title Misty immediately think of the Eastwood film!

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wounded during the Battle of Bull Run in 1861. Despite the continued presence of women in the U.S military, serving in various capacities, no other woman has yet been awarded a medal. 7. Meiyo and meisei being only two such terms, both based on the character read as myô or mei, which means distinguished, noted; wise, name, or also read as na meaning name, fame, reputation, pretext. Neither of these terms could be translated as “face,” menshi, which is based on the character men meaning face, features, mask, face, guard, surface, plane, side, facet, aspect, and so on.

7 And on Television . . . 1. Teddy to Leonard Shelby in Memento (2000). 2. In fact, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) does assert that actual violence in the United States is fed by a diet of news and fiction programs that continuously represent society as dangerous and violent. 3. Joe Spano is best known for playing the sensitive and very moral detective Harold Goldblume in Hill Street Blues, the series that is arguably the “grandfather” of all these police shows. 4. Or, as another one of the many MA students I’ve taught over the years—a priest—once quipped in class: “Anyone who believes in a single rational version of reality has never been married”! Unlike the priest in Rashomon, this insight on his part led him to the study of anthropology rather than shocked depression.

8

The Group Western

1. As with Rashomon, the process of remakes continues. The Kurosawa family endorsed the animated extended television version of the film, Samurai 7 (Takizawa 2004) and there is also a version set in Thailand, The Seven Samurai, based on Hashimoto’s screenplay (cowritten with Kurosawa) due out in 2009. 2. Prince (1991:209) analyses the framing in the scenes in which Rikichi is shown at odds with the other villagers as one way of “reinscribing him within the group.” This insistence on seeing aspects of Japanese groupism in such scenes misses the point: the framing shows how Rikichi presents a problem for the others. The question is, why do they listen to him? Normally, problematic, eccentric, or annoying villagers were just ignored in Japanese society. Instead, Rikichi’s histrionics always elicit some sort of response from the other men. If his attitude is a problem, it is because they have committed a crime against him. 3. Two Westerns spring to mind in relation to this theme. The Gunfighter (King 1950) and Shane (Stevens 1953), a film of which Kurosawa was fond. Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) might also be seen as a version of this tale. One of the best non-genre versions about this issue was the film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). 4. With its continuing involvement in foreign wars, this theme in the United States has had a long run. Such stories explore the lives of these men in their



Notes

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

Notes new professions—generally in law enforcement. For example, the novels (and their film versions) of Joseph Waumbaugh look at the dysfunctional lives of older Korean War vets and then Vietnam vets who work as police officers, as do the novels of James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly. In films, we have the morally perturbing Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976); Rambo (Kotcheff 1982), who begins the series as mentally disturbed; Year of the Dragon (Cimino 1985); and the very popular Lethal Weapon (Donner 1987) series. On television we had a series that might be called a comic version of the Seven Samurai via the Wild Bunch (Peckinpah 1969): The A Team (Cannell 1983). Boomtown offered us Fearless as a haunted Gulf War veteran. Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven. The Cisco Kid, The Gene Autry Show, The Lone Ranger, The Roy Rodgers Show, Zorro, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Cheyenne, Maverick, Davey Crocket, Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Wagontrain—to name just a few. For an analysis of this era see Boddy (1998). Revolutionaries still exist in modern Mexico as the ongoing revolt in Chapas shows. In fact the Japanese title of the Magnificent Seven, Arano shichinin (The wild seven), rather makes the point and anticipates Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. The Japanese film Eleven Samurai (Ju-ichinin no Samurai, Kudo 1966) was not a sequel to the Kurosawa film. It could be argued that during this pre-Tokugawa era the samurai were still a group of professionals whose ranks could be joined by any ambitious peasant, and so clearly are a class in the Marxist sense. By the Tokugawa era, when the samurai had become a group into which you had to be born, they could better be described as a caste. Buck in The Magnificent Seven, 1998. I raise this last as only a possibility. It is not clear if the village is meant to be organized along honke/bunke (main household/branch household) lines where the main household can provide generations of village heads or if it is meant to be the more independent type of organization where a head arises out of one man’s successful maneuvering through internal politics. The former system was frequently associated with the organization of the Tokugawa era and was seen to be the dominant form of leadership right up until the postwar era. The latter system remained associated with a more egalitarian type of village organization, such as fishing villages (cf. Nakane 1967), and is perhaps more historically accurate for the era in which the film is set. As in The Lone Ranger who was lone only in that he was the last of his Texas Ranger troupe, he always had his faithful “Indian” companion; prefiguring the alternative reading of the Western as largely homoerotic—see Fassbinder’s Whity (1971), or Lust in the Dust (Bartel 1985). More recently, the filming of E. Annie Proulx’s novel Brokeback Mountain (2005) has been causing controversy over a male screen kiss. Gelt in Battle beyond the Stars. During the 1970s, Corman’s distribution company was, according to Galbraith, responsible for the foreign distribution of several art house films such as Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, Bergman 1972), Amacord



190

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

191

(Fellini 1973), and The Story of Adele H. (L’histoire d’ Adele H., Truffaut 1975). Corman’s admiration of these films may appear surprising as does the information that the horror film director Wes Craven knew Bergman’s Virgin Spring (1959) well enough to remake it as Last House on the Left (1972). For an interesting analysis of these films see Brashinsky (1998). The active interest of independent filmmakers in foreign films is one that I will discuss in chapter ten. Flik to Hopper in A Bug’s Life. The British comedians Morecombe and Wise may have anticipated this film in their film The Magnificent Two (Owen 1967), but I cannot establish any connection between the two. The science fiction permutation on Seven Samurai crossed with Mad Max, entitled World Gone Wild (Katzin 1988), explores no new territory and is notable only for the manic performances of Adam Ant and Bruce Dern. A cross between the clay “pixilated” figures of the old monster films pioneered by Ray Harryhausen and computer animation techniques. And it should not be forgotten that Kennedy’s administration was, in the 1960s, linked to the ideas of King Arthur’s court and Camelot. That at some level he strongly identifies with his character, perhaps an injoke aimed at Leonard Nimoy who played the Vulcan Mr. Spock, is made clear when later, chatting on the phone at home, he is still in full make up. There is, perhaps only for me as a frequent viewer of these films, a nice link between the villains of The Magnificent Seven and The Terminator. Calvera’s final words, in a Mexican accent, to the villagers in the film’s first scene are: “I’ll be back.” Most films, from Hollywood and elsewhere, relied on a single camera. While Kurosawa did not invent the technique of multiple camera use (it was used in early Hollywood musicals, for example, to give a less static effect and Desi Arnez had been using it in television from 1950), his use of the technique in battle sequences is seen to be pioneering.

9

The Lone Hero

1. There is some debate on this. See Barra’s “From ‘Red Harvest’ to ‘Deadwood’ ” (2005) on dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2005/02/28/hammett/index.htm accessed November 19, 2008. 2. The ronin (masterless samurai) and the nobleman in disguise who wander the countryside righting wrongs have been popular on Japanese television and in films, including Tôyama no Kinsan, the Kuzure vkami (Lone Wolf and Cub) series, which consists of manga (Koike Kazuo and Kojima Goseki 1970–1976), two television series (1973–1976; 2002–2004), and several films as well as a video game; Hanzo the Razor series, and, of course the Zatôichi series. 3. Mad Max beyond the Thunderdome (Miller 1985) ends with just such a communal “remembering” of the hero: pointing to his mythical status and possible ideological immortality.



