The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (231 page)

As for the philosophy of
A Clockwork Orange
, it is journalistic and tacked on. Its halfhearted suggestion that there is a relationship between watching violence in films and coming to terms with it is derisory beside Hitchcock’s forty-year analysis of voyeurism. And it should be noted that
A Clockwork Orange
is a portrait of the future infused with reactionary fear, cowardly about thug violence or a serious analysis of its causes, and schizophrenically able to prettify it as a means of wishful condemnation. (Evidently, Kubrick has mixed feelings about
Clockwork Orange
. In Britain, where he controls the movie, he has forbidden screenings after what seemed like a copycat killing.)
The Shining
, for me, is Kubrick’s one great film, so rich and comic that it offsets his several large failures. The elements of horror story have been turned into a study of isolation, space, and the susceptible imagination of a man who lacks the skills to be a writer.
The Shining
is about intuitive intimations, good or bad, and it has an intriguingly detached view of its story’s apparent moral situation. Perhaps Jack Torrance is a monster, a dad run amok; perhaps family is the suffocation that anyone should dread. The film is very funny (especially as Nicholson goes over his edge), serenely frightening, and endlessly interesting. For the Overlook Hotel is not just a great set but a museum of movies, waiting for ghostly inhabitants.

Full Metal Jacket
, however, was an abomination, obsessively disciplined, and striving to make a Vietnam in English locations. It is the sort of film Mr. Torrance might have made.

Kubrick died with
Eyes Wide Shut
finished but not yet open, so he was spared dire reviews, public dismay, and even the pained feelings of Cruise and Kidman. To my mind the film is a travesty, but Kubrick was always a “master” who knew too much about film and too little about life—and it shows.

Lev Kuleshov
(1899–1970), b. Tambov, Russia
1918:
Proekt Inzhenera Praita/Engineer Prite’s Project
. 1919:
Pesn Lyubvi Nedopetaya
(codirected with Vitold Polonsky). 1920:
Na Krasnom Frontye/On the Red Front
. 1924:
Neobychainye Priklucheniya Mistera Vesta v Stranye Bolshevikov/The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks
. 1925:
Luch Smerti/The Death Ray
. 1926:
Po Zakonu/By the Law
. 1927:
Vasha Znakomaya; Parovoz No. B 100
. 1929:
Veselaya Kanareika; Dva-Buldi-Dva
(codirected with Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko). 1931:
Sorok Serdets
. 1933:
Gortzont/Horizon; Velikii Uteshitel/The Great Consoler
. 1940:
Sibiryaki
. 1941:
Sluchai v Vulkanye
. 1942:
Klyatva Timura
. 1944:
My s Urala
.

Somewhere in a work of reference, the author should own up to a sheltered life: I have seen not one of Lev Kuleshov’s films. Not all of Kuleshov’s work can have survived in any form; from the mid-1930s onward he was out of favor in Russia, condemned by his own obligatory confession; several of his films, made on secondhand or inferior Russian stock, may now be scarcely visible. Yet Kuleshov has a place both as theoretician and as director. Much of his life was spent in film education, and our haphazard gatherings from his books, his films, his influence on other Russian directors, and the story of his life suggest a brave, unpredictable man, and a Russian director of rare originality.

In his youth, he studied painting at the School of Painting, Architecture and Sculpture and it was only by chance that he took a job as a set designer for Evgeni Bauer. That whetted his appetite for direction: his first film,
Engineer Prite’s Project
, was made in the first months of the Revolution. In this period of analytical, creative fervor, Kuleshov turned into a film didact. Above all, he was struck by the implications of montage. On
Engineer Prite
he had noticed that a shot of a man looking, followed by a shot of another person, a place, or a building, suggested that the man was looking at that person or place.

By 1919, Kuleshov was teaching at the State Film School and conducting his famous experiments to extend the theory of montage. These included the shot of Mosjukhin intercut with shots of objects of quite different emotional values. He concluded, fairly enough, that the fickle face lent itself to those different objects with equal ease. In fact, Mosjukhin’s face had been expressionless, but Kuleshov soon saw that montage was often more powerful than human expressiveness, and that audiences interpreted facial expressions as if they were codified. This relates Kuleshov to the cinema of, among others, Godard, where it is admitted that film helps us to see how far we always interpret expressions and gestures.

