Throne of Blood - Kurosawa's Adaptation of Macbeth

Throne Of Blood

Critics commonly describe Throne of Blood as Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth. While this description is certainly not untrue, it hardly begins to suggest the ways in which the film is so much more than a literary adaptation. Kurosawa's film is a brilliant synthesis of diverse cultural, aesthetic, and historical sources, only one skein of which derives from Shakespeare. The film's towering achievement lies in the way Kurosawa seamlessly integrates these sources and gives them a superlative formal expression.

Kurosawa often turned to foreign literary sources for his films, but in all cases, the result was a transposition of the source rather than anything as straightforward as an "adaptation." His appropriation of Shakespeare (here as well as in Ran), for example, was more an act of historiography than of literary analysis, and descriptions of the film as a literary adaptation minimize the true nature of what Kurosawa accomplished. With his keenly developed sense of Japanese history, Kurosawa found a kind of mirror universe in the period of turmoil, treachery, and succession battles that Shakespeare wrote about in Macbeth.

Shakespeare's play derives from a regicide and other historical events in 11th-century Scotland. Emerging ideas of national unity and kingship were vying with civil disorder caused by the battles for power among regional lords. Struggles over succession often resulted in bloodshed. Malcolm II, grandfather of Duncan, the king Macbeth murdered, seized the crown by killing a rival prince and eliminated other rivals to ensure Duncan's succession. Duncan, in turn, was killed when he unwisely ventured into Macbeth's province in the north of Scotland. Kurosawa was keenly impressed with the heritage of violence that he saw in the play and its history. He remarked that, in depicting an age when the strong preyed on the weak, Macbeth had a focus in common with all of his films.

The parallel Kurosawa intuited and explored was with the century of civil war in medieval Japan. Following the Onin War, which lasted from 1467 to 1477, and laid waste to the imperial city of Kyoto, the country entered a prolonged period of turmoil that lasted for a century. This period, the Sengoku Jidai (The Age of the Country at War), was marked by internecine wars among rival clans, the absence of a national political power, and the kind of treachery, prevarication, and murder that Kurosawa dramatizes in Throne of Blood. Warlords violently seized domains, murdered trusted associates, and were killed in turn by their vassals. Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) may enact a story whose outlines are those of Macbeth, but he personifies elements of the historical spirit of his own age, the Sengoku Jidai.

But Kurosawa's chronicle is a highly selective one. As with his literary sources, Kurosawa's treatment of history is faithful to elements of the factual record while transposing it in poetic terms. He made the 16th century his own period by being one of the few Japanese filmmakers of his time to explore it. In Throne of Blood, Ran, The Hidden Fortress, and Seven Samurai, Kurosawa concentrates on the period's military strife, and his presentations of those conflicts are so apocalyptic as to imply that widespread killing was taking place in Japan's medieval era. In fact, the rate of battlefield death in the samurai wars was not so extensive. Kurosawa gives us battles filtered through his perceptions as a 20th-century artist well acquainted with the large-scale slaughters of his own time. The sense of apocalypse in the films is not of the 16th century but of now.

Kurosawa's transposition of Macbeth points to the transcultural materials in the play--the common human experience that underlies it--but also vitiates the Shakespearean elements. All that beautiful dialogue is gone. That surely makes it an odd adaptation, except that Kurosawa has transposed not only history, but theater as well. There is plenty of theater in this film, but not the sort the King's Players would stage.

Kurosawa's radical gesture here is to supplant Shakespeare with the Noh Theater. Emerging in the 14th century and patronized by samurai lords, Noh was contemporaneous with the age that Kurosawa depicts, and therefore he felt that its aesthetic style would furnish the right kind of formal design for the film. (In Ran, when he again transposed Shakespeare to 16th-century Japan, he again incorporated Noh elements.) Besides, he loved Noh and found it inexpressibly beautiful in its own right.

The Noh shows up everywhere in Throne of Blood, making the project a real fusion of cinema and theater and showing just how cinematic theater can be in the hands of a great filmmaker. Noh elements include