Notes

Notes

4. This certainly marks the time as being post-Tokugawa. While muskets and cannons were used by samurai from the sixteenth century onward, pistols were a modern weapon that arrived with Japan’s opening to the West. 5. That Sanjuro might be more than human is also hinted at by the sequel to Yojimbo, Sanjuro (Tsubaki Sanjûrô 1962). At the film’s opening he appears from the back of a Shinto shrine in which the young samurai are meeting. “I checked everywhere,” protests the young man in charge of organizing the meeting, “there was no one here!” Moreover, the wife (Irie Takako) of the honest but ugly bureaucrat Matsuta (Itô Yûnousuke) seems to recognize something in the scruffy Sanjuro. “You glitter too much,” she says to him, “Like a sword.” She tries to convince him that problems can be resolved without resorting to violence, that “staying in the scabbard” is important. It would be interesting to see the 2007 Japanese remake of Tsubaki Sanjûrô directed by Morita Yoshimitsu, based in part on Kurosawa’s script. 6. Mrs. Baxter to the Man with No Name. 7. Every time I showed the film on my course, my largely female students would sit and sigh over how good looking Eastwood is in this film. They had no such relationship with Mifune! 8. The three-way duel, or Mexican stand-off, of For a Few Dollars more has made it into the iconography of Tarantino, obviously—although it is thought to be borrowed from John Woo’s work—but is most wonderfully parodied in Pratchett’s novel: Men at Arms (1994). 9. Felina to John Smith in Last Man Standing. 10. Perhaps this is Leone’s first attempt to work with the theme he fully develops in Once Upon a Time in the West, where, as Frayling notes (2000), he said he wanted to depict the West “when it had lost its balls.” The myth being echoed here is that of the demasculinization of men by civilization or the matriarchy of modernity. 11. An interesting statement from a man who, by all accounts, was well tied to his wife. 12. Note I use the term easily—the strong female characters in Escape from New York and Mad Max die in a blaze of gunfire, only, in these films, they take several bad guys with them when they are killed. 13. Almost the first thing I was told when arriving in Japan in 2003 was how Kurosawa’s daughter Kazuko had taken Takeshi Kitano to task for this, saying that his use of violence had none of the moral underpinning that was the foundation of her father’s work. 14. Zatôichi (Kitano 2003).

10

Cloning Kurosawa

1. Lucas does keep this reference to The Hidden Fortress in his portrayal of Princes Amedela and her body doubles in the first two of the Star Wars series (1999, 2002). 2. This is one of the few points on which I disagree with Richie. He argues (1996) that Rokurota is the third villain because he does not care about his



192

3. 4.

5.

6.

193

sister’s death, only about his mission. However, the music and Mifune’s stoic posture as he strides through the forest on his way to the princess’ hiding place to give her the news of the death of her retainers, make the point very clear: the death of his sister is devastating for him. This scene is an excellent example of how physical an actor Mifune was. If the general is the third bad man, it is because of the way in which he uses the peasants. Incidentally, Mifune gets to show off his riding skills learned in his childhood in Manchuria (Galbraith 2002). The DVD for this film only became available in December 2008 as this book was going to press. A careful viewing of it revealed the need for a rather long discussion of the film, as well as many other Japanese TV and Toho Studies remakes of Kurosawa films that recently have been aired or are being planned. Hollywood is working on new remakes as well, which all begins to sound as if completing this manuscript would be a neverending process. The Hidden Fortress, Star Wars, and The Last Princess comparison will be the subject of a forthcoming paper I plan to give at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2009 conference in Tokyo, Japan. For more news on Kurosawa remakes check: http://akirakurosawa.info/2007/10/29/an-akira-kurosawa-film- remakeroundup/, as well as http://www.totalfilm.com/news/mike-nichols-remakingkurosawa-s-high-and-low, both accessed on December 19, 2008. It could be argued that Spielberg refers to and gently pokes fun at the impossibility of the deeds in this scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), where the young Indiana tries something similar only to end battered and bruised. But then again, it might be homage to hundreds of similar scenes in many Westerns. Eco (1987) has written on the convergence between science fiction fantasy and medieval romances, noting how the former rely on the magical thinking of the latter.



Notes




Adorno, Theodor. 1991. “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 98–106. Akutagawa Ryunosuke. 1987. “In a Grove,” in Focus on Rashomon. Trans. and ed. Richie, pp. 102–112. ———. 1987a. “Rashomon,” in Focus on Rashomon. Trans. and ed. Richie, pp. 97–101. Allison, Anne. 2006. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. Althusser, Louis. 1984. Essays on Ideology. London: Verso. Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, Joseph L., and Donald Richie. 1982. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. Foreword by Akira Kurosawa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Ed. Appadurai. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 27–47. Arendt, Hannah. 1994 (rev. ed.). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books. Aufderheide, Patricia. 1998. “Made in Hong Kong, Translation and Transmutation,” in Play it again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Ed. Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal. Afterword by Leo Braudy. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 191–199. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso. Bakhtin, M.M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Austin Press. Barrett, Gregory. 1989. Archetypes in Japanese Film: The Sociopolitical and Religious Significance of the Principal Heroes and Heroines. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1990. Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s Press; Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 1995. The Gulf War did not Take Place. Trans. Paul Patton. Indiana: Indiana University Press.



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Kurosawa Akira Filmography 1943. Sanshiro Sugata (Sugata Sanshirô). Japan: Toho Company. 1944. The Most Beautiful (Ichiban utsukushiku). Japan: Toho Company. 1945. Sanshiro Sugata, Part 2 (Zoku Sugata Sanshirô). Japan: Toho Company. 1945. They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail (Tora no O wo Fumu Otokotachi). Japan: Toho Company. 1946. No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kuinashi). Japan: Toho Company. 1947. One Wonderful Sunday (Subarashiki nichiyôbi). Japan: Toho Company. 1948. Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi). Japan: Toho Company. 1949. The Quiet Duel (Shizukanaru ketto). Japan: Daiei Motion Picture Company. 1949. Stray Dog (Nora inu). Japan: Film Art Association. 1950. Scandal (Shubun). Japan: Shochiku Company. 1950. Rashomon (Rashômon). Japan: Daiei Motion Picture Company. 1951. The Idiot (Hakuchi). Japan: Shochiku Kinema Kenkyû-jo. 1952. Ikiru (Ikiru). Japan: Toho Company. 1954. Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai). Japan: Toho Company. 1955. Record of a Living Being (Ikimono no kiroku). Japan: Toho Company. 1957. Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jô). Japan: Toho Company. 1957. The Lower Depths (Donzoko). Japan: Toho Company. 1958. The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san akunin). Japan: Toho Company. 1960. The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru). Japan: Kurosawa Production Company. 1961. Yojimbo (Yôjinbô). Japan: Kurosawa Production Company. 1962. Sanjuro (Tsubaki Sanjûrô). Japan: Kurosawa Production Company. 1963. High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku). Japan: Kurosawa Production Company.



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1965. Red Beard (Akahige). Japan: Kurosawa Production Company. 1970. Dodeskaden (Dodesukade). Japan: Toho Company. 1975. Dersu Uzala (Derusu Uzara). Soviet Union/Japan: Atelier 41. 1980. Kagemusha (Kagemusha). Japan: Kurosawa Production Company/Twentieth Century Fox. 1985. Ran (Ran). Japan/France: Greenwich Film Productions. 1990. Dreams (Yume). USA: Warner Brothers Pictures. 1991. Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no kyôshikyoku). Japan: Feature Film Enterprise II. 1993. Madadayo (Mâdadayo). Japan: DENTSU Music and Entertainment.



