Blu-ray Review: Kurosawa Akira’s Dreams on the Criterion Collection

A gorgeous and painterly late-period masterwork, the film gets a stellar 4K transfer and a surfeit of extras from Criterion.

Akira Kurosawa’s DreamsFollowing the rich and despairing pageantry of Ran, his epic reimagining of King Lear, Kurosawa Akira opted to turn inward, resulting in Dreams, an intimate anthology film that finds its raw source material in the director’s own inner experience.

The notion of cinema as oneiric reverie is, of course, nothing new. There are even those who would argue that the two are more or less synonymous. Going as far back as Luis Buñuel Un Chien Andalou, though, the idea has been to render the dream in its own terms, employing startling juxtapositions and the protean elasticity of time and space to capture the disorienting and often disturbing experience of the unconscious. Kurosawa’s masterstroke is turning this approach on its head, by couching the dream content—often blending the blatantly autobiographical with broader folkloric and even sociopolitical material—in the understated, naturalistic visual style he had developed over his last few films.

In each of the film’s eight vignettes, a Kurosawa surrogate either plays witness to or, more seldom, enacts the goings-on himself. The basic dyadic structure of most segments owes a profound debt to the dramaturgy of traditional Noh theater. Elucidating Kurosawa’s belief that, by emphasizing the strictly personal, a narrative opens into more universal implications, Dreams is bookended by traditional rites of passage: a wedding and a funeral, respectively.

In “Sunshine Through the Rain,” a young dreamer (Isaki Mitsunori) witnesses the forbidden festival of a fox wedding, a legendary event that reputedly only happens during sun showers. For his transgression, the boy is exhorted by his mother (Baishô Mitsuko) to atone, either by asking the foxes’ forgiveness or by committing hara-kiri. Then, in “Village of the Watermills,” the middle-aged version of the dreamer (Terao Akira) visits the anachronistically Edenic titular village in time to witness the funeral procession of an elderly woman.

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What’s remarkable about both these segments is that Kurosawa manages to seamlessly merge meticulous attention to detail—recreating his childhood home in one, his father’s rural hometown in the other—with an extravagant sense of the theatrical. Both depict their protracted pageants practically in real time, with visual élan and a conspicuous absence of the declamatory verbosity found elsewhere in the film. Kurosawa indulges in pure cinema here (and in the doll ceremony in “The Peach Orchard”), finding a kinetic rhythm that conveys both an exalted, almost hieratic ceremonialism and a joyful embrace of the vicissitudes of mortal existence.

“The Blizzard” finds Kurosawa in a more purely existential mood. A team of mountaineers battle a snowstorm in order to recover their base camp, but most succumb to the elements. Only one (Terao) persists in the Sisyphean quest, until he encounters a snow demon (Harada Mieko)—a mythic embodiment of the elemental at its least forgiving—who seeks to do him in. Kurosawa shoots the finale in equivocal fashion, using slow motion and rear projection to problematize an apparently happy ending. It’s easy to read this segment as a metaphor for the filmmaker’s struggles over the course of his career with studios and financing. But true to Kurosawa’s artistry, “The Blizzard” also works more polyphonically, standing as a bleak fable for humanity’s opposition to an indifferent, if not overtly hostile, natural world.

“Mount Fuji in Red” and “The Weeping Demon” form a disturbing diptych, depicting a nightmare of nuclear and post-nuclear annihilation. The former pays cheeky tribute to the films of Kurosawa’s longtime friend and assistant director, Honda Ishiro (who directed Godzilla), with its deliberately low-rent special effects, yet the vignette retains a striking, almost poetic quality in its surreal visions of Mount Fuji in neon-red flames and wafting particolored radiation fumes. The latter, filmed on the desolate volcanic slopes of the real Mount Fuji, offers giant irradiated dandelions and horned demons bathing in pools of blood. The long final, slow-motion shot contains a haunting literalization of man’s descent into the lower depths.

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“Crows” is perhaps the most conceptually intriguing of the vignettes. An aspiring artist (Terao) views a Van Gogh exhibition and, after being afflicted with something aking to the Stendhal syndrome, enters bodily into the world of the paintings, which spring to life through a combination of rotoscope and digital chroma key effects (provided by Industrial Light & Magic). Ultimately, he meets the painter himself (Martin Scorsese, in an inspired acting coup).

Van Gogh’s soliloquy about devouring and being devoured by his art—and his claim that its source and essence resides in the light of sun—can stand as a kind of aesthetic credo from Kurosawa, but the segment turns strangely ambivalent as the Kurosawa surrogate cannot find his way out of Van Gogh’s paintings. Kurosawa, who was an aspiring painter in his youth, sees that he must abandon his own anxious influences in order to find himself as an artist of light, that exuded (as Buñuel wrote) by “the screen’s white eyelid,” which “would only need to be able to reflect the light that is its own, and it would blow up the Universe.”

Image/Sound

Criterion’s 4K transfer is a marvel to behold. Every frame of Kurosawa Akira and DP Ueda Shôji’s imagery is charged with chromatic detail: from the riot of rich colors on parade in “The Peach Orchard” segment to the splashes of incarnadine and sickly blue-green that contrast the otherwise muted earth tones in “The Tunnel.” Criterion’s Blu-ray renders color density and saturation exponentially better than previous SD versions. The image, whether static or in motion, has impressive depth and clarity; flesh tones and fine details of costume and set design are presented faithfully. The Master Audio two-channel surround mix lends some nice separation and depth to Shinichiro Ikebe’s score, which fluidly blends traditional Japanese and classical Western instrumentation.

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Extras

Stephen Prince’s energetic commentary track neatly lays out the production history, links individual vignettes to episodes in Kurosawa’s private life, and analyzes the formal and thematic connections to the director’s other films. The 150-minute making-of documentary by House director Ôbayashi Nobuhiko utilizes a panoply of cutting-edge-for-circa-1990 video-editing techniques to tinker with the inherently interesting behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with Kurosawa, a decision that’s often more distracting than illuminating.

New interviews with production manager Nogami Teruyo and assistant director Koizumi Takashi offer more straightforward insights into the director’s technique and attitudes toward the material. Elsewhere “Kurosawa’s Way” ruminates on the elusive nature of language and the vicissitudes of translation, then offers tributes from 11 contemporary directors, including Martin Scorsese, who delivers some wry observations on his role in Dreams. Last but not least, the booklet contains the script for a ninth dream that wasn’t filmed and an essay by critic Bilge Ebiri focuses on the film’s cultural and personal sources of inspiration.

Overall

A gorgeous and painterly late-period masterwork, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams gets a stellar 4K transfer and a surfeit of extras from Criterion.

Score: 
 Cast: Terao Akira, Baishô Mitsuko, Harada Mieko, Negishi Toshie, Isaki Mitsunori, Nakano Toshihiko, Zushi Yoshitaka, Igawa Hisashi, Ikariya Chosuke, Ryû Chishû, Martin Scorsese, Kiku-no Kai Dancers, Tate Misato, Suzuki Mieko, Yui Masayuki, Nakajima Shu, Kimura Sakae, Yamashita Tessho, Members of the 20-ki No Kai  Director: Akira Kurosawa  Screenwriter: Akira Kurosawa  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 120 min  Rating: PG  Year: 1990  Release Date: November 15, 2016  Buy: Video

Budd Wilkins

Budd Wilkins's writing has appeared in Film Journal International and Video Watchdog. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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