Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

Rating:
Summary: OK, really only for Kurosawa Die Hard Fans
Review: The first short story was really cool. The others were Ok. Not really much to say. This was my first Kurosawa film. Wasn't too impressed. Was impressed with Hidden Fortress and Really impressed with 7 Samurai.
Rent-Maybe
Buy-No

Rating:
Summary: One of the 10 best films of all time
Review: This is perhaps a tough film to review because it is highly personal in nature, being composed of the dreams of its author; however, being highly personal does not mean it lacks universality, in fact quite the contrary. Akira Kurosawa is widely recognised as one of the greatest film makers of the twentieth century, i.e. in film-making history. He himself described this film - and I paraphrase from memory - as the film he had always wanted to make, his ultimate and best film. I do not believe that this is because the particular story-lines in the film were so important but because using the medium of dreams, Kurosawa was able to delve into a level of storytelling far deeper than much of his previous work and explore further subtleties of texture, nuance, psychology, colour, mood and so on. That said, the themes and stories on the surface are of interest because they evoke quintessentially Japanese pre and post war issues, also the perceptions of childhood, of adulthood, of facing death, of nostalgia. However, using the medium of a dream, Kurosawa can penetrate deep into the heart of each vignette to give us unsurpassably lovely and profound entries into the heart of particular moods, for ultimately this is what each story is: a very profound, almost sub-consciously- inhabited mood piece. Both in esoteric buddhism and Shinto, with both of which Kurosawa was culturally familiar to say the least, moods can be regarded as the gateway into the central channel of enlightenment; in other words, rather than avoid feelings and passions in order to engender peace or purity, instead you dive into their turbulent waves to thereby enter the deeper, silent ocean of awareness beneath. This he does beautifully with each piece, and in fact once you connect with this dynamic, many of the stories lay open to fuller enjoyment, like a main course served up at a banquet. In nearly every piece there is an encounter with a world beyond the immediately perceived one, and yet linked in feeling, in mood, in terms of season, colour, surrounding, context and so on. And then the 'deity' of that particular landscape or situation emerges, either as the gods and goddesses of the peach tree orchard, the foxes in the forest, van Gogh, the ice storm deities or whatever, the deity being the quintessential expression of the mood freed from any burdens of being bound to everyday normalcy, function or timeframe - a pure expression. In essence, this film is a study - or teaching - in the union of awareness and emotion; as such it is incredibly precise, playful, artistic and profound. I urge anyone who has not seen it to do so. It is unquestionably one of the greatest masterpieces of cinematic art in history and will remain so for centuries, I suspect, long after many others have faded from memory.