210

Absent presence, 5, 34 Actors, 4, 5, 6, 23, 84, 86, 108, 118, 124, 131, 136–138, 143, 152, 162, 166, 177, 184-n.4, 187-n.8 Aesthetics, 85, 140, 158–160 see also Film, art; Violence Africa, xvii, 2, 40 Akutagawa Ryu¯nosuke (1892–1927), 31, 47, 54, 56, 57, 59, 64, 91, 98 Americans, 5, 7, 13, 40, 47, 49, 79, 81, 83, 137, 139, 149, 159 Native, 120, 122, 124, 125–126, 127 Ang Lee, 28, 190-n.13, 204 Anthropology, xix, 2, 3, 11, 185-n.2, 189-n.7.4 and film, xiii–xiv, xviii, 1, 3, 173 of globalization, xiii–xiv, xvi–xvii, 175 methods, xiv, xvii and Orientalism, 7–8 theory, xiii, xv, xviii, 7, 9, 44, 45, 183-n.2, 186-n.3.9 Antonioni, Michelangelo (1912– 2007), 6, 175–176 Art, 1–2, 7, 20, 65, 108, 142, 156, 183–184-n.1.2 as commodity, xv, 9 and globalization, 4, 19 and film xviii, 4, 20, 44, 140, 175, 190–191-n.15

Japanese, 38, 53, 130 Artists, 6, 9, 20–21, 33, 58 as bridges, 44, 179 and creativity, 1, 2 identity of, 3, 7, 19, 171 western, xvi, 22 Asia East, xvii, 3, 142 South, xiv, xvi, xvii, 186-n.4.3 Southeast, xvii Audiences, xiv–xv, xvii, 9, 15–17, 23, 24, 26–27, 34, 36, 38, 39–40, 41, 45, 47, 49–50, 57, 67, 70, 72–73, 76–77, 82, 86–87, 95, 100, 105–106, 114–115, 159, 170, 173, 180, 183-n.1, 186-n.3.6, 187-n.7, 188-n.6.3 children, 16, 133–134, 135, 158, 183-n.3, 184-n.9 as critics, 2, 11–12, 26, 44, 62–63, 107, 109, 150, 156, 169, 184-n.9 filmmakers as, 2, 6, 16–17, 26, 108–110, 171, 173, 175 and foreign films, 7, 15–16, 23, 108, 110, 117, 131–132, 169, 175, 179 ideology and, 2, 108, 132 imagination, 10, 15–16, 36, 78, 79–80, 85, 86, 91–92, 94–95, 98–100, 104, 110, 159, 179, see also Imagination



Index

Index

Audiences—Continued Japanese, 9, 20, 23, 24, 26–27, 36, 39–40, 77, 84, 116, 187–188-n.13 and knowledge, 108, 129, 130, 171, 179, see also Knowledge television, 8, 27, 155–156 as voyeurs, 62, 90, 162 see also Fans; Film, buffs Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 2, 9, 10, 12, 20–21, 34, 98, 104, 180, 184-n.8, 184-n.10, 188n.6.3, 195 Battle Beyond the Stars, 128–130, 133, 190-n.14, 207 story, 128, 130–131, 135, 159 Bava, Mario, 43, 72, 81, 110, 186-n.4.1, 204 and Kurosawa remakes, 65, 69, 76–77, 187–188-n.13 Benjamin, Walter, 1–2, 9, 15, 196 Bergman, Ingmar, 5, 6, 190– 191-n.15, 204 Blade, 13, 207 Blade Runner, 136, 139, 207 Bollywood, xiv, xvi, 80 Boomtown, 78, 96, 105, 110, 127, 200, 204 narrative, 100 stories in, 102, 103, 189–190n.8.4 story of, 99–102 Borders, xviii; xix, 48–49, 118, 149 see also Mexico Bridges, xiv, xviii, xix, 29, 44, 175, 179, 181 conceptual, xiv, 2–3, 16, 173, 180, 183-n.1.1 creation of, 2, 29, 175, 179 Buddhism, 31, 35–38, 41, 58, 75, 102, 143–144 see also Religion

Buffy the vampire slayer, 13–14, 44, 170, 175, 208 A Bug’s Life, 128, 132–134, 191-n.16, 206 plot, 133–134 story, 131–132, 135 Buñuel, Luis, 5, 6 Capitalism, 6, 16, 108, 151, 167, 174 see also Class; Ideology Carpenter, John, 96, 150, 204 and Kurosawa remakes, 95–96, 110 Censorship, 9, 15, 21–22, 34, 53, 118, 120, 185-n.6 Chan, Jackie, xvii, 28, 205 China, 5, 27, 80, 140, 171 Christianity, see Religion Citizen Kane, 76–77, 79, 186-n.6, 208 Class, 24, 50–51, 52–53, 55, 82, 108–109, 116, 121, 122, 125–126, 133, 135, 163, 167, 174, 190-n.10 samurai, 33, 121, 165 Comedy, 65–66, 68–69, 73, 96, 99, 128, 130–131, 138–139, 142, 151–152, 153, 162, 163–164, 188-n.5.2, 191-n.17 film, 14, 24, 64–65, 138–139, 157–158, 177, 189–190-n.4 Consciousness, xviii, 6, 44, 51, 186-n.4.2 Consumption, 3, 14 of commodities, xv, 2, 109 Coppola, Francis Ford, 12, 24, 26–28, 44, 169, 170–171, 205 Copying, xix, 1–2, 15, 20, 44 see also Permutations Copyright, 5, 118, 141, 149, 150 Corman, Roger, 128, 130, 190–191-n.15 Cosmopolitism, see Global, citizens



212

Courage under fire, 78, 87–90, 97, 105, 110, 177, 209 stories in, 88–89, 91 story of, 87–88 Creativity, xv, xviii, 1–2, 14, 44, 75–76, 105, 109, 111, 132, 135, 169, 171, 176, 179, 181, 187-n.5 see also Artists; Filmmakers Crime, 32, 36, 54–55, 57, 63, 68, 72–73, 77–81, 83–86, 98, 100, 104, 117, 122, 149, 187-n.6, 189-n.8.2 as genre, 54, 98–100, 143, 186-n.2 Critics, xvii, 12, 26, 36, 38, 39, 67, 99, 108, 109, 155, 173, 183-n.1, 185-n.10 American, 4, 25, 40, 54 Japanese, 24, 25 Cukor, George, 66, 205 and Kurosawa remakes, 68, 76, 110 Cultural, 2, 3, 6, 11, 17, 26, 53, 158, 161, 173, 184-n.4, 184n.10, 185-n.12 capital, 6, 108–109, 171, 173 cross, 15, 16, 179 imperialism, 4, 5 similarity, 15, 41 theory, xiii, xvii, 2–3, 183-n.1 Culture, xiii–xiv, xvi, 2, 68, 75, 106, 107, 138, 176, 178, 181, 183-n.2 dominant, 11, 44, 45, 174 global, xviii, 2, 6, 174–175, 180 Japanese, 38, 55, 75 local, 6, 34, 174, 180, 187-n.6 nation-state, 8–9, 174 popular, xv, 1, 3, 6, 9–10, 108, 109, 137 similarity, see Cultural, similarity Desire, xv, 13, 16, 22, 40, 41, 47, 49, 53, 101, 103, 121, 139, 175

213

and the imagination, xviii, 2, 104, 106, 149, 168, 173 lines, xviii, xix, 16, 107–111, 171, 173, 181 Dialogic, 2, 9–11, 20–21, 105, 111, 131, 180, 184-n.8, 185-n.3 imagination, 10, 78, 80, 92, 98, 104 relationship, 34, 105, 110 Difference, xiv, xviii, xix, 10, 93, 108, 135, 136, 167, 176, 178–181 in films, xiv, 11, 47, 61, 65, 68, 75–76, 81, 84, 90–91, 92, 98–99, 101, 105–106, 122, 142, 151, 176–177, 187-n.12 and identity, 8, 15, 22, 28–29, 37, 41, 45, 46–47, 50–51, 106–107, 108–109, 115, 121, 122–123, 174, 184-n.8 in meaning, 2, 9, 11, 16, 43–44, 46, 63, 73, 80, 87, 98, 127, 139, 173, 175 see also Similarity; Social, reality Directors, see Filmmakers Disjuncture, xvi, xviii, 2, 107 and scapes, xvi, 2, 174, 180 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich, 36, 56, 77, 90, 114 and Kurosawa, 20, 33–34, 37–38, 47, 102, 185-n.3 novels, 20–21, 33, 34–35 Eastwood, Clint, 27, 62, 124, 148–151, 152–155, 187–188-n.13, 189-n.8.3, 192-n.9.7, 205 Economics, xvi, xvii, 5 Eisenstein, Sergi, 6, 162 Epics, 5, 76, 114, 188-n.6.3 Europe, 3, 4, 7, 40, 80, 105, 118, 149, 183–184-n.1.2 European, 4–5, 39–41, 45, 47, 69, 94, 105–106, 110, 149, 151, 159



