“Fine words, but words don’t win wars.”
These words, uttered by Kurogane before his lord Jiro orders their men into a massacre, encompasses the culture of Kurosawa’s Ran. From the beginning, physical prowess and the natural world dominate the film’s landscape, as it opens with still, painting-like tableaus of hunters on horseback, standing upon steep hills with huge plains behind them. Unlike in Shakespeare’s King Lear, where power is dishonestly won through flattery and lies, words can only win so much in Ran’s violent samurai setting.
The body politic of Ran has been defined by the Great Lord Hidetora Ichimonji, whose absolute hegemony was won through fifty years of violent warfare prior to the film’s events. Hidetora, a warlord with a violent past, is the opposite of the “more sinned against than sinning” history-less Lear, used by Kurosawa to criticise the violent political systems wrought throughout Japanese history, first when the shogunate held power, then later during the fascist years before and during the Second World War. The film explores the ways in which the physical body is entwined with power within violent, authoritarian states; Kurosawa arguing that “the world will not change unless we steadily change human nature itself”.
Where Lear opens with dialogue, Ran opens with physicality: hunters on horseback, standing upon bare, steep hills. The stillness of the camera exhibits stability, demonstrating Hidetora’s absolute control, that all of these hunters are under a powerful, centralised command. But these pictorial compositions foreshadow chaos; everyone being armed, implying that everyone is a potential threat, the beautiful terrain dangerous and untamed. Hidetora spent his entire reign waging war and failed to lay down foundations of infrastructure like roads or bridges.
After the hunt we see them surrounded by portable walls; temporary structures. Kurosawa uses this natural, empty landscape to emphasise the stagnating effect war has upon civilisation. During the hunt, the stillness of the camera is broken by the boar and the thundering hunters behind it. In the centre frame of this camera’s “chaos” is Hidetora, bow bent and drawn. Here we see Hidetora in his element, committing violence towards another living thing despite his age. His breaking of the camera’s stability foreshadows his downfall, the arrow unleashing the title with a nohkan flute shriek: “Ran” meaning “chaos”, implying that Hidetora’s violent act has triggered disorder.
The dangerousness of the natural is evoked with each scene transition, the camera capturing clouds and the sun to appear as images of cruel forces of nature beyond human control. The clouds foreshadow the oncoming storm approaching Hidetora, while the Sun emphasises the harshness of the world to those without shelter. The storm breaks with the siege upon the Third Castle, but with fire-arrows instead of rain. The unblocked sky is not seen again until Hidetora looks up in terror at the flame-like clouds and says, “What a sky. Am I in the other world?” associating the sky with death.
Two victims of Hidetora’s violent conquests, Lady Sué and her brother Tsurumaru, are framed against the sky. When Sué is praying outside the Second Castle, the sky behind herself and Hidetora dwarfs them. In Sué’s words a cyclical theory of human nature and time is introduced, where “History has given way to a perception of life as a wheel of endless suffering…ever repeating” Sué responding to Hidetora’s command to hate her with, “I don’t hate you. All is decided in our previous lives. The Buddha embraces all things.” the beautiful Heavens complimenting this teaching. But the sky is also empty, Hidetora retorting, “Buddha again! He is gone from this evil world…We can’t rely on Buddha’s mercy” the empty sky behind them suggesting that there are no Gods there. The scene matches Kurosawa’s pessimism, Sué’s words implying that the violence she endured was determined by a previous life: that “Cause and effect is the only law. Freedom does not exist”. Sué and Tsurumaru are framed against the sky later at the ruins of their family castle, seen from below by Hidetora and his fool, Kyoami, visually suggesting their Heavenly position as those with faith, above the damned Hidetora, who cries that he is in “The lowest level of Hell” tormented by the phantoms of his victims, the sky as much a Hell as a Heaven.
Tsurumaru is framed against the sky once more, standing upon a steep, dangerous cliff. Blind, he almost walks off it, dropping the Buddha Sué gave him for protection. The horror of this tableaux of a blind man on a cliff is exaggerated by the camera zooming further and further away, until he is an irrelevant spec in the landscape, emphasising the cliff’s magnanimity and the sky’s emptiness, the natural world increasing Tsurumaru’s vulnerability, the Gods nowhere to be found.
Kurosawa uses animals to characterise the violence, and to describe the characters. The boar allegorises the Ichimonji clan’s fall, Hidetora identifying himself with it, “Indigestible. Like me, old Hidetora” asking his three sons and Lords Fujimaki and Ayabe, “Would you eat me?” Lord Fujimaki replies that Hidetora would “stick in our throats” showing that he understands the cyclical nature of violence, much like Hidetora’s son Saburo. But Hidetora’s other sons, Taro and Jiro, do attempt to consume their father’s lands, and “choke” on it, leading to Lord Ayabe (whom Jiro describes as a “vulture”) attacking the undefended First Castle (feeding on the carrion). Emphasising this metaphor of the Ichimonji’s as a rotting boar, Ayabe’s men in black armour, appear as a swarm of flies encircling the First Castle, violence envisioned as a natural circle of life, one animal feeding on the next. This theme continues when Kyoami tells the story of a hare to entertain Hidetora’s guests Ayabe and Fujimaki, to which Hidetora’s youngest son Saburo jokes, “Only one hare, Kyoami? Two, I think. Hopping here to be eaten by Father” referring to the guests and to Hidetora’s own dishonourable usage of alliances to conquer his enemies. These predator and prey comparisons act as aural reminders of the treacherous nature of a society based on strength, where abstract ideas like honour mean little to the ambitious.
