Give me Kurosawa and Tarkovsky
and I'll watch movies until my eyes fall out of their sockets (part 1)
The Anti-Samurai
When I was a kid in Brazil there was a TV channel that on Sunday nights showed art-house movies in original language, with subtitles - a really bizarre, cathodic oasis in the middle of a toxic landscape made of rivers of banality and mountains of garbage. One of those nights, with no preparation apart from some short annoucements, I get caught by the sensorial avalanche that is the mighty Kurosawa’s Ran.
I was already keen on japanese culture in general, but Ran took me from “ha, samurai stuff, cool” to another level in terms of aesthetics and existential perspective. When the movie ended i was someone else and the world changed into something different too, as if Kurosawa had given me a new pair of eyes and maybe a new apparatus to feel, hear and read everything around.
In a reverse engineering process then I saw the previous Kurosawa’s work, the feverish and colorful Kagemusha. It confirmed the impression caused by Ran: at the end you feel exhausted but blessed, as if you had experienced not only an entertaining journey, but a masterclass on Art and the human existence.
And sure as Hell our great Akira can work in black and white. A movie like Throne of Blood, his version for Macbeth, has an overwhelming intensity and it’s another lesson on narrative, atmosphere, composition and everything you need to know if you make comics or if you are in this storytelling business in any other way.
The Expressionist use of colors and the theatrical acting on Kurosawa’s work were big influences on my work on La Grande Crociata, not only for the atmosphere in general, but also in specific moments like a brief tent talk moment - and here I was thinking about Asterix too, in the way the reader almost takes part in the meeting:
Kurosawa was not an exclusively genre director, he made films with other themes, and even his samurai movies are in fact anti-samurai, a break from the tradition of portraying this warrior class with an unreal level of nobility and honor. In previous samurai movies, the steadfast swordsmen fiercely engaged in highly choreographed and clean fights, like super heroes. With Kurosawa you can see fear, mistakes, cheating, stumbles.
Another aspect is the quest for power leading to loosing everything, even one’s sanity, leaving behind betrayal, destruction and bodies - a too human experience, far from what some History books and boastful traditions tell us about “leaders” and “heroes” from the past.
In Kurosawa’s movies one can see how his work is informed by other disciplines like in the noh influences and in the precise, minimal and sharp use of music, but it has also a strong graphic, pictorial aspect and it can be traced back to the fact that Kurosawa himself was a great painter and illustrator, in fact he made a lot of concepts and storyboards to his films.
I was planning to write a little about our friends Akira and Andrei in one single post, but it’s impossible. I humbly ask you to stay tuned until the next chapter! See ya!