Kagemusha

Last night my buddy Tom and I watched Akira Kurosawa's film Kagemusha (1980). I've heard it said that it's not Kurosawa's best, and I agree, this is true. It doesn't have the engaging narrative and lively characters that mark his earlier films. But I want to reflect briefly on a few of Kagemusha's merits, because there are a few cinematic gems buried in there.

The film is set in 16th century Japan, before the nation was unified. From start to finish, the turmoil and bloodshed wax in intensity. In my first watch-through, it felt like the film's structure was built on a slow swell toward chaos. For example, the film gradually shifts its focus from the narratives of individual characters to the broader conflicts at large – from warlords, doubles, and fiefs, to battles and burning castles. I see this as Kurosawa's interpretation of the unification conflict itself, as the warlords' own identities and meanings were unmoored and swallowed up in forces beyond their control. It's a movement from control and coherence into chaos.

Aside from that reflection, there were two parts I found especially satisfying. The first was the opening scene, where Warlord Shingen and his brother, Nobukado, convince the thief Kagemusha to act as a double for the Warlord. Kurosawa shot the scene in one long take, from one camera angle. The room is bare, and the characters hardly move from their seats. Its almost excruciatingly slow, lending a certain gravity to every gesture and movement. The scene feels like it was shot for the stage, which I think is the point. Each of the men is set up as an actor playing on the stage of Japan's history, in events well beyond their control.

The second scene I'll note happened about a quarter of the way into the film. It's when the sniper who shoots Shingen explains to his superiors how he executed the shot in the dark. I find it a brilliant moment in the film, again emphasizing the impact that the genius and wit of one character can have on events and circumstances that are far larger than himself.

This seems like enough reflection for now. I'll close by saying that Kagemusha is worth watching as a snapshot in Kurosawa's career, but I recommend Seven Samurai and Hidden Fortress as superior films.

Abandon

"There's an old quote, Ophelia," the young girl's father, Mr. Chester, said musingly. "It's one of my favorites, and I believe it speaks directly to our little disagreement. It goes like this: 'Abandon hope, ye who enter here.' It means," he went on, stroking his mustache, "that once you reach a certain point, you enter a certain stage of life, the journey's not worth the trouble anymore. See what I mean?"

"No Father," Ophelia grumped, hastily stifling a yawn. "You're not helping. I've already told you: I don't want to be eight years old anymore. I want to be grown up – I'm ready!"

Mr. Chester shook his head. "Ophelia, being grown up isn't so glamorous and exciting as you might think. Just look at me." Ophelia gave him a good look and frowned. "Exactly," Mr. Chester nodded, "you see, once you're grown up, you start to gain weight in unsightly places; you start to grow (and in my case, lose) hair at rates hitherto unfathomed; you even start to lose your memory. No, Ophelia, once you're grown up, there's just nothing else to look forward to; once you're my age, you might as well give up on the idea that the good things in life will still come your way."

"But Father," Ophelia argued, "you get to smoke cigarettes and ride in carriages by yourself and stay up late and eat as many chocolates as you want and–"

Mr. Chester held up his hand to shush her. "Ophelia," he sighed, "you're confused my darling. Those things seem nice, but they aren't the good things in life. What's good is being young, having energy, riding your bicycle, reading your stories, pulling up carrots, and all such as that. What's good is being free from anxiety, being able to run about in this green world without it dragging you down, understand? Ophelia, I've lost that. I've grown old. I have chocolates, but I have worries. I ride in carriages, but I never enjoy them because I'm riding for business. It's not the same."

"But Father," Ophelia responded, wide-eyed, "if I grow up, I'll still ride my bicycle and play in the dirt and do all of my favorite things. I'll just be, well, grown up."

Mr. Chester smiled. "Some people can do that Ophelia. Some people can be old and still be young. You're old Father here wasn't so lucky."

"Oh, that's sad Papa!" Ophelia leapt into her Father's lap and rested her head on his shoulder. "I think there's still a young Papa in you somewhere." She snuggled deep into his shoulder.

"Ophelia, that is very nice of you to say. You know, in some ways, being grown up is just as simple as living each day, knowing that tomorrow we'll be older and wiser. In that sense, time just seems to... Ophelia?" The young girl was breathing deeply, fast asleep. The hour was, of course, long past her bedtime. "I should have known – old enough to weasel your Father into staying up, but not old enough to take the consequences. Off you go now."

