Painterly Eye

My rinky-dink 400 pixel-width format (I really need to figure out how to alter this blog's main column width...) hardly does this frame justice.  But it gives you a taste of the visual sense Kurosawa brings to many of the shots in his austere, bleak epic Kagemusha.  In motion, with the soldiers in the background crossing right-to-left and occluding the setting sun, it's dazzling -- one of those shots that make you pause the video player and just stare for a moment.  I don't think of Kurosawa as a director who typically arranges shots in which the pictorial qualities overshadow the narrative function; in his black-and-white films, especially, he shows considerable restraint in this respect.  Starting with Dodes'kaden in 1970, though, Kurosawa began shooting in color, and his painterly insincts seem to have been somewhat freed by the shift.  The Criterion Blu-ray release of Kagemusha includes a booklet showing some of the paintings Kurosawa labored over during the years when he was planning (but couldn't get the funding to produce) his first color samurai epic.  What this shot -- along with many others in this film, as well as in 1985's Ran -- conveys is the stark beauty that can arise amid the brutality of war.  It's a paradox that seeps into Kurosawa's two late color war epics, and makes for an interesting contrast with his earlier work: in Seven Samurai, war conveys grit, dirt, brutality, camaraderie, blood, and sweat, but very little beauty.  The late films suggest an artist ever so slightly disengaged from his material, viewing the events at a remove, as a disinterested god might do.

Comments

[Turan]

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[Kim]

Hi Bob,that's the question isn't it . I don't want to put any spfiiecc time frames here, since those never hold. I don't have much work to do (updating system, icons and few other small things) and I will release the beta version (need to get some feedback and discover as much bugs as possible). I hope it will be soon, but hope wont get me there, so I will try to get more time for this in this few weeks so you can finally get the taste of it.

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