2010.03.09 黑泽明100岁生日快乐

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Happy 100th Birthday, Akira Kurosawa
By Colin Fleming
MARCH 9, 2010
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Rizzoli Books
With the centenary of Akira Kurosawa's birth shortly upon us—March 23, for all you film buffs—I'm for anything that mixes up the Japanese director's familiar mythology. His samurai epics still get the bulk of the critical ink—after all, who can turn swords and sandals into poetic agents like Kurosawa? And then there's his pop culture cred: try finding someone at a Comi-Con convention who can't rattle on about Hidden Fortress being an archetype for Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, a sci-fi double-whammy via feudal Japan.

Unfortunately, archetypes—and the attention they get—undermine some of the subtler points of Kurosawa's artistry. Sure, the outmanned-but-persevering band of virtuosos/heroes theme of Seven Samurai inspired The Magnificent Seven—and Inglourious Basterds, for that matter—while the semi-somnolent, cooler-than-thou ethos of Yojimbo was a virtual Ur-text for the spaghetti western movement. Western audiences have always liked the epic side of Kurosawa, but what of Kurosawa the humanist, the artist who could mine a single conversation or a single image for his galvanizing truths?


The quiet, quotidian aspect of Kurosawa's art gets a nice push in the impressively lavish—we're talking stacks of high-grade stills, notes, mockups—Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema (Rizzoli; $75), with a text by film historian Peter Cowie and the requisite foreword by Martin Scorsese, as true a fan of cinema as there ever was. There's no shortage of stills to suggest that Kurosawa could conduct an epic battlefield scene with D.W. Griffith-like élan, but it's the close-ups and three-quarter shots that mesmerize. Actor Toshiro Mifune—a Kurosawa stalwart who appeared in more than a dozen of his films—is everywhere, but never more arrestingly than in a still from The Quiet Duel, a neglected film with Mifune playing the part of a syphilis-stricken obstetrician. Clothed in surgical gear, his arms limply bent-upwards—as if pleading—and crossed by a lattice of shadow lines, Mifune is both ghostly and shredded, vague and not vague at once. It's also a shot you could hang on the wall at MOMA.

The Quiet Duel, significantly, dates from 1949. If you go through Kurosawa's filmography, you'll see that there were plenty of big, fairly bombastic films coming out at regular points throughout his career. The King Lear revamp, Ran, is from 1985; Seven Samurai from 1954, Yojimbo from 1961, Dersu Uzala—an eco-parable set in Siberia—from 1975. But it's in the first few years after World War II that Kurosawa set himself up as a master of miniatures.


Stray Dog—also from 1949—is one of cinema's most relentless works, as unmitigating, in its way, as Peckinpah's Straw Dogs or Polanski's Macbeth. There are loads of devils in these details. "The sense of suffocating heat is brought home in repeated shots of people fanning themselves, mopping their perspiring faces with grimy hankies, grasping at a tepid drink or a proffered Popsicle," Cowrie writes. The simple premise—a young detective sets off after a pickpocket who stole his gun, and flirts with criminality himself—results in a docudrama, urban travelogue of sorts. Tiny, person-specific details coalesce to create a portrait of an exceedingly ravaged country with busted-up people all around.

This is the Kurosawa I prefer—the director more in step with the Italian neo-realist movement rather than some of the bloated horse operas of the American Western, a form he loved. He also loved painting and drawing, and Master of Cinema shows that even in his large-scale epics, Kurosawa was in touch with the aesthetic that dominates his late 1940s work. An image drawn for Ran—in crayon, pencil, and pastel—of a warrior stuck with a couple dozen arrows, has the same gruesome grill work as the Quiet Duel still, but now the shadows have become physical objects. The lacerations are present either way, but there's more of the conjurer's art in the postwar films, and a stronger shading of reality too. That's one nifty party trick.

For a list of the five best Kurosawa films you (probably) haven't seen, click here.
Colin Fleming is the author of the forthcoming book The Anglerfish Comedy Troupe: Stories From the Abyss. He has written for Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, and Vanity Fair, and is a regular contributor to NPR's Weekend Edition.


