Remaking Kurosawa: Translations and Permutations in Global Cinema (review)

Remaking Kurosawa studies the narrative relationships among four films by Kurosawa Akira—Rashōmon (1950), Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1961), Yōjinbō (1958), Kakushi toride no san'aku-nin (The Hidden Fortress, 1958)—and subsequent productions by other directors that are either direct remakes or exhibit a diffuse narrative similarity to the Kurosawa films. Martinez refers to the latter condition as a narrative permutation—not an outright remake but a condition of semblance. The principal focus, developed across five chapters, is on Rashōmon and its filmic influences. She explores the other Kurosawa films more briefly, in a chapter each.

Most books on Kurosawa explore his work in terms of its connection to postwar Japanese culture and the cinematic devices and expressive techniques that constituted his filmmaking style. Martinez approaches her topic differently, as an anthropologist rather than a film scholar, seeking answers to questions about relationships between local and global cultures and the transformations that occur as narratives circulate from one context to the other, crossing linguistic boundaries as well as those formed by national and historical experience. Kurosawa is a good candidate for this analysis because of his clear and dramatic influence on global cinematic culture and his attentiveness to the Japanese heritage of which he was a part. Kurosawa and his films synthesize the global and the local in striking and dramatic ways.

Although Martinez acknowledges that her primary background is not in cinema, her unfamiliarity with film aesthetics and cinema history leads to some errors and questionable assertions. She states, for example, that Toshiro Mifune broke off his working relationship with Kurosawa (p. 23) when most accounts of this rupture have suggested that it was Kurosawa who initiated the break. She writes that Kurosawa "famously always shot with at least three cameras" (p. 24). He didn't always do so. His multicamera method emerged slowly, and he fully adopted it only in the 1950s. She writes, "Postwar, Kurosawa appears to have had success after success" (p. 21). In fact, Habuchi (The Idiot, 1951) was a notorious failure, and Ikimono no kiroku (Record of a Living Being, 1955) and Kumonosujō (Throne of Blood, 1957) performed so poorly at the box office that he resolved to make something that would be purely entertaining and a popular hit. The result of this calculation was The Hidden Fortress, which Martinez describes merely as "an interesting departure" for Kurosawa. She incorrectly (from the standpoint of filmic technology) describes Kurosawa's expressive use of rain as a "special effect," akin to simulations of spurting blood. She writes that Dodeskaden (1970) has a neorealist style (p. 24). Dodeskaden's exaggerated color palette and pictorial garishness are incompatible with neorealism, which as a cinematic style aims to remove all camera artifice from the surface of a work. She writes that Kurosawa was like Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Luis Bunuel in that "these are all 'foreign' filmmakers who generally stayed at home" (p. 6), that is, they worked within their indigenous culture and its film industry rather than emerging elsewhere. After attaining fame as a filmmaker in England, Hitchcock emigrated to Hollywood where he worked for more than 30 years and made his best-known films. Lang, too, was a successful Hollywood director, and Bunuel worked in Spain, Mexico, and France. Martinez is correct that Kurosawa was content to keep working in Japan, but this is precisely how he was not like the directors with whom she compares him.

Martinez does not engage with the cinematic aesthetics of Kurosawa's work. She says little about his use of editing, sound, cinematography, or set design and concentrates instead on narrative. Her comparisons of Rashōmon and the other films with their remakes are developed through plot summary and thematic extrapolations from the plots. Her anthropologist sensibilities serve her well here, and she develops keen and sometimes surprising interpretations from the plot material based on her familiarity with Japanese history and culture. She points...