This message is exclaimed through Kurosawa’s inversion of the Mori Motonari story, upon whom Ran is based. Retelling the legend almost exactly, Hidetora gives his sons first an individual arrow to snap, then a bundle of three. The sons are able to snap the individual, but not the bundle, with Hidetora, teaching them that united, they are invincible. While inspired by a Japanese legend, the “bundle of sticks” concept exists in another culture: the Roman Empire, called “fasces”, representing national strength in unity, a concept employed by the Fascists in Europe. Kurosawa’s response to Mori Motonari’s story was, “that’s not true”, having seen the united Tripartite Powers of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Statist Japan defeated in the Second World War.
Saburo snaps the three arrows against his knee; visually arguing that even the greatest strength can be broken. The next bundle of sticks shown is covered in blood, surrounded by murderous, invading forces. Saburo understands that his generation born in “strife and chaos” cannot be trusted to work together united, with Hidetora’s hope that he can rely on “giri” (familial and hegemonic duty) to retain his position as “Great Lord” after dividing his lands between his sons is folly, a hope born out of expectation, rather than experience. The body politic of bushido is followed because it is a tangible means of gaining power, whilst giri, an ideal requiring loyalty in a world that doesn’t reward it, is forgotten.
There are no shadows in Ran. The film’s vibrant colours contrast with its melancholic and chaotic tone, one motif being the masking of evil behind a beautiful exterior (personified in Lady Kaede). “Shakespeare’s poetry is replaced by visual imagery”, Kurosawa using theatrical Noh traditions to recreate Shakespearean scenes, with bold, primary colours reflecting a character’s status, emotions and role, such as Jiro’s red outfits reflecting his emotional and sexual energy, and Saburo’s blue his purity and honesty. Kurosawa uses Noh facial masks to convey poetry visually, Hidetora’s face modelled like a Jō “Old Man” mask, which later through a twisted, terrorised expression, transforms into a ghostly Yaseotoko “Emaciated Man Suffering In Hell” mask. Filming close-up to Hidetora’s face Kurosawa conveys his “death” in the burning Third Castle. Unable to commit seppuku, Hidetora is reduced to a powerless, ghostly state, sitting in the fires of the castle defeated before walking out of the castle, the close-ups of his face capturing his total disconnect from the world, this scene dramatically recreating the line, “Lear’s shadow” visualising a character as a shadow of their former self in a distinguished and colourful way.
The starkest example of vibrant colour use relates to a visual mixing of power and the body through blood, representing transferrals of power. Depending on a main character’s relationship towards their giri, blood will either be invisible or visible. Kurosawa uses Kabuki theatre traditions, where “Blood is quite common” and “death scenes are numerous and very elaborate” to narratively tie scenes of power transferral together visually by having the same actions performed with or without blood. Both Taro and Saburo are shot while riding, with Taro’s bullet wound exploding in blood (for ignoring his giri by attacking his father) while Saburo dies cleanly (because of his noble efforts). Sué and Lady Kaede are decapitated, with Sué’s headless corpse laid amongst the grass, bloodless, her colourful kimono like a flower arrangement (implying possible Buddhist enlightenment) whereas Kaede’s beheading is explosive and violent, reflecting her crimes and bookmarking the film’s “chaos” (the wall of blood mirroring the red titles at the beginning).
The “blood” scenes in the First Castle are particularly specific, Lady Kaede convincing Taro to have Hidetora sign away his title and banner and seal the signature with his blood. Here the cut is quickly made and cleaned, invisible, because Hidetora, despite his sins, reluctantly follows giri. A similar scene is repeated in the same room, where Kaede, dressed in white (signifying purity) steals Jiro’s dagger and cuts her kimono with it (the signification a mask of her true self) then cuts Jiro’s neck, drawing visceral blood. In both scenes the men are emasculated, their physical power reduced by this vampiric blood-letting, Kaede’s sucking on Jiro’s wound resulting in a collapse of his masculine agency and her absolute power over him.
