Washizu (Toshirô Mifune) and his wife, Asaji (Isuzu Yamada), reimagine Shakespeare’s MACBETH in Kursosawa classic THRONE OF BLOOD
THRONE OF BLOOD, AKA MACBETH (KUMONOSU JÔ) (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Thursday, November 21, 9:15; Sunday, November 24, 3:45; and Sunday, December 1, 5:30
Series runs November 20 – December 1
212-505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
Akira Kurosawa’s marvelous reimagining of Macbeth is an intense psychological thriller that follows one man’s descent into madness. Following a stunning military victory led by Washizu (Toshirô Mifune) and Miki (Minoru Chiaki), the two men are rewarded with lofty new positions. As Washizu’s wife, Asaji (Isuzu Yamada, with spectacular eyebrows), fills her husband’s head with crazy paranoia, Washizu is haunted by predictions made by a ghostly evil spirit in the Cobweb Forest, leading to one of the all-time classic finales. Featuring exterior scenes bathed in mysterious fog, cinematographer Asakazu Nakai’s interior long shots of Washizu and Asaji in a large, sparse room carefully considering their next bold move, and composer Masaru Sato’s shrieking Japanese flutes, Throne of Blood is a chilling drama of corruptive power and blind ambition, one of the greatest adaptations of Shakespeare ever put on film Throne of Blood is screening November 21, November 24, and December 1 as part of the Anthology Film Archives series “The Middle Ages on Film: Shakespeare,” consisting of ten cinematic adaptations of several of the Bard’s history plays, set in the Middle Ages, including Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, and Peter Brook’s King Lear. The twelve-day festival was curated in collaboration with professor and scholar Martha Driver, who notes, “Through film, Shakespeare’s Middle Ages are not lost but revived and revitalized in translation. And much of what we think we know about the medieval period has been shaped by Shakespeare, the plays and film adaptations living on in our memories more vividly perhaps than the history books’ accounts.”
At the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, producer Menahem Golan, who would go on to make several movies nominated for the Golden Raspberry (Cannonball Run, Cobra), somehow got French auteur Jean-Luc Godard to agree to direct a new version of King Lear, signing the contract on a napkin. Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite as planned, resulting in Godard’s incomprehensible, unintelligible, extremely hard-to-follow Shakespeare flick. Theater director Peter Sellars — he of the Eraserhead-like hairdo — stars as William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth, a descendant of the Bard’s who is trying to put his famous ancestor’s plays back together in a post-Chernobyl world. After Norman and Kate Mailer get in an argument about turning the script into a gangster picture, Sellars meets Learo (a muttering Burgess Meredith) and his daughter, Cordelia (a monotone Molly Ringwald). Also on hand for this twisted fairy tale are French director Leos Carax (Pola X, Holy Motors) as Edgar, Julie Delpy as Virginia, Woody Allen as Mr. Alien, and Godard himself as the wacky Professor Pluggy. Elements of the play occasionally show up, but it is nearly impossible to figure out just what the hell is going on. By the time it all starts making the least bit of sense and even becomes intriguingly poetic, it’s over. In his inimitable style, Godard subversively defies all expectations, making a film that is about everything, nothing, and no thing. He takes on virtue and power, art and nature, text and image, and storytelling itself, but in this case he ends up with an unwatchable mess. Still not available on DVD, King Lear is having a rare screening January 11 at 7:00 and 9:30 at 92YTribeca, with the early show followed by a Q&A with critics Simon Abrams, Bilge Ebiri, and Richard Brody. When he selected the film for the 2009 New Yorker Festival, Brody wrote, “I consider Godard’s King Lear to be his greatest artistic achievement; in a Y2K poll, I ranked it among the ten best movies ever made.” It should be quite interesting hearing him defend that choice on Friday night.