Index

Index

Experience, xiii, xiv–xv, 16, 25, 26, 38, 47, 53, 63, 79–81, 84, 86–87, 98–99, 114, 149, 167, 176–177, 180–181, 186-n.3 of film, 10–11, 175–177 and gender, 68 individual, 9, 36, 44, 46–47, 56, 104, 178 shared, 39–41, 45, 47, 84, 106, 176–178, 180 see also Subjectivity Fans, xvii, 9, 24, 50, 72, 128–129, 137, 187-n.9 see also Audiences; Film, buffs Fantasy, 9–10, 12, 25, 48, 62, 63–64, 76, 91, 111, 193-n.6 Fellini, Frederico, 6, 185-n.10, 191n.15, 205 Feminism, xiii, 14, 52–53, 62, 64, 68, 91, 135 Festivals, 144–145, 157, 161, 165–166 Film, xiii, xvii, xix, 1–3, 11, 19–20, 21–28, 33, 35, 38–41, 45, 47, 51, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 65, 66, 68, 71, 76, 80, 81–83, 85, 92–93, 95, 107–111, 118, 120– 121, 123–124, 126, 129, 133– 136, 140, 181, 184-n.12, 185-n.10, 187-n.9, 188-n.6.4, 191-n.22 American, the, 4–5, 185-n.12, see also Hollywood analysis, xiv, xv, xvi, 3, 29, 34, 147, 185-n.9, 187-n.6, 187n.10, 190–191-n.15 art, xviii, 44, 140, 158–160, 175, 190–191-n.15 audiences of, see Audiences buffs, xvii, 2, 70, 109, see also Audiences business, xvii, 6, 28 censorship, see Censorship

context, 34, 41, 47, 55, 57, 63–64, 72, 82–84, 114–116, 122, 142–143, 163, 190-n.12 crews, 6, 179 criticism, xvi, 2, 14, 24, 25, 36, 38, 108, 183-n.1, 184-n.9, see also Critics as dialogic, 2, 34, 111, 131, 180, 185-n.3 expense, xvii, 4, 113, 170 as feminist, xiii, 52–53, 55, 62, 91, 187–188-n.13 festivals, xvii, 4, 27, 128, 187-n.6 foreign, xiv, 4, 16, 19–20, 23, 26–29, 45, 69, 75, 94, 108, 109, 142, 174–176, 179, 190–191-n.15 French, 4–5, 53, 79–80 gender in, see Men; Women and globalization, xiii, xv, 3, 5, 11, 16, 27, 29, 106, 109, 173– 175, 177, 179–180, 184-n.4 grammar of, 15, 141, 149, 176 historical, 25, 48, 113–114, 143, 190-n.12, see also Samurai, film history of, 6, 19, 109, 129, 167, 183–184-n.1.2 horror, xviii, 12–13, 69–72, 81, 170, 190–191-n.15 and ideology, 2, 9, 106, 132, 178, see also Ideology industry, 1, 3, 4–5, 20–21, 22–24, 27–128, 141, 149–150, 183–184-n.1.2 knowledge, see Knowledge and Marxism, xiii, 3, 135 multiple readings of, 9–10, 17, 39, 56, 76, 109–110, 119, 159–160, 174, 179, see also Dialogic; Heteroglossia and myth, see Myth narration, see Narrative narrator, see Narrator



214

noir, 56, 77, 79, 94, 136–137, 148–149 permutations, see Permutations and politics, xiii, 128, 136–137, 167–168 polyphony, see Polyphony producers, xvii, 4, 25, 179, 183-n.3 realism, 57, 83, 97–98, 105, 114, 162, 169 as resistance, xv, 21–22, 25, 109, 115 science fiction, 128, 129, 132, 136–139, 168–171, 191-n.18 scripts, 1, 6, 7, 22, 50, 118–119, 125, 129, 141, 185-n.5, 192-n.5 silent, 3, 12, 20, 22, 49, 131, 183-n.1.2, 184-n.3 South Asian, see Bollywood studies, xiii–xiv, 17, 19, 21, 75, 109 subjectivity, see Subjectivity theory, xv, xix, 1, 34, 183-n.1, 186-n.6 tragedy, 69, 131 translation of, xiii–xiv, 14–15, 28, 43, 48, 75, 117, 141, 177–180, see also Translation violence in, see Violence Westerns, see Westerns Filmmakers, xiv, xvii, 1–7, 15–17, 21–23, 26, 29–41, 43, 46, 50, 52, 75, 76, 79, 85, 86, 90, 93, 95, 99, 105, 110, 113, 118, 124, 138, 140, 147, 160, 171, 173, 175, 176–177, 180, 183-n.3, 185-n.10, 185-n.12, 187–188-n.13 as artists, 11, 29, 44, 175, 179 foreign, 6, 27, 28, 69, 94, 110, 162, 170, 174 and genealogies, 27, 106, 170–171, 173

215

independent, 28, 109, 169, 171, 174, 190–191-n.15 Japanese, 11, 24, 27, 54, 56, 87, 110, 168 and knowledge capital, 16–17, 108–109, 129, 171, 174, 176, 190–191-n.15 Western, 25, 26, 48, 87 Filmmaking, xiii–xiv, xviii, 1, 22, 29, 40, 81, 174, 183–184-n.2 local, 3–4, 20 techniques, xv, 14–17, 24, 28, 40, 69, 76–77, 81, 84–86, 93, 95, 98, 100, 108, 110, 113, 124, 139–140, 157, 159, 170, 174, 176, 178, 191-n.19, 191-n.23, see also Rashomon technique Fistful of Dollars, a (Per un pugno di dollari), 148, 155 narrative, 148 story, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153 Flashbacks, 14, 47, 54, 56, 70, 76–77, 79, 81, 84–85, 86, 88, 90, 95–96, 98, 100, 103–104, 107–108, 157, 167, 186-n.3.3, 186-n.3.6, 188-n.6.3 Frankfurt School, 1, 9 Freud, xv, 10, 71 Galaxy Quest, 128, 135–139, 207 plot, 137–138 story, 138 Genealogy, 76, 79, 95, 106, 109, 171, 180 Ghosts of Mars, 78, 95–96, 98, 99, 105, 204 narrative, 95 stories in, 95 story of, 95–96 Global, the, xiv, xvii–xviii, 6, 11–12, 28, 179–180, 183–184-n.3 business, xvii, 4–5 citizens, 6



Index

Index

Global, the—Continued culture, xiv, xvi, xviii, 2, 174–175, 180–181 economy of, xvi, xvii, 8 film distribution, 3, 5, 27, 174, 179 film production, 3, 5, 27, 174, 179 flows, xiv, xvi, xix, 19 and human imagination, xv–xvi, 173, 175 and local, xiv, xvii, xviii, 3–5, 45, 174–175, 179 politics of, xvii, 137 see also Story, grand Globalization, xiii–xiv, xvii, 3, 5, 45, 174, 177 Group(s), 11, 59, 81, 85, 87, 113–140, 163, 165, 184-n.8 heroic, 111, 142 Japanese, 122–123, 124, 126, 127, 134, 189-n.8.2, 190-n.10 Guilt, 21, 29, 34, 36–39, 53, 55–56, 62–63, 64, 68, 75, 84, 90, 94, 97, 101–102, 104, 114, 116, 167 and responsibility, 102, 163, 180 Gunfighters, see Men, as gunfighters Hegemony, 5, 10, 106 Hero, the, 13, 22, 28, 29, 49, 56, 89, 90, 111, 124, 129–132, 134, 139, 159, 165, 169, 177, 180, 187-n.12, 189–190-n.8.4, 191-n.3 antihero, 111, 149–150, 167, 177–178 lone, 111, 123–124, 127, 141–160 super, 122, 144, 148 Heroines, 13–14, 38, 44, 51, 62, 88–89, 91, 93, 95–96, 110, 136, 170, 188–189-n.6.6 Heroism, 51, 88–89, 91, 111, 124, 130, 132, 134–136, 138, 139,