In a culture like Ran’s where the body is power, an emasculated body is powerless. Kurosawa’s “unaccommodated man” is embodied in the character of Tsurumaru, but whereas Poor Tom is naked and exposed, Tsurumaru is blind, combining Gloucester and Edgar visually and thematically. Possession is defined by sight in Ran, Hidetora identifying his lands by pointing between a distant castle and their camp on the hills, and Kaede’s ignoring of Jiro’s wearing Taro’s armour robbing him of his aesthetic triumph. Possession and power are tied to the eyes, so being physically blinded is to be impoverished, Tsurumaru’s wooden hut the only poor house seen in the film (the peasants of the land a spoken of but unseen class, irrelevant because of their powerlessness). Tsurumaru is mistaken for a woman, his hair uncut, Hidetora’s gouging out of his eyes removing him from the masculine body politic. Feminised, Tsurumaru’s only recourse is the same as his sister’s, to pray to Buddha. But unlike Sué, Tsurumaru admits difficult at forgiving Hidetora for the violence done to him, resulting in a unique (neither masculine nor feminine) response to his oppression. Unable to forgive or attack, Tsurumaru “turns the warrior’s flute into an instrument of the ear and the heart”. The music, like an arrow, striking Hidetora through the heart and throwing him backwards, as though physically struck, and terrifying him, Tsurumaru’s nohkan music acting as his only bodily power, reverberating throughout the film as both a fearful response to violence, and to the cruelty of the natural world. When he loses his nohkan, he loses the only form of power left to him.
”Women during the 16th-century civil wars were only tools for political strategy. Fathers got their daughters married because they wanted to dominate a part of the country or to make peace. These women were not recognised as people at all.”¹ Women like the silent concubines are “destroyed” along with the Third Castle, as Hidetora’s possessions. How women with some influence respond to their position is personified in the two female leads: the sister-in-laws, Sué and Kaede, who share conquered backgrounds, but also patriarchal dehumanisation, referenced as foxes. When Kurogane is ordered to kill Sué, he returns to Jiro and Kaede with a stone-fox’s head, sarcastically shocked that Sué was a fox in disguise, referencing a common myth about shape-shifting Kitsune foxes. Kurogane uses this to warn Jiro against Kaede, whom he describes as “Vixen”. This animalisation of women demonstrating the patriarchy’s incomprehension of women with agency, the explanation for women that didn’t fit expectations being that they are inhuman.
(1. Mieko Harada quote, Lady Kaede actress)
A spatial divide is created between Kaede and Sué, framing how their attitudes towards power define them. Kaede is always seen within the walls of the First Castle, claustrophobically imprisoned by her desire to hold her family castle. But though her movements are limited, she is active, manipulating the events of the film with a goal in mind. Sué spends her time at prayer, uninterested in power or revenge, and is always positioned outside against the open sky or fields. But despite this freedom she is a passive victim, her destiny controlled by her father-in-law, husband and rival, Kaede, becoming a victim of Kaede’s power play. Kaede is Kurosawa’s Edmund, with camera close-ups her soliloquies, achieving her goals “by the same bold means Edmund employs to move himself from the margins to the centre of masculine power…brazen sexuality and self-assurance.” Kaede learns from Hidetora’s slaughter of her family how the body politic of the world operates: that the physical body, rather than institutions like marriage or giri, is power. When Taro dies, she turns her attention to the next Ichimonji so he’ll obey her, instead of accepting her fate as a widow, Kaede asserts her position upon Jiro’s arrival, forcing him to remove the Ichimonji armour, literally lowering his defences. The armour is then seen in Kaede’s hands, the tableaux suggesting Kaede’s capture of Ichimonji masculinity. Kaede doesn’t just seduce Jiro with her body, she assaults him, closing the doors around them to physically and symbolically trap him within her small domain. When they “make love”, she kicks the Ichimonji helmet away, the act mocking giri and asserting Kaede’s domination of the clan’s body politic through the exchange of bodily fluids with its most powerful male figures. When she demands that Jiro marry her despite his wife Sué, Kaede crushes a moth between her fingers as she cries for Jiro’s affection, emphasising her lack of compassion in achieving her goals (much like Hidetora). With the death of the moth, Kaede “embodies the consequences of Hidetora’s bloody past of triumph” personifying Kurosawa’s cycle of violence.
King Lear’s battle occurs offstage because power in the play is achieved through Machiavellian scheming, not through physical battles. But in Ran, violence is power; the battles’ details carefully choreographed to emphasise the individualised nature of warfare, filled with shots of blood, mutilations and cadavers. Insignias of power like banners, so important at the start of the film, are trampled into the mud as useless when men retreat for their lives. Simulacra of power like the Third Castle are destroyed within minutes, Kurosawa reminding us of the atomic bomb mushroom cloud with the solemn tableaux of the burning castle, showing how quickly the powerful can fall, with Hidetora, like the banners, collapsing in the dirt, reduced to an old man by the violent upheaval. While filming in the early 1980s, Kurosawa drew on his life experiences and knowledge of Second World War history to warn against militaristic mindsets, fearing that the final days of the War could be repeated on a grander scale in a nuclear holocaust. Shakespeare spares us the battle, whereas Kurosawa forces us to look, giving us a complicit, God’s eye view of the horror. Kurosawa rarely films close-ups in Ran, the camera always placed at a distance from the characters, never allowing us to empathise with them, save for Hidetora and Kaede, the perspective making the characters “as flies to wanton boys”, so when characters scream at the Gods for their cruelty, Kurosawa points a finger at the audience: an audience who likely hold views that lead to the same violent chaos presented, warning against humanity’s ability to forget their empathy towards others.
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Brooking The Vault 