Once he'd tucked Ophelia into bed, he went back to the parlor. He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and reached for a chocolate he'd left on the piano. For a moment, he listened to the crickets chirping outside the twilit window. "Perhaps there is a young Papa in me somewhere," he smiled thoughtfully. "Doesn't mean I can't enjoy the fruits of age, however," he chortled, popping the chocolate into his mouth.

The End.

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This post is part of a synchroblog, where myself and some other good folk post simultaneously, every two weeks, on the same topic. This week's topic was "Giving up for the long haul." Above is my interpretation. The other bloggers' takes can be found here:

Synchrobloggers

Roots

"Father!" Ophelia yelped from where she sat, "what's this one?" In her hands, which on this particular morning were covered with dirt – as were her knees, feet, and belly – she held a deep red, earth-encrusted bulb. The bulb was like a tiny ball, white near the top where tall fronds of green exploded from its cap, and white again where a thin vein hung from its base. But the red, the pure deep red of its middle, was so beautiful Ophelia could hardly stand it – like a ruby, a treasure excavated from some forgotten pharaoh, and Ophelia had found it first. The archaeological community would, undoubtedly, be in awe.

"What's that?" her Father grunted from a few yards away. Mr. Chester was on his knees in the manor gardens as well, but Ophelia's enthusiasm was lost on him. Sweat bristled on his thick mustache, and his shirt was plastered to his back like the wrappings of a mummy. Looking up from the clump of weeds that, despite his best efforts, was still firmly planted in their bed of cabbages, Mr. Chester chuckled to himself at Ophelia's discovery.

"Why, my dear, that's just a radish. You can try it if you like, but you'd better brush it off first. Now haven't you pulled up enough of Ms. Braeburn's vegetables this morning?" Ms. Braeburn was the widow of the Chester family's former groundskeeper, Mick, and she had stayed on to carry on her husband's work. She was a gifted gardener, but a bit reclusive. Mr. Chester, out of pity for the widow, and out of sheer hatred for disorder, helped pull weeds from the vegetables from time to time. This day, however, was the first time Ophelia had taken a real interest in the neatly rowed garden beds. A book on loan to the Chesters from the British Archaelogical Society may have aided her conversion.

And yes, Mr. Chester was right. Ophelia had pulled up a fair few of Ms. Braeburn's vegetables that morning. Strewn about the girl were the following: some new potatoes, yellow and lumpy like clumps of gold sifted in a creek; a few varieties of carrots, precious daggers made from living orange stone, their hilts as green as jade and worth far more; and one fat turnip, its white and purple exterior signaling it was clearly from a nest of dinosaur eggs, buried in the garden from time out of memory. And now, finally, the radishes, the glorious radishes, the most valuable discovery of the day. Wiping off the dirt on her already-filthy blouse, Ophelia found that their coloring was even more brilliant than she had first hoped. She flopped on her back and stared at the blessed thing from every possible angle.

"I suppose it's good you know your roots," Mr. Chester mumbled, turning back to his weeding. He got to his knees, wrapped his hands firmly around the stubborn clump in front of him, and pulled with all his might. His face turned red. He pulled harder. His face turned deeper red, then deeper. Ophelia stopped to watch her father work. Finally, his face was ruby like the radish in her hand.

"Oh father," Ophelia cried, "you might explode!"

"Woah!" he yelled, the weeds finally giving way. The force of his pull threw him backward, laying him out flat. "Good gracious," he heaved, "these weeds will be the end of me."

"Here, have a radish father, it will make you feel better!" She handed him the clean radish, then picked another for herself.

"Don't mind if I do, thank you my dear." Holding the red radish next to his red face, he looked ridiculous.

Crunch. Ophelia bit into her radish. Her eyes took a queer turn. "Oh father," she spit the bite out, "it's so bitter!"

"Yes," he replied, crunching on his radish thoughtfully, "they usually are."

"I suppose most buried treasures aren't meant to taste good," Ophelia thought to herself. "But they are so, so nice to look at." She put the remains of the radish in her blouse pocket and inspected the rest of the vegetables and concluded that yes, they were important discoveries indeed.

The End.

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This post is part of a synchroblog (a group of people posting every two weeks on the same topic). This week's topic was "know your roots." To read the other posts, which are quite good, follow this link:

http://synchrobloggers.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/know-your-roots/

Sunshine

In the parlor of her family’s Victorian home, Ophelia was kneeling in a wing-backed armchair, her elbows folded and resting on its back. Looking out the large parlor windows, she squinted just enough so that she could look at the noonday sun without hurting her eyes. Every so often, she would fling her lids wide and gaze upon the great orange ball in all its burning splendor. Able to bear it for only seconds, she would quickly look away, blinking furiously. To her delight thereafter, whether she closed her eyes or simply stared at the floor, she could still see the image of the round sun as clearly as if its shape were burnt into her pupils. When the sun’s likeness had faded, she would start at the beginning, squinting to give her eyes a rest, then capturing the sun all over again.