142, 159–160, 162–163, 165, 168, 169 Heteroglossia, 9, 12, 104, 175, 180 Hidden Fortress (Kakushi Tori no San Akunin), xix, 13, 14, 51, 106, 111, 128, 157, 161–168, 179, 192-n.1, 193-n.4, 209 plot of, 167 story of, 14, 165–167, 168 Hill, Walter, 159, 205 and Kurosawa remakes, 148–149, 151–155, 158 History, 11–12, 16–17, 29, 37, 40, 47, 48, 55, 68, 72, 75, 105–106, 114, 115–116, 124, 132, 135–138, 139, 142–143, 155–156, 161, 169, 171, 173, 175, 184-n.8, 190-n.12 of film, 6, 19, 109, 129, 167, 183– 184-n.2 national, 8, 33, 48, 64, 118–119 see also Samurai, film Hitchcock, Alfred, 6, 199 Hollywood, xvii, 3–4, 7, 9, 28, 68, 81, 117, 119, 124, 141, 152, 155, 168, 174, 176, 179, 183–184-n.1.2, 191-n.23 directors, see Filmmakers dominance of, 4, 5, 9, 106, 180 and local cinemas, 5, 118, 180 and remakes, 29, 48, 54, 193-n.4, see also Remakes resistance to, 5, 120, 185-n.1 Homogenization, xviii, 174 Honor, 64, 90–91, 119, 129–130, 132, 151, 166 Medal of, 88, 188–189-n.6 Human, xix, 10, 11, 12–13, 33, 40, 44, 53, 56, 59, 62, 68, 73, 90, 95, 96, 100, 102, 108, 132, 136, 139, 146, 148–150, 155, 163, 165, 176, 192-n.5 activity, 2, 5, 45, 111 beings, xiv, xv, xviii, 15, 25, 36, 46, 56, 164, 173, 188-n.6.5



216

connections, xviii, 2–3, 45, 47, 179–180 consciousness, xviii, 73, 97, 105, 186-n.4.2 creativity, xviii, xix, 44, 104, 111, 181 emotions, 32, 65, 84 experience, 16, 46, 97, 105, 177–178 narration, xiii, xviii, 44, 105 Humanism, 20, 29, 138–139, 180 Identity, 2, 3, 5, 8–9, 43, 45, 85, 108, 131, 179 Japanese, 6–9, 38–39, 116 national, xviii, 6–9, 33, 45 see also, Kurosawa, identity Ideology, xv, xvi, 5, 10, 38, 45, 105, 132, 174, 179, 184-n.8 dominant, 2, 9–10, 12, 27, 108, 122 as myth, 9–10, 167 and the nation-state, 8–9, 174 Imagination, xv–xvi, xix, 10–11, 78–80, 91–92, 98, 99, 104, 142, 181, 186-n.4.2 and desire, xviii, 107–111 popular, 3, 150 In a Grove (short story), 31, 41, 47–48, 54–55, 56, 64, 72, 75, 141 Internet, 2, 9 Iron Maze, 38, 57, 75, 76, 209 narrative, 55–56, 75–76 stories in, 54–56 story of, 54 Japan, xvi, xix, 1, 3–5, 6, 8, 19, 21, 24, 26–27, 28–29, 31, 33, 38, 39–41, 48, 51, 52–54, 57, 62, 64, 80, 105, 107, 114, 116, 117, 119, 140–141, 151, 169, 183-n.1, 192-n.3, 193-n.4 aristocrats, 8–9, 130, 162, 164–165, 186-n.4

217

artists, 9, 21 culture, 9, 53, 75, 90, 113, 115, 122, 127, 142 folktales, 9, 25, 143, 167, 184-n.6 and globalization, 19–20, 171, 183-n.1.2 Heian era (794–1185 CE), 64, 75 identity, 6–9, 23–25, 27 literature, 9, 78, 141 Occupation of, 9, 34, 84, 123 and religion, 37, 178 Showa Era, 20, 52, 185-n.2 studies of, xiv, xix, 7–8 Taishô Era, 20, 185-n.2 Tokugawa Era, 139 and the U.S.A., xvi, 4, 7–8, 14, 55–56, 76, 124, 171 jidai-geki (period film), see Samurai, film Killing, The, 80, 84, 86, 98, 99, 206 narrative, 78–79 story of, 78 Kitano Takeshi, 27, 192-n.13, 192-n.14, 206 and Kurosawa remakes, 156–158 Knowledge, 6, 16, 20, 91, 115, 149 capital, 6, 108–109, 129, 138, 171, 173 Kubrick, Stanley, 110, 206 and Kurosawa remakes, 78–79 Kurosawa, Akira, 1, 4–6, 11, 19, 35–36, 45–46, 62–63, 69, 71, 83–84, 86, 90, 94, 98, 101, 127, 131–132, 138, 142, 147, 149, 158, 185-n.6, 185-n.7, 185-n.10, 186-n.3, 187-n.10, 189-n.8.3 as artist, 20–21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 33, 152, 176 and Dostoevsky, 20–21, 33–35, 37–38, 47, 90, 102, 185-n.3 family, 19–20, 192-n.13 films, xiii, xv, xvii, xix, 2–3, 21, 24–26, 29, 38, 55–56, 64, 78,



Index

Index

Kurosawa, Akira—Continued 119, 129–130, 159, 162–163, 166–167, 187-n.12, 190-n.9 and globalization, 5–7, 27–28, 109, 162 and Hollywood, 4, 28 and humanism, 29, 180 humor, 131, 151, 153, 155, 157 identity, 14–15, 22–23, 38, 179, 185-n.4 influence, 1, 14, 17, 54, 76–78, 87–88, 95, 107–108, 113, 117, 128, 136, 156–157, 168, 170–171, 173–174, 176–177, 186-n.2 international fame, 4–5, 7, 23–25, 27 Japanese identity of, 6–7, 24–27 life, xix, 19–29 literature on, 6–7, 19, 33–34, 75, 80–81, 113, 121, 140, 185-n.1, 185-n.9, 186-n.6, 187-n.6 politics, 20–22, 25, 39, 116, 121, 132, 139, 146, 151–152, 154, 162, 165–167, 169 remakes, xiv–xv, xix, 1–2, 7, 14–17, 45, 47–49, 57–58, 68, 72–73, 106, 117–118, 139, 148, 153, 161–162, 173, 180, 187-n.13, 189-n.8.1, 193-n.4 screenplays, 7, 34, 41, 59, 98, 114–115, 118, 130, 131, 135, 141, 143, 153, 155, 158, 162–163, 166, 178, 185-n.5, 192-n.5 techniques, 4, 5, 7, 14, 23–24, 34, 39–40, 49, 54, 57, 61, 63, 69, 76, 79–80, 82, 85, 87, 98, 104, 140–141, 152, 157, 162, 165, 169, 191-n.23 and Toshiro Mifune, 23–24, 49–50, 152, 162, 165 and women, 14, 25, 29, 50–52, 65, 153