Kuleshov also liked experiments that cut together shots of people in far-flung locations. He stated that, if the grammar or dynamics of cutting was fluent, then the celluloid spatial relationship—he called it “artificial landscape” or “creative geography”—was more important than real space. His stress on that seems to me wrongheaded, but it is clearly a useful theory when dealing with Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, directors who often relate people by means of editing. Indeed, Hitchcock’s obtrusive back projections cry out for the label “creative geography.”

Kuleshov’s own films—or those made in the period 1924–34—sound worth seeing. Originally, it was the crosscutting of Griffith and Sennett comedy that had aroused him. And his own films show an interest in American subjects and some indifference to revolutionary conventions.
Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks
was a comedy in the American style, as well as a view of Russia to correct American misunderstandings.
The Death Ray
is like a Mabuse story, with rival gangs and a much more violent melodrama than is usual in Russian cinema.
By the Law
is from a Jack London story set in the Yukon, in which a couple of prospectors attempt to execute a criminal they have tried. A simple evocation of landscape, community, and the moral melodrama of a lonely pioneer taking the law into his own hands, it also concentrated on a few characters drawn in depth—one of them played by Kuleshov’s wife, Alexandra Khokhlova.

Theorizing had led Kuleshov to draw up a comprehensive but rigid code of “signs” to be conveyed by actors. This is something like an alphabet of responses, a system that any viewer might often conclude was implicit in cinema, but that has awful dangers as a method taught to actors. Kuleshov’s teaching was all the more important because in the early 1920s Russia was so short of film stock that he acted out stories, as if they were being filmed, rather than expose film. Add to that his belief that, in montage, actors needed to know the scheme of editing and to emote almost by number, and it is easy to see the evolution of a stylized method that was exposed by the naturalism of sound.

Kuleshov never seems to have come to terms with this. But his later films still sound fascinating.
Horizon
is a Mr. West in reverse: the story of a Russian Jew who emigrates to America, is disappointed by what he finds, and returns to a Russia now Sovietized.
The Great Consoler
, however, is by far his most ambitious work. It deals with the period in which W. S. Porter (O. Henry) was in prison, and blends his life with the material of some of his stories. Of necessity, it does this to teach Porter the need for commitment, but in its mixture of fact and fiction it may prove worthy of greater attention.

That is effectively the end of Kuleshov’s output. In 1935 he was denounced by Stalinist forces and obliged to recant. His only other films were for children. But in 1944, and on Eisenstein’s recommendations, he was made head of the Moscow Film Institute, a teaching position he retained to the end of his life.

Akira Kurosawa
(1910–98), b. Tokyo
1943:
Sugata Sanshiro
(in two parts). 1944:
Ichiban Utsukushiku
. 1945:
Zoku Sugata Sanshiro; Tora No-o/They Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail
. 1946:
Asu o Tsukuru Hitobito
(codirected with Kajiro Yamamoto and Hideo Segikawa);
Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi
. 1947:
Subarashiki Nichiyobi
. 1948:
Yoidore Tenshi/Drunken Angel
. 1949:
Shizukanaru Ketto; Nora Inu
. 1950:
Shuban; Rashomon
. 1951:
Hakuchi/The Idiot
. 1952:
Ikiru/ Living
. 1954:
Shichinin no Samurai/Seven Samurai
. 1955:
Ikimono no Kiroku
. 1957:
Kumonosu jo/Throne of Blood; Donzoko/The Lower Depths
. 1958:
Kakushi Toride no San-Akunin/The Hidden Fortress
. 1960:
Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru/ The Bad Sleep Well
. 1961:
Yojimbo
. 1962:
Tsubaki Sanjuro/Sanjuro
. 1963:
Tengoku to Jigoku/High and Low
. 1965:
Akahige/Red Beard
. 1970:
Dodeskaden
. 1975:
Dersu Uzala
. 1980:
Kagemusha
. 1985:
Ran
. 1990:
Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams
. 1991:
Hachigatsu no Kyohshikyoku/Rhapsody in August
. 1993:
Madadayo
.

