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Ran

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Friday, October 22 2010

The Individual As Institution: Power, Loss and Madness in Kurosawa's Ran and Shakespeare's King Lear

By identifying Lear with the ancient Japanese warlord Hidetora, whose violations emerge from a breach of publicly identified self-hood, Akira Kurosawa plays with the quintessentially Shakespearean focus on individual personality.


Thursday, October 21 2010

Monster Dandelions and Weeping Demons

In the early 1990s, The Hollywood Reporter picked up on an emerging ‘trend’ of what it called cinema vert -- films about ‘green issues’. Kurosawa’s Dreams, though not financed by the American studio system, fits well in this cohort, albeit as the most formally distinct example of this miniature film movement.


Monday, October 18 2010

The Brush and the Lens: Kurosawa As Painter and Filmmaker

As a painter and filmmaker, Kurosawa stuck to his own style, informed heavily by traditional Japanese painting as well as European impressionists and expressionists, another arena of art where he answered to both Eastern and Western influences.


Wednesday, October 13 2010

West By East By West: The Influence of Kurosawa on the West and Vice Versa

Through his influences and achievements, Kurosawa became one of the first true international filmmakers, inspiring several generations of filmmakers who would explore notions of genre and identity in film.


Thursday, June 21 2007

Part 4: Challenging Convention

As cinema went completely commercial, abandoning art for artifice, true aesthetic acumen was hard to come by. Luckily, for the movies included herein, it was their difference, as well as their diversity, that helped them stand out from the rest of the high concept hackwork.


Reviews

Sunday, January 1 1995

Ran (1985/2000)

Kurosawa achieves an almost perfect fusion of storyteller and painter.


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