Last Man Standing, 7, 155, 159, 178, 192-n.9 narrative, 148, 150–151, 155 story, 152–153, 154, 158 Last Samurai, The, 26, 87, 156, 209 Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad), 78, 85, 94, 95, 97, 105, 177, 207 narrative, 79–80 Leone, Sergio, 27, 48, 148–149, 154–155, 170, 187-n.13, 192-n.10, 206 and Kurosawa remakes, 139, 141, 151–153, 155, 158–159 Les Girls, 65, 72–73, 76, 94, 110, 177, 188-n.5.1, 188-n.5.3, 205 narrative, 65, 67–68, 73, 75–76 stories in, 66–68 story of, 66 Lévi-Strauss, Claude. xiv, xv, 44 Literature, 1, 6–7, 16, 19, 124, 148 Local, xviii, 3–6, 7, 14, 29, 45, 120, 184-n.4 filmmaking, 3–5, 28, 106, 174, 179–180 see also Global Lucas, George, xii, 24, 26–27, 129, 168, 170, 174, 176, 178, 206 and Kurosawa remakes, 14, 28, 100–101, 164, 167–169, 171, 192-n.10.1 Magnificent Seven, The (film), 121, 129, 131, 133, 142, 159, 190-n.8, 191-n.22, 205, 208 plot, 124 stories about, 117–118 story of, 118–119, 135 Magnificent Seven, The (television), 122, 132, 155, 159, 190-n.5, 190-n.11, 206 narrative, 124 story, 125, 127, 135 Marxism, xiii, 3, 11, 37, 135, 169, 190-n.10



218

Masculinity, 71, 76, 85, 127, 135, 138, 192-n.10 see also Men Mass Media, xviii, 1, 3, 8–9, 12, 62, 75, 81, 104, 107–109, 137, 146 and ideology, 9–10, 90, 180 Meaning, 2, 7, 9–14, 26, 34, 44–45, 80, 95, 104, 114, 158–159, 171, 173, 187-n.5 and translation, 15–16, 43, 46–47, 110, 178–179 Memento, 78, 96, 98, 100, 105, 189-n.7.1, 207 narrative, 95 stories in, 94–95 story of, 94, 95 Men, 31, 32, 33, 36, 39, 55, 58, 67–68, 81, 92, 94, 115, 119, 123, 128–130, 132, 138, 142, 143, 146, 148, 150, 152, 155, 158–159, 161, 162, 165–166, 171, 177, 192-n.10, 192–193-n.2 and crime, 49, 52, 57, 59, 61, 63, 78, 83–85, 92–93, 102–104, 144–146, 151 as gunfighters, 120–121, 123–127, 133 Japanese, 19–20, 23–24, 117, 123, 144–145, 185-n.2, 189-n.8.2 and violence, 25, 88–91, 95, 102, 114, 116–117, 122, 165, 167, 176, 189–190-n.8.4, 192-n.5 and women, 50–52, 59–60, 62, 64, 65–68, 71, 80, 119, 153–154, 177, 188-n.5 see also Heroes; War Mexico, 48, 118, 120, 122, 133, 135, 149, 154–155, 190-n.7 see also Borders Mifune Toshiro (1920–1997), 23, 27, 32, 49–51, 86, 119–120, 141, 142, 143, 150–152,

219

153–154, 162, 165, 192-n.7, 192–193-n.2, 193-n.3 Misty (Misuti), 38, 57, 64, 75, 76, 91, 93, 104, 187–188-n.13 narrative, 57, 61, 75–75 stories in, 59–61, 62 story of, 57–59, 61, 63, 188-n.6.5 Modernity, 1, 3, 8, 32, 43–44, 54, 72, 77, 106, 108–109, 136–137, 140, 151, 157, 170, 176, 179, 180, 183–184-n.2, 192-n.10 and gender, 51–53, 142–143, 154, 159, 167 in Japan, 9, 20, 26, 48, 63, 110, 114, 116, 159, 192-n.4 see also Postmodernity Murakami, Jimmy T., 128, 207 Myth, xv, 11–12, 58, 61, 63–64, 131–132, 134, 137, 139, 149, 159, 184-n.8, 192-n.10 definition of, 9–10, 44, 184-n.8 and ideology, 9–10, 132, 167, 184-n.7, 184-n.8, 191-n.3 national, 8–9, 48 and Westerns, 49, 118, 132, 149, 154 Narration, see Narrative; Narrator Narrative, xiii, xviii, xix, 44, 65, 73, 75–75, 108, 118, 124, 132, 159, 179–180 and consciousness, 44–45, 47, 110, 187-n.5 creativity, xiii, xviii, 22, 27, 45, 171, 175, 179–180 definition of, 14, 175 and difference, 45–46, 136, 178–180 grand, 98, 104, 178 and individuality, 35–36, 41, 46, 76, 105, 178, 180 plausibility, 45, 124 and remakes, 43–44, 47, 68



Index

Index

Narrative—Continued and social reality, xviii, 10, 33, 44–45, 56, 73, 95, 104, 110, 136, 178 as technique, 10, 12, 14, 16, 33, 34, 38, 61, 76–77, 81, 86, 95, 100, 107, 113, 139, 170, 174, 176, 178, 183-n.1.1, 186-n.3.6, 188-n.6.3 translation of, 7, 9, 75, 106, 109– 110, 141, 148, 173, 175, 178 see also Polyphony Narrator, 34, 35–36, 40, 78, 97–98, 143, 148, 150, 155, 171, 178 benshi, 20, 22, 185-n.8 unreliable, 79, 80, 82–83, 87, 95–96, 101, 105 Nation-state, 8–10, 40, 45, 77, 117, 174 Japan, 1, 22, 29, 37 No Regrets for our Youth, 22, 51 Nolan, Christopher, 97, 207 and Kurosawa remakes, 94, 110 Novels, 1, 9–10, 20, 37, 98, 105, 131, 175, 183-n.1, 184-n.10 detective, 78, 190-n.4 Oshima Nagisa (1932–), 5, 20, 185-n.12, 201 Other, the, 5, 10, 12, 16, 34, 39, 107 vampires as, 11–14 Outrage, The, 38, 47, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 69, 71, 72, 76, 90, 91, 118, 120, 121, 136, 187-n.9, 188-n.6.1, 207 narrative, 75–76 stories in, 188-n.6.1 story, 49, 51–52 Perceived cultural similarity, see Similarity, perceived cultural Permutations, xix, 7, 12, 14, 17, 27, 29, 47, 38, 56, 68, 75–96, 97–98, 105, 107, 110–111, 113,

131, 159, 161–162, 168, 170, 173, 175, 177, 188-n.5.2, 191-n.18 comic, 64, 128, 157–158 creativity, 44, 161, 174 and narratives, 14, 16, 65, 73, 110, 179 Plot, 8, 13–15, 40, 46–47, 64, 65, 66, 69, 77, 96, 108, 113–114, 124, 128, 133–134, 137–138, 151, 152–153, 156–157, 163, 167, 170, 174, 179 definition of, 14, 178 Politics, xvii, 22, 52, 123, 137, 167, 190-n.12 postwar, 6, 128, 136 Polyphony, 10, 21, 33–34, 41, 76, 188-n.6.3 Postmodernity, xv, xvii, xix, 1, 6, 56, 109, 178–179 theories of, xiii, xv, xix Power, xvi, 2, 4–5, 13, 36, 55, 85, 92–95, 103, 122, 146, 169, 180–181 of film, 2, 47, 49, 122, 179 political, 54–55, 77, 135, 157, 167–168 of stories, 16, 52, 63 and women, 51, 61, 93, 136 Quante volte . . . Quella Notte (Four times that night), 65, 76, 186-n.4.1, 188-n.5.1, 204 narrative, 65, 75–75 plot, 69 stories in, 69–72 story of, 60, 70 Rashomon (film), xix, 4, 14, 31–42, 65, 67–69, 77, 78–82, 84–87, 90–91, 93–94, 96, 102–105, 107–111, 114, 116, 118, 127, 130–131, 138, 141, 157, 162, 163, 167, 168, 170, 177, 179, 185-n.4, 185-n.10, 186-n.3.1,