The current awareness of Japanese cinema in the West began with Kurosawa, even if he has now been surpassed. The success of
Rashomon
at Venice in 1951 ushered in Mizoguchi and Ozu, directors who had been working some twenty years before Kurosawa’s debut. On the art-house circuit,
Living, Seven Samurai
, and
Throne of Blood
had enormous appeal. Such variety—a deeply humane study of a bureaucrat dying in modern Japan, a stirring samurai epic, an ingenious fusion of Noh and
Macbeth
—could hardly be argued against. It is possible that
Rashomon
was shrewdly aimed at Western audiences; time has revealed Kurosawa as the director most alert to Western art and American cinema in particular. Despite his appetite for disparate subjects in the 1950s, his period films look insubstantial against Mizoguchi’s, just as
Rashomon
’s debate on truth is trite beside
Ugetsu
. As to the contemporary Japanese experience, Kurosawa now trails behind a new generation.

But Kurosawa’s legend is still very potent in the West. Pictures he made as tributes to American genres were slavishly remade in this country. In 1989, two of his great fans, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, presented him with an honorary Oscar for “accomplishments that have inspired, delighted, enriched and entertained audiences and influenced filmmakers throughout the world.” He got a best director nomination for
Ran
, which, like
Kagemusha
, played to large, respectful audiences in the West, unable to see that Kurosawa’s former dynamism had turned toward pageantry and procession. Few in the West knew, or cared, that his films were not popular in Japan.

Significantly, he trained to be a painter at a Western art school; similarly, Shinobu Hashimoto, the scriptwriter of
Rashomon
and
Seven Samurai
, has confessed that
Stagecoach
is his favorite film. It is not surprising that
Seven Samurai
was remade by Hollywood because it was already close to the Western in its use of an elite body of brave warriors, a slow preparation for violent action, and the generally pusillanimous civilian population—like the townspeople in
High Noon. Seven Samurai
is as exciting as a good Western: its leading characters are distinct and appealing; the situation is contrived but compelling; the action is shot with virtuoso skill. But it is almost twice as long as a good Western, and its social theme—that the samurai are disapproved of by the village they protect—is made monotonously.

It is this unexpected knowingness that was most startling about Kurosawa and that most limits him.
Rashomon
is a simpleminded proof of an idea that informs many films. At that period of his career, Kurosawa was visually inventive, but
Rashomon
is as obvious as it sounds in synopsis. Whereas,
Ugetsu
simply incorporates the principle that people see events differently—as, incidentally, do
Strangers on a Train, Exodus, Citizen Kane
, and many other films less struck by the mock-parable idea of variable truths.
The Idiot
is intriguing in that it is Dostoyevsky, transposed with pointless ingenuity to Japan. In the same way,
Throne of Blood
is doggedly echoing of
Macbeth
, as Oriental as a travel agent’s window; Welles’s
Macbeth
, ramshackle and cheapscape, is a more tragic film.

Kurosawa’s eminence led in the late 1950s to his forming his own production company.
The Bad Sleep Well
, his first independent venture, was based on Ed McBain and it was enjoyable for the way Warner Brothers of the 1940s was turned into Tokyo 1960. But the contrivance was weird and unsettling. Kurosawa’s suicide attempt in 1971 speaks for an anguish that might be deduced from a survey of his career, but which has only rarely been expressed in the films, as in
Drunken Angel. Living
, his best film, seems as much in debt to de Sica and Zavattini as his samurai films are to Ford, but there for once a troubled personality spoke out.

The late Kurosawa films—
Kagemusha
and
Ran
, especially—have enshrined the director in many Western eyes. Of course, they are elegant and spectacular films; there is no doubt about who made them. Yet if an American director proved so content to film nothing but battles and their context, there would be eyebrows raised. Kurosawa is a superb handler of action, and especially of crowds in action. He has a taste for moody place and heroic character like that of the illustrator N. C. Wyeth. I was tough on him once. But I was tough only to ask viewers to see that Ozu and Mizoguchi were his masters. And they still are.