silver nitrate notes

Throne of Blood and the Fog of Cobweb Castle

18 feb 2021

Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957) is Macbeth relocated to sixteenth-century Japan, and it is the film I would recommend to anyone who wants to argue that Shakespeare translates better to film than to stage. The screenplay by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Ryuzo Kikushima rewrites the play rather than adapts it: the dialogue is reduced drastically, the spirit who prophesies is relocated from heath to forest, and the final act replaces Macduff's pursuit with a rain of arrows that became one of the most physically dangerous sequences Kurosawa ever shot.

The cinematographer was again Asakazu Nakai, his third Kurosawa collaboration in this decade. What Nakai and Kurosawa did that was new, even against the standard set by Seven Samurai three years earlier, is photograph fog as a primary visual element. The forest of Cobweb Castle, where Washizu (Toshirō Mifune) encounters the spirit who prophesies his rise, is constantly obscured by white fog that rolls through the trees. The fog was produced on set by dozens of smoke machines, and Nakai photographed it using the available light at the production's location on the slopes of Mount Fuji. The image is often almost white. Trees recede into the whiteness. Washizu's horse appears out of the whiteness. The effect is that the geography of the forest is not fixed; the trees move, the ground changes, the same path leads to different places.

Mifune's performance is the other achievement of the film. He plays Washizu in the mode Kurosawa had worked out for him in the period-samurai pictures: broad, athletic, physically specific. What is new in Throne of Blood is that Mifune is performing within the formal conventions of Noh theatre, a decision Kurosawa made before shooting. Washizu's movements are stylised. His face, especially in the later scenes, is held in a rigid mask that Kurosawa explicitly modelled on a Noh warrior mask. Mifune is acting, in other words, inside a form of theatre that predates film by six centuries, and acting in front of a camera that lets us see the form from close up.

The final sequence, where Washizu is killed by a rain of arrows fired by his own men, was shot with live arrows fired by trained archers at Mifune. Kurosawa insisted on this because arrow-firing stunt actors of the period tended to miss, and he wanted the threat to be real. Mifune later said he had been genuinely afraid throughout. One arrow stuck in a post next to his neck. The shot was used. What we are watching, in the arrow sequence, is a man being shot at.

I do not know another Shakespeare adaptation in which the cinema is asserting its superiority to the theatre the way it is here. Watch Throne of Blood first; watch Macbeth plays second.

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sources
[1] Richie, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. University of California Press, 3rd ed. 1998.
[2] Prince, Stephen. The Warrior's Camera. Princeton UP, rev. ed. 1999.
[3] Goodwin, James. Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema. Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.
[4] Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Knopf, 1982.