220

186-n.3.7, 187-n.6, 187-n.10, 188-n.6.5, 189-n.7.4, 189-n.8.1 international success, 16, 23–25, 29, 45, 53–54 as mystery, 36, 73, 76–77, 94, 97–98, 103 narrative, 33, 34, 35–36, 38, 41, 45, 73, 75–76, 107, 110, 113 stories in, 31–36, 50–51, 186-n.3 story of, 38, 39–41, 49, 65, 75, 110, 131, 187-n.8, 187-n.10 translations of, 29, 43–64, 75, 107, 110, 186-n.7 Rashomon (short story), 31, 41, 47–48, 54–56, 57, 58, 59, 63, 65, 75, 84, 92, 98, 141, 187-n.8 Rashomon effect, 41, 88, 107, 186-n.3.8 Rashomon technique, 47, 56, 76–78, 92, 95, 98–99, 104–106, 107–108, 132 Red Harvest, 141, 143, 153, 178, 191-n.1 Religion, xviii, 2, 37, 58, 129, 147, 174 in film, 38, 58, 61, 146–148, 150–151, 153–154, 178, 192-n.5 Remakes, xiii–xiv, xv, xix, 2, 5, 11–12, 14, 29, 38, 43–49, 52–54, 56, 57, 64, 65, 72–73, 97, 106, 107, 110–111, 117–118, 119, 121, 123–124, 128, 129, 131, 139, 140, 147–148, 152–153, 155, 159, 161, 163, 167, 170, 173, 176–177, 179, 183-n.1.2, 187-n.13, 189-n.8.1, 190–191-n.15, 192-n.5, 193-n.4 and creativity, 11, 28–29, 44, 75, 96, 109, 113 as translations, 6, 14, 16–17, 28, 43, 48, 53, 75, 113, 158 see also Copying

221

Reservoir Dogs narrative, 84–85 stories in, 85 story of, 84–85, 86 Resistance, xiv, xv, 13, 21–22, 59–60, 87, 115–116, 122–123, 126, 154, 177, 178–179 Resnais, Alain, 207 and Kurosawa remakes, 79–80, 110 Responsibility, 35, 37–39, 53, 62, 68, 77, 81, 88, 90–91, 94–95, 97, 101–102, 104, 116, 120– 121, 124, 130–131, 162–164, 169, 177, 179–180, 190–191-n.15 see also Guilt Reversal of Fortune, 38, 78, 81–84, 94, 98, 105, 110, 177, 207 narrative, 82 stories in, 82–83 story of, 82, 83–84 Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no Kyôshikoku), 25, 51, 163, 170, 210 Richie, Donald, 20, 23, 25, 28, 31, 32–33, 36, 39–40, 48, 49, 56, 57, 63, 71, 82, 90, 113–114, 115, 116, 119–120, 122, 128, 144, 150, 161, 163, 183-n.1.2, 186-n.1, 192–193-n.10.2 Ritt, Martin, 75, 207 and Kurosawa remakes, 38, 48, 50–53, 76, 118 Rodriguez, Robert, 48, 150, 170, 207 Ronin, see Samurai, unemployed Run, Lola, Run, 78, 98, 105, 110, 176, 208 story of, 92–94 Russia, 10, 20, 35, 37–38, 114, 162, 174 Saegusa Kenki, 187–188-n.13, 207 and Kurosawa remakes, 38, 57–64



Index

Index

Samurai, 19–20, 23, 26, 28, 31–33, 38–39, 49, 59–60, 114–116, 119, 121–124, 130–132, 135, 139, 141–144, 147, 156–158, 162, 167–169, 187-n.12, 190-n.9, 190-n.12, 191-n.9.2, 186-n.4, 190-n.10, 192-n.4, 192-n.5 film (jidai geki), 14, 25, 27, 29, 48, 51, 85, 87, 106, 111, 113–114, 116–117, 119, 122, 125, 127–133, 138–139, 142, 143, 151–152, 156–159, 162–163, 165, 170–171, 177, 185-n.6, 185-n.10, 189-n.8.1, 189–190-n.4, 190-n.9, 191-n.18 on television, 115, 127, 141, 155–156, 189-n.8.1 unemployed (ronin), 116, 117, 143, 191-n.9.2 values, 146, 165, 185-n.6 Sanjuro (Tsubaki Sanjuro), 51, 85–86, 163, 165–166, 187-n.12, 192-n.5, 209 Sanshiro Sugata (Sugata Sanshiro), 21, 22, 209 Schroeder, Barbet, 38, 207 and Kurosawa remakes, 110 Scorsese, Martin, 175–176, 189–190-n.4, 207 Screenwriting, see Film, scripts Second World War, 4, 7, 21, 33–34, 36, 38, 64, 107, 115–116, 168, 185-n.5 see also War Seven Samurai, xix, 14, 25, 27, 29, 51, 85, 114, 122, 127, 129, 132–133, 138, 141, 151, 152, 159, 162, 163, 165, 167, 185-n.10, 189-n.8.1, 189–190-n.5, 191-n.18, 209 narrative, 124, 139 plot, 113–114, 124, 128, 133–134, 137–138

story, 113–114, 115–116, 119, 127, 130–131, 135, 144, 177 translations of, 106, 111, 113, 125, 128, 130–131, 139, 141– 142, 157–158, 170–171, 177 Shame, 37–38, 64, 90, 115, 145 see also Guilt Shinto, 37, 58, 61, 63, 143–144, 192-n.5 Similarity, xv, xix, 46, 144, 147, 157–158, 173, 175–176, 178, 181 perceived cultural, xvii, xviii, 15 social, xviii, 41, 155–156 see also Difference Simmel, Georg, xix, 17, 181 Simpsons, The, xvi, 107 Singer, Bryan, 27, 208 and Kurosawa remakes, 86–87, 110, 176 Social, 6, 9, 12, 33, 35, 41, 68, 142, 161, 179 critique, 114, 132, 169 justice, 29, 83, 159 reality, xix, 10, 16, 46–47, 56, 61, 73, 97, 104–105, 110, 131, 135, 162, 178–180 system, 118, 131 Society, xv, xvii–xviii, 8, 11, 35, 40, 48, 56, 68, 73, 77, 90, 117, 129, 131, 142, 154, 155, 159, 163, 177, 183–184-n.2, 186-n.8 Japanese, 33, 35, 50–51, 110, 115, 127, 141–142, 189-n.8.2 and stories, 63, 135, 179–180 U.S., 53, 106, 122, 189-n.7.2 women in, 62–63, 97 Spielberg, Steven, 27, 169, 170, 171, 193-n.5, 208 Star Wars, 14, 128, 129, 161, 163, 169–170, 173–174, 178, 192-n.10.1, 193-n.4, 206 story of, 14, 128, 167–168 Status, 6, 72, 108–109, 138, 186-n.4 see also Class



222

Story, xviii, 2, 11–14, 16, 22, 24, 25, 28–29, 31–33, 38, 40–41, 43–45, 47, 49, 50–51, 54, 55, 57, 58–62, 65–72, 75–76, 79, 81, 82–86, 88–91, 94–96, 98, 100–104, 107–108, 113–116, 117–118, 119, 127, 130–131, 138, 142–144, 147, 148–151, 153–156, 158–159, 166–168, 171, 176, 183-n.2, 184-n.9, 185-n.8, 186-n.3.1, 187-n.8, 187-n.10, 188-n.6.3, 188-n.6.5 as bridges, 29, 178 comic, 131, 138, 151, 155 crime, 51, 77, 98 definition of, 14, 43, 174, 178 fairy, 45, 111, 132, 163, 167 and gender, 68, 76, 92 grand, 178–179 of the Grand Inquisitor, 34–35 horror, 81, 179–180 human need for, 41, 45, 104, 176, 178–179 and knowledge, 16, 52, 76–77, 111, 178, 184-n.9 as mirrors of society, 9, 16–17, 63, 73, 90, 98–99, 104, 117, 127, 143, 159 narrators of, 78, 110 retelling of, 3, 14, 16–17, 20, 43–45, 46, 48, 52, 56, 68, 75, 107, 111, 117, 156, 174–175, 176, 178–179, 183-n.2 short, 31, 54, 55, 63 structures, 43, 99 and subjectivity, 41, 44–47, 61, 84, 97, 108, 110 translation of, 14, 46, 48, 52, 56, 110, 113, 128, 131, 135, 142, 175–178 Story of the Kelly Gang, The, 183-n.2 Storytelling, 14, 20, 22, 131, 188-n.6.1 Studios, 21, 24, 28, 113

