For three months last summer, even East Coast humidity
couldn’t stop New Yorkers from consistently forming lines
trying to get into a sold-out movie theater.
No, it wasn’t the new “Star Wars” or
“Austin Powers.” It was a retrospective of 11 films
made by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and Japanese actor Toshiro
Mifune. The film series will come to Los Angeles for three weeks at
Landmark’s Nuart Theater starting Friday.
“There is a hunger and a need for these great
movies,” said Linda Hoaglund, who did new subtitle
translations for six of the films to be screened including
“Seven Samurai.”
Voted by 144 international critics to be one of the top 10 films
of all time in Sight and Sound magazine, “Seven
Samurai” is considered Kurosawa’s greatest film and
will have an entire week of screenings on its own. Hoaglund
subtitled the new 35 mm print of the great film.
“To get to have the last word on “˜Seven
Samurai,’ how exciting,” Hoaglund said with a giddy
laugh.
The film, which was remade in Hollywood as “The
Magnificent Seven” and has influenced recent films such as
“A Bug’s Life,” tells how a town enlists seven
samurai to defend itself against pillagers. While it is known for
its well-staged action sequence in the rain, Kurosawa also spends
time on character.
“The reason why that film works so well is that it
combines the visual spectacle of action with tremendous attention
to the development of the characters,” said East Asian
languages and cultures professor Seiji Lippit, who teaches a course
on Japanese cinema. “The first third of the film sets up
different personalities and characters.”
To accentuate the characters, Hoaglund sought to recreate the
experience of understanding the film in Japanese. “Throne of
Blood” employs older, more formal Japanese, akin the
Shakespearean language of “Macbeth,” the play which
“Throne” is based on. “Samurai” uses
language to separate the social castes, which were enforced by law
and evident in speech.
“The samurai tends toward elegant brevity while the
peasants tend toward very visceral, earthly gutsiness and great
deference in the presence of samurai,” said Hoaglund, whose
recent work also includes the subtitles and translation for the
Disney release of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited
Away.”
The comic relief of the film is Toshiro Mifune, who worked with
Kurosawa on 16 films including the Oscar-winning
“Rashomon,” “Throne of Blood,” and
“Yojimbo.” Mifune often played more lively characters,
and his role in “Samurai” is no exception.
“The one maverick is Mifune, the samurai wannabe, who has
his own wacky language,” Hoaglund said. “That’s
the one place I let myself play (with the subtitles). I would do
anything to milk his comedy.
“The Mifune role is incredibly important, because the
audience has to laugh as much as it can before the movie gets into
that relatively grim third act of all that fighting and mud,”
Hoaglund added.
While making epic films, Kurosawa infused them with a social
conscience and often made his period pictures allegories for modern
times. “The Bad Sleep Well” deals with governmental
corruption and was released amid a government liquidation of
leftists in Japan by the prime minister. “Rashomon” is
famous for telling the same story through four very different
perspectives, demonstrating the elusiveness of truth.
“”˜Rashomon’ is … about the immediate
post-World War II era period, the total collapse of society, even
though it’s set in ancient Japan,” Lippit said.
“It’s about attempts to create or invent a meaningful
social reality.”
Kurosawa’s identity is equally mysterious. He was
influenced by Western art, including the films of John Ford and
Shakespeare’s plays, which he often re-envisioned for
Japanese audiences. But in Japan, Kurosawa is not as revered for
his films as he is in the West, according to Lippit. Yet in the
United States, he influenced later filmmakers, such as George Lucas
(who has said “Star Wars” was based on Kurosawa’s
“Hidden Fortress”), Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford
Coppola. However, Kurosawa is not the violence-happy director his
influence has helped create.
“One thing that does run throughout Kurosawa’s films
is a strong current of humanism and the belief in the goodness of
humanity,” Lippit said.
The Nuart Theater is located by Santa Monica Boulevard and the
405 Freeway. The “Kurosawa/Mifune” series starts Friday
and ends Dec. 19. Call (310) 478-6379 for more info.