黑泽明100岁生日快乐
作者：科林-弗莱明
2010年3月9日
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Rizzoli Books
黑泽明的百年诞辰即将到来--3月23日，对于所有的电影迷来说，我喜欢任何能将这位日本导演熟悉的神话混合起来的东西。他的武士史诗仍然得到了大部分的评论--毕竟，谁能像黑泽明那样把剑和凉鞋变成诗意的代理人？然后还有他的流行文化信誉：试着在Comi-Con大会上找到一个人，他不能喋喋不休地谈论《隐蔽堡垒》是《星球大战》和《帝国反击战》的原型，这是一个通过封建日本的科幻双击。

不幸的是，原型和它们所得到的关注，破坏了黑泽明艺术的一些微妙之处。当然，《七武士》中的 "寡不敌众"、"百战不殆 "的主题启发了《七雄争霸》，以及《英勇无敌》，而《虎胆龙威》中半冷不热、冷酷无情的气质则是意大利西部片运动的一个虚拟文本。西方观众一直喜欢黑泽明的史诗性的一面，但黑泽明这个人文主义者，这个能够从单一的对话或单一的图像中挖掘出激励人心的真理的艺术家呢？


黑泽明的艺术中安静、平淡的一面在《黑泽明：电影大师》（Kkira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema）（Rizzoli; $75）中得到了很好的推动，该书由电影历史学家Peter Cowie撰写文本，并由马丁-斯科塞斯（Martin Scorsese）作必要的前言，他是有史以来最忠实的电影迷。该书不乏剧照，表明黑泽明可以用D.W.Griffith式的风度来演绎史诗般的战场场景，但让人着迷的是特写镜头和四分之三镜头。演员三船敏郎--黑泽明的中坚力量，在他的十几部电影中出现过--随处可见，但从未像《静静的决斗》中的一张剧照那样引人注目，这是一部被忽视的电影，三船扮演一位患梅毒的产科医生。三船身穿手术服，双臂无力地向上弯曲--仿佛在恳求--被阴影线的格子划过，三船既像幽灵又像碎屑，既模糊又不含糊。这也是一个你可以挂在MOMA墙上的镜头。

很明显，《静静的决斗》可以追溯到1949年。如果你浏览一下黑泽明的电影作品，你会发现在他整个职业生涯中，有很多大型的、相当轰动的电影在定期上映。李尔王》的修订版《小兰》是1985年的作品；《七武士》是1954年的作品，《勇者》是1961年的作品，《德苏乌扎拉》是1975年的作品--一部以西伯利亚为背景的生态片。但在二战后的最初几年，黑泽明将自己打造成了一个微型电影的大师。


流浪的狗》（Stray Dog）也是1949年出品的，是电影界最无情的作品之一，就其方式而言，与佩金帕的《草泥马》或波兰斯基的《麦克白》一样毫不留情。在这些细节中，有大量的魔鬼。"考利写道："人们反复拍打扇子，用肮脏的手帕擦汗，抓着不温不火的饮料或递过来的冰棒，这种令人窒息的热感被带回家。这个简单的前提--一个年轻的侦探开始追捕偷了他的枪的扒手，他自己也和犯罪行为打交道，结果是一部纪实剧，类似于城市游记。微小的、针对个人的细节凝聚在一起，创造了一个被严重蹂躏的国家的肖像，周围都是破败的人。

这是我更喜欢的黑泽明--这位导演与意大利新现实主义运动的步伐更加一致，而不是美国西部的一些臃肿的马戏，他喜欢这种形式。他也喜欢绘画，《电影大师》表明，即使在他的大型史诗片中，黑泽明也与主导其1940年代后期作品的美学相联系。为《小兰》绘制的一幅图像--用蜡笔、铅笔和粉笔绘制的一个被几十支箭射中的战士，具有与《静静的决斗》相同的可怕的格栅工作，但现在阴影已成为实物。无论哪种方式都有撕裂的痕迹，但在战后的电影中，有更多的魔术师的艺术，而且对现实的影子也更强。这是个漂亮的聚会技巧。

关于你（可能）没有看过的五部最佳黑泽明电影，请点击这里。
科林-弗莱明是即将出版的《鮟鱇鱼喜剧团》的作者。来自深渊的故事。他曾为《滚石》、《体育画报》和《名利场》撰稿，也是NPR周末版的定期撰稿人。