In 1955 legendary Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa built a medieval castle on the foggy slopes of Mt. Fuji. The film that followed has been universally hailed as perhaps the greatest Shakespearean film adaptation ever made. Yet Throne of Blood (screening April 17th at Boulder’s IFS) proves less mere adaptation than haunting artistic transposition of the “Scottish play”, daringly supplanting Western Shakespearean stage-craft with the Eastern Noh Theater tradition and inexplicably conjuring the elements before the lenses. Under Kurosawa, iambic pentameter transcends into strings of images, both horrifying and surreal- fog and wind evolve into characters; “Lady MacBeth” fades into a spectre; the iconic Toshiro Mifune transforms beneath the wretched fear of a hunted animal. This dream-like foray into the mists of the absurd confounded the cinematic universe of 1957- too expressionist for postmodernism; too Eastern to be proper Shakespeare; too Western to be proper Japanese. Throne simultaneously deconstructs the written word through lens of post-war filmmaking and reconstructs the medium back into a haunted haiku of the human condition. Harold Bloom called it the “greatest film version of Shakespeare ever made.” T.S. Elliot called it his “favorite film ever constructed”. The late Jake Euker of the Wichita Eagle called it “the greatest reason to ever attend a movie.” What more can be expressed about a film that simply must be experienced?
Throne of Blood screens Wednesday, April 17th at 7 & 9 p.m. at CU Boulder’s International Film Series in Muenzinger Auditorium and is sponsored by the Colorado Shakespeare Festival Guild.
