Director: Akira Kurosawa
I sometimes wonder why most of Kurosawa's great films take place during the same time period in Japanese history. I suppose I don't know enough about Japanese history to say - most of my knowledge of the time period was cribbed from the beginning of the instructions to Nobunaga's Ambition. Still, there's a combination of lawlessness and terror during this period - fief rulers are concerned only with conquering other fiefs, and the average person suffers; towns are empty of young men, bandits and deserters rule the roads, and food shortages seem to be a constant problem.
Hidden Fortress, besides being an enthralling film, looks at how class distinctions can subsist even after rule of law has broken down. Our two 'main' characters are lowly vagabonds, lorded over by the authoritarian Mifune. The two constantly bicker and believe they are conspired against at every turn - they look to betray Mifune whenever possible. Regarding Mifune's conspiring, they turn out to usually be right and yet are usually hilariously wrong. I won't give away any more than that, except that I have absolutely no idea how Kurosawa managed to film the opening ten minutes of the film.
The Sengoku period, before the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate, is probably the most important period in pre-industrial Japanese history, and one of the most gripping of the popular imagination. The only period which rivals it in importance and popular interest is probably the end of the shogunate followed by the Meiji restoration and Japan's entry into the industrial world. To ask why Japanese creators love Sengoku drama is to ask why Americans love Civil War documentaries or Westerns; it is a milieu with both inherent excitement and vital ties to the formation of the national identity.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I would also consider that Kurosawa lived through the Second World War as an adult, and made many of his greatest films for a country that was just getting back on its feet after economic and material devastation. Besides the similarities in detail (shortages, loss of young men, etc), themes such as the costs of exercising power and the effect of war on a population would certainly have been particularly resonant to the average postwar Japanese viewer.