In his monograph on Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line, a work that is equal parts war film and meditation on nature, film scholar Michel Chion eloquently makes a common observation about movie-going, rather than watching a film on the television or computer screen at home. “When we grow up,” writes Chion, “something happens that adults don’t talk about or don’t remember: the world gets smaller…Cinema returns objects to a larger scale.” Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams achieves large scale with a certain degree of simplicity. Cinema screens have an unmatched power to remind us to remain awestruck by the world, intensifying thought and feeling through scale.
More pertinently, films have provided stories about how we embrace and escape nature, seeking to flee from its mysteries, immensity, and terror. In Kurosawa’s Dreams, these horrors are mostly prompted by human action and the absence of human thought.