Ran and the Tragedy of History

BRIAN PARKER Ran and the Tragedy of History Fourteen years ago, at the first World Shakespeare Congress in Vancouver , I invited the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev to speak for a panel I was organizing on 'Shakespeare in Modern Production.' He gave a fine talk on the creative thinking behind his films of Hamlet and King Lear, and, as a bonus, brought with him the first copy of his Lear film to be seen outside Russia, the screening of which brought the members of the Congress to their feet applauding. I mention this not out of vainglory but because at the same time I tried to invite Akira Kurosawa but could not manage to contact him. When I mentioned this to Kozintsev, his reply was: 'What a pity! He was staying with me and would have loved to come.' Kozintsev was also a personal friend of Peter Brook, the English stage and screen director; and it is these three men who have made the most interesting modern film versions of King Lear. A briefcomparison of their approaches can illuminate Kurosawa's unique achievement in Ran. I In both Kozintzev's books, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience (1966) and (especially) King Lear: the Space of Tragedy (1977), there is very generous praise for Peter Brook's stage version of the play; and earlier, in a 1967 article in Sight and Sound, Brook was equally laudatory about Kozintsev's film of Hamlet. The two men discussed the problem offilming King Learata meeting in Paris in 1967, began to shoot it simultaneously, the one in Northern Jutland, the other in the Crimea, and exchanged very interesting letters about their theories and experiences, some of which Kozintsev has reprinted in his Lear book. They agreed that, in translating the play to the medium of film, it was not their job just to illustrate the text but to find visual equivalents for its highly metaphOriC language.This concern focused first of all in a common desire to find a non-specific location for their films, full enough of precise detail to be imaginatively convincing but not based on any particular historical place or period. They also agreed that colour was totally inappropriate for King Lear; only black and white could avoid a vulgar interest in verisimilitude and convey the play's great moral and emotional extremes: 'I do not know what colour grief is: writes Kozintsev, 'or what UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1986 KUROSAWA'S 'RAN' 4'3 shades suffering has." Setting, they agreed, must be a universal 'country of the mind'; so both rejected any interest in either historical authenticity or decor that was visually attractive in its own right. They also agreed on the importance of close-up shots to capture what Brook would no doubt have called the 'psychological' and Kozintsev the 'spiritual' heart of the play. The advantage of film, says Kozintsev (echoing Pudovkin), is not that it enables you to bring on real horses but that you can look into a man's soul through his eyes. Kozintsev thought Brook overemphasized close-ups, however, and pointed out that the facial intensity of a silent film such as Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc (which Brook was citing as his model) depended on having no dialogue: with sound a much greater variety of distance is required, and in King Lear particularly the hero's subjective experience needs to be 'placed' within wider social and natural contexts. Each also agreed that the storm should not be treated in a spectacularly literal way because it is Lear's reaction to the storm rather than the weather itself that the director should try to convey; but they went about this in rather different fashions. For Kozintsev, the heart ofthe storm was Lear's experience in Poor Tom's hovel, where he is represented as justone among many hapless 'naked wretches' whose misery he had ignored as king. Brook, on the other hand, in his search for a visual equivalent of the multivalency of Shakespeare's language - its ability to say many things simultaneously at different levels - used the storm to show Lear's mental breakdown, mingling factual images and phantasmagoric horrors in...