“Father,” she said, sitting up quite suddenly after nearly half an hour of her game. The mustached and be-monocled  Mr. Chester was dozing in another armchair nearby. “Father, have you ever looked up at the sun?” She could scarcely imagine that her father had ever done so, or that he had ever had a childhood for that matter, stuffy and boorish as he was.

“Eh?” he grunted, cracking an eye and giving her a sideways glance. “The sun, what’s that?”

“Have you ever looked up at the sun?” she persisted.

“Oh,” he yawned, “that’s a silly question, my girl. Of course I have.”

“You have?” she said, a note of surprise in her voice.

Both his eyes were open now. Mr. Chester stretched, then scooted his armchair around to face his daughter. “Ophelia,” he began, “I once looked at the sun through a telescope! It nearly blinded my left eye!”

“Oh father!” she said in mock horror. “But you got better, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did, my dear,” he chuckled. “Of course. But you have to be careful, you know. Too much staring at the sun, and who knows, you might not be so lucky as me.”

“Hmm,” said Ophelia thoughtfully, looking outside again and watching the sun glitter on a small pond in the gardens. “You know, Father, I think that if the sun came any closer to the earth, we might all be blinded! It’s just lucky that the sun keeps far enough away to give us light, but not too much.”

“Ho ho,” her father chuckled. “Ophelia, I don’t think the sun will be moving any time soon. It’s quite happy where it is, I do believe.”

“But father,” Ophelia turned to him, annoyed. “The sun moves every day. It goes all the away around the earth, round and round. I read about it in a book.”

“Well, I hate to argue, but I think you’ve been reading the wrong books Ophelia. The sun doesn’t move – the earth does. We’re on an orbit, you see, and – oh, but I suppose you wouldn’t understand all that.”

“No, father!” Ophelia jumped up in her chair. “You're wrong! If the earth were moving, we would feel it. We’d be stumbling and nothing would sit on the shelves properly. Stop playing,” she fumed, jumping down from the chair. She ran over to the couch across the room and flung herself upon it.

“Be reasonable, Ophelia,” her father began in an exasperated tone.

“No, you be reasonable Father!” she called back. “I know what I know, and I see what I see. The sun runs around the earth like a big chariot, and it’s beautiful, and I would watch it run all day long if my eyes could stand it! Hmph!” With a final sigh, she snuggled her face into a pillow and lay still.

“Well, Ophelia,” her father said carefully, “I suppose you can decide for yourself which way is the right way. But maybe you’ll change your mind some day – you should be open to that, you know.” He fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. Clenching one between his lips, he struck a match and tried to light it – the small flame from the match crept closer and closer to his fingertips. As he finally puffed the cigarette to life, the match came to its end. “Ouch!” he said, and dropped the spent match onto his lap. “Blast it all,” he muttered, sticking his burnt finger in his mouth.

“Serves you right,” Ophelia whispered into her pillow. “If the sun were any closer, it’d do the same thing.”


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This post is part of a synchroblog, where people post at the same time every two weeks on the same topic. This week's topic is: 'The Earth around the Sun or the Sun around the Earth: Centers of Gravity.' To read the other posts (which are quite good), follow this link:


Synchrobloggers

Becoming

"Look," said Mr. Chester, twisting his mustache in one hand and waving a cigarette wildly in the other. "The world might end tomorrow, and all you want to do is go bicycling?! I simply cannot abide such foolishness!" He pranced about in front of his eight-year-old daughter, heaving his broad belly as he moved, the monocle under his left eye flashing in the late afternoon light.

"But Father," squeaked the little girl, "no one knows when the world will end, you said so yourself." Her large brown eyes were full of mirth as she watched her father redden. He walked away from the love seat where she sat with a sour look on his face. So tempted was Ophelia to laugh that she stuck her head quickly down into the lap of her brilliant floral sundress.

"I may have said that once," her father huffed, leaning now against the grand piano in their Victorian parlor. "But that must have been quite some time ago, and must not have taken my recent discoveries into account! A man cannot be held accountable for words spoken in ignorance! You must understand Ophelia, I've done a considerable amount of calculating, and the chances that the world will end tomorrow are just shy of seventy-percent! Do you have any idea what this means?" At this, he gathered himself up to his full height for effect. He took a long drag from his cigarette and exhaled the smoke impressively from his nose.

