Reading Response Prompts
 

These prompts are meant to get you thinking about what you have read, and to help focus your thoughts for your reading responses. You can respond to any one of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Do not, however, attempt to answer multiple prompts for any assignment. If you choose to pursue an idea of your own or are not writing a response that day, you should still spend at least a few minutes thinking about each of the prompts in preparation for class. For more information, review the listserv assignment.
Ran (1985). directed by Akira Kurosawa; screenplay by Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, and Masato Ide, adapted from King Lear by William Shakespeare; starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Daisuke Ryu, Akira Tenao, Jinpachi Nezu, and Mieko Harada

What does Kurosawa keep of Shakespeare’s play? What does he change? I’m not talking about obvious changes such as making the daughters into sons, but more thematic changes. Does Ran have the same themes as King Lear? To the extent it does, are they in same proportion? By the way, the parts of the screenplay not recognizably from King Lear are taken from a Japanese legend called “The Three Arrows.” If you had to call this either an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in Japan or a film about feudal Japan that makes use of King Lear as source material, which would you choose and why?

A film is in one sense a staging of a play, but a true film has some differences from merely a filmed version of a stage play. Consider Ran in both ways. How does it work as a staging of King Lear?  What do you think of the performances, the costumes, make-up, the sets?  Conversely, how does Kurosawa use the cinematic elements — the opportunity to film on location rather than inside a studio, the cinematography, the sound, the editing, the special effects — to his advantage?

Kurosawa was honored around the world as a great director, and he was tremendously influential. Steven Spielberg, for example, happily admitted he had borrowed from combat scenes in Ran and Kurosawa’s prior film Kagemusha when he filmed the D-Day Normandy beach invasion scene in Saving Private Ryan. The influence worked in the other direction, too. Kurosawa often used western sources. Beyond this film, he adapted Shakespeare’s Macbeth into Throne of Blood (1957), and stated that the American film noir The Glass Key (1942) was the source for Yojimbo (1961), about a ronin (unaffiliated samurai) warrior who gets involved in a fight between two families, though it arguably has as much in common with Dashiell Hammett’s classic crime novel Red Harvest. Italian film director Sergio Leone turned Yojimbo into A Fistfull of Dollars, the first of his “Man with No Name” westerns (sometimes called Spaghetti Westerns, originally as a term of derision but now seen as a worthy genre in their own right) starring Clint Eastwood, which were and remain hugely popular in the U.S., thus bringing the influence full circle. Yet in Japan Kurosawa was often criticized as being too western. In essence, he was charged with appropriating western culture instead of being authentically Japanese.

 
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