223

system, 4, 5 Sturges, John, 208 and Kurosawa remakes, 119–122 Subcultures, xvii, 129, 138 Subjectivity, xix, 10, 12, 31–41, 43–64, 65–73, 79–81, 93–94, 97–98, 104–105, 107–108, 110, 131, 179, 188-n.6.5 Subtitles, 14, 15, 53 see also Translation Sullivan’s Travels, 138, 208 Tarantino, Quentin, 27, 79, 86, 109, 140, 157, 158–159, 184-n.4, 188-n.6.5, 192-n.8, 208 and Kurosawa remakes, 84–85, 110 Television, 8, 45, 83, 96, 104–105, 146, 158, 184-n.4, 191-n.23, 193-n.4 and film, 24, 27, 47, 54, 56, 132, 155, 189-n.8.1 samurai dramas, 127, 141, 146, 155–156, 191-n.9.2 series, 47, 78, 96, 97–106, 122, 125, 127, 129, 136–138, 186-n.3.1, 189–190-n.4 Westerns, 118, 131 Translation, xiii–xiv, 2, 6, 7, 14–17, 28, 29, 43, 48, 52, 53, 110, 141, 158, 173, 175 faithful, see Translation, wordfor-word possibility of, xiv, 7, 9, 45–46, 75, 110, 113, 142, 175, 179 as problematic, xviii, 3, 45, 46–47, 75 word-for-word, 15–16, 46 see also Subtitles Truffaut, François (1932–1984), 6, 191-n.15, 208 Truth, xix, 29, 32, 40, 43–64, 65, 66–68, 70–71, 73, 77–78, 80–84, 87, 89–91, 94–95, 97–98, 105, 108–110, 132,



Index

Index

Truth—Continued 134–135, 169–170, 177, 179–180, 186-n.3.3, 186-n.3.8 individual, 34–36, 39, see also Subjectivity Tykwer, Tom, xii, 93 and Kurosawa remakes, 27, 92, 110, 176 U.S.A., 3, 5, 10–11, 13, 21, 25, 28, 48–49, 50–53, 55, 56, 69, 82–84, 88, 90, 105–106, 119–121, 123, 127, 133, 136–137, 149, 151, 158, 163, 168–169, 178, 180, 184-n.4 and crime, 56, 83–84, 99–100, 136, 186-n.3.2, 189-n.7.2 film, 3–5, 25, 65–66, 87, 132, 179, 183–184-n.2, 185-n.12 history, 40, 48, 53, 70, 90–91, 108, 117–118, 122, 125–126, 128, 137, 149, 150, 155, 169–170 individualism, 120, 122, 124, 135, 142, 189–190-n.4 and Japan, xvi, 7–8, 14, 22, 47, 53–57, 76, 110, 115, 124, 171 novels, 54, 111, 124, 143 women, 51, 54, 67, 91, see also Women see also Americans U.S.S.R., see Russia Usual Suspects, The, 78, 105, 110, 176, 208 narrative, 87 stories in, 86–87 story of, 86 Value(s), 3, 6, 10, 22, 109, 138, 180 American, 48, 106, 137, 169 Japanese, 116, 146, 159–160, 165, 167, 185-n.6 Venice Film Festival, 4, 27, 187-n.6 Violence, 76, 122, 131, 139, 150, 180, 186-n.8, 189-n.7.2, 192-n.5

aesthetitics of, 85, 158–160 in film, 10–11, 140, 158, 192-n.3 and the U.S.A., 11, 125–126 War, 31, 36, 85, 87, 117, 120, 136–137, 145, 160, 162, 167, 169, 180, 185-n.5, 186-n.8, 189–190-n.4 American Civil, 49, 90, 91, 118, 125, 149 in film, 21–22, 25, 26, 34, 36, 39, 53, 87–90, 117, 162, 165–166, 168–170, 189-n.8.3, 189–190-n.8.4 Gulf, 64, 81, 87–91, 94, 101, 125, 189–190-n.4 Second World War, 4, 7–8, 21, 33–34, 38, 64, 115–116, 168 victims of, 25, 29, 165 Vietnam, 53–54, 64, 150, 169, 189–190-n.4 Welles, Orson, 76–77, 87, 94, 185-n.10, 186-n.6, 208 Westerns, 117–118, 135–136, 151, 155, 168, 189-n.8.3, 193-n.5 characters, 52, 56, 123–124, 137 revisionist, 126, 154 Spaghetti, 69, 149–150 see also Myth Willis, Bruce, 27, 148–149, 150, 153–154, 155 Women, 12, 29, 38, 46, 50, 53, 55, 65, 67–68, 91, 97, 100–101, 102–104, 110, 115, 127, 132 American, 51, 54, 91 in film, 32, 33, 36, 49–52, 55, 57, 61–62, 67–68, 77, 82, 90, 92, 110, 115–116, 119, 122–123, 126, 130–131, 135, 144–145, 148, 151–154, 155, 157, 164, 170, 177, 178, 187-n.12, 188-n.6.5, 192-n.12 Japanese, 20, 21, 25, 39, 49–50, 53, 62, 91, 186-n.4



224

and men, 39, 50, 55, 57–64, 65–73, 80, 91, 151, 153–154, 188-n.6.5 as problems, 51, 62, 92, 97, 151, 154, 177 sexuality, 12–13, 62 and violence, 14, 33, 52–53, 85–86, 91 and war, 91, 105, 162, 188–189-n.6 see also Heroines yakuza, 144, 146, 158, 178 Yojimbo, xix, 14, 51, 143, 151–152, 155, 162, 163, 167, 170, 192-n.5, 109

225

narrative, 148 plot, 151–153, 157 story, 35, 141, 148, 153, 155, 165–166 translations of, 106, 139–140, 141, 148–149, 156, 158, 177–178 Yoshida Hiroaki, 209 and Kurosawa remakes, 38, 54–56 Zatôichi, 191-n.9.2, 192-n.14, 206 plot of, 156–157 story, 156 Zwick, Edward, 91, 209 and Kurosawa remakes, 78, 87–90



Index

Remaking Kurosawa: translations and permutations in global cinema

Youth Culture in Global Cinema

Remaking Management: Between Global and Local

Remaking Management: Between Global and Local

The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa

Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories

Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories

Combinatorics of permutations

Remaking the Global Economy: Economic-Geographical Perspectives

Combinatorics of Permutations

Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema (Public Worlds)

Combinatorics of permutations

Combinatorics of Permutations

Selected Translations

Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory (Traditions in World Cinema)

Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater (Studies in European Culture and History)

Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater (Studies in European Culture and History)

Studies in French Cinema

The Voice in Cinema

Queer Cinema in Europe

The Voice in Cinema

Traditions in World Cinema

Studies in Australasian Cinema

Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo

Action and Adventure Cinema

Nazis and the Cinema

Surrealism and Cinema

Cinema and Nation

Cinema and Spectatorship (Sightlines)

Remaking Kurosawa: translations and permutations in global cinema

Youth Culture in Global Cinema

Remaking Management: Between Global and Local

Remaking Management: Between Global and Local

The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa

Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories

Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories

Combinatorics of permutations

Remaking the Global Economy: Economic-Geographical Perspectives

Combinatorics of Permutations

Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema (Public Worlds)

Combinatorics of permutations

Combinatorics of Permutations

Selected Translations

Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory (Traditions in World Cinema)

Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater (Studies in European Culture and History)

Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater (Studies in European Culture and History)

Studies in French Cinema

The Voice in Cinema

Queer Cinema in Europe

The Voice in Cinema

Traditions in World Cinema

Studies in Australasian Cinema

Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo

Action and Adventure Cinema

Nazis and the Cinema

Surrealism and Cinema

Cinema and Nation

Cinema and Spectatorship (Sightlines)

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