Everything in Akira Kurosawa‘s Throne of Blood is spot-on, as usual. The leads — Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada as the ostensible Macbeth and Lady Macbeth — are impeccable as Kurosawa blends the Shakespeare tragedy with Japanese Noh performance, with a dose of John Ford western for good measure.
It’s a tightly crafted, brilliantly acted, pared-down adaptation of Macbeth set in feudal Japan.
What more can be said about the 1957 film (or any of Kurosawa’s other 29 films, for that matter) that hasn’t been said?
So rather than re-analyze Throne of Blood, I want to ask a question I think about often as I’m watching, in particular, foreign films: How much am I missing?
In film club, most of the movies we watch were produced years ago, in other countries, and in languages other than English. We’re viewing them from a 2020s, American perspective. We’re not watching the movies in the context they were produced.
For instance, Noh is not a performing art that I am familiar with, whereas Japanese filmgoers in 1957 would be familiar enough with it to recognize the settings, performances, and references used by Kurosawa. I wasn’t aware of its influence in Kurosawa films until watching an extra, Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create, on the Criterion Blu-Ray disc.
We miss references such as this, as well as jokes, political commentary, cultural elements, and even differences between the spoken language and the subtitles. Last week’s film, The Cocoanuts, refers to the Florida land rush in the 1920s and was released just before the start of the Great Depression. For most of us, we know about these from history, not first-hand experience.
That doesn’t diminish our enjoyment of a given film, but it may limit our appreciation and understanding of it.
What are your thoughts?