Ophelia smiled broadly and looked out the enormous parlor window over her father's shoulder. "Father," she said, looking him in the eye once more. She took a very careful tone here, "If the world were to end tomorrow, I think that the best thing I could do, and simply must do at this very moment, is ride my bicycle."

Mr. Chester raised his eyebrows.

"Father, wait, let me explain. If it all ends tomorrow, then perhaps it's best if I live the equivalent of the next sixty years of my life in the next twenty-four hours. And if that's so, then I believe that I shall need to ride my bicycle at full tilt for the next six hours straight, if not longer! Because Father, can you imagine what we might become if the world were to end and we had left certain portions of our lives un-lived? We would end on a bad note, like an unfinished book or play. And really, who wants that?"

The sun was at the climax of its setting, streaming through the clear panes of the parlor window and bathing Ophelia and her father in warm light. Mr. Chester, his eyebrows still raised, came and sat beside his daughter on the love seat and joined her in looking out the window.

"Ophelia, my girl," he finally said, looking over at her with surprise still manifest on his face. "You really are the brightest eight-year-old that I know. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps everything will be fine. But, perhaps not. Anyhow, why don't you go ride your bicycle for, oh, say, thirty minutes? I believe your mother will want us both in for dinner, and I have quite a bit of smoking to do if I plan to live the next thirty years of my life in the next twenty-four hours. Off you go!"

The End.

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This post is part of a "synchroblog," wherein a number of persons blog bi-weekly on the same topic and release their posts at the same time. The topic for this time was 'what we might become if...'. To access the other blogs (which are well worth reading), follow this link:

Synchrobloggers

a thing is itself

My first thought about the concept of 'independence' is that it is a very limited idea. A person, place, or thing can be independent to a certain degree, but I would argue that this is a superficial, or even artificial, classification. Consider these examples: the USA, a person, and a flower.

The US can be said to be independent insofar as it has its own governing body, and perhaps insofar as it maintains its own artificial borders. But the US is far more dependent than independent. We rely on the Mid East for our fuels, on China for our imports, and on South America for our exotic fruits (the list could go on and on). At a deeper level, the US relies on centuries of Western philosophy and political successes/failures in Europe for the ideological framework upon which it was founded. Even when the US declared itself independent from Britain, its formerly British citizens were dependent upon British sensibilities about how to govern townships, how to distribute wealth and food, and how to deal with internal threats (think Native Americans). The US has never been independent of its heritage. Had we been, we might have been more sensible, and less violent, in our exploration and settlement of the vast parcel of land we call the USA. But we cannot escape history and tradition - we depend on it to make sense of life, flawed as it may be.

Moving on to an individual human being. A person might be said to be independent insofar as they are a unique entity - not unique in the superficial sense (their tastes, their clothing, etc.), but in the profound sense that they are a singular soul amidst billions of other singular souls. I will not argue that such a person cannot be independent, at least to some degree. But the problem remains - left alone, this person would soon die and be nothing. At the most basic level, an individual person cannot reproduce. An individual person cannot teach her or himself to speak; an individual person, without any cultural education, cannot teach her or himself what is appropriate to eat (it took centuries of communities making mistakes to figure this out!). We are entirely dependent upon cultures, histories, and traditions. We depend upon one another to build the infrastructures that make our lives tick. It is within the relative safety of these structures and cultures that we even begin to conceive of the notion that we are 'unique' or 'independent' persons. This seems rather strange to me.

Finally, a flower - and this is where 'independence' breaks down at even the biological level. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist teacher, writes: "When we look into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the earth, and everything else in the cosmos in it... In fact, the flower is made entirely of non-flower elements; it is has no individual, independent existence. It 'inter-is' with everything else in the universe" (Living Buddha, Living Christ; 11). The flower is made of non-flower elements; its entire existence depends upon the generosity of the universe, of the structures and systems we know as rain, sunshine, and soil. And we too are dependent upon these things. Without the sun, we would have nothing to eat. There would be no living, breathing planet.

And so my final point. I find the notion of 'independence' unhelpful. At a superficial level, things are independent from one another; but when you look at their roots, all persons, places, and things are dependent, grounded in the same good earth. Perhaps the most that can be said about our being unique, or independent, is this truth: a thing is itself, and no other thing. Things are differentiable; differentiable things are special things. But all things depend upon all other things for life.


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This post is part of a synchroblog; this week's topic is "independence." To read the other blogs, follow these links:
nightsbrightdays
Karma's Fool
Rebel I
art, et cetera
iwritetoberidofthings
wordshepherd