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Kiyoshi Kurosawa hardly needs introduction. To that purpose, I refer readers to his general IMdb and Wikipedia profiles (with more online resources to follow). For starters, however, French critic Mathieu Ravier's appreciative overview of Kurosawa's career written for this year's Sydney International Film Festival suffices nicely, drawing some fascinating comparisons with the films of Michael Haneke. "Like Haneke," Ravier writes, "Kurosawa is able to charge even the most banal scene of domestic life with a sense of dread. Elaborate sound design and counter-intuitive framing conspire to create an atmosphere rich with possibility. From the smallest of disruptions, a tiny tear in the social fabric, everything can unravel." Though not available online, Kent Jones' recent career purview for the current issue of Cinema Scope likewise addresses the mature breadth of Kurosawa's evolving oeuvre and is a strongly-recommended read.
This entry will serve as the shell for incoming contributions and—during the course of the week—I will post separate entries regarding my focused interests.
Contributors
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Proposing that Charisma may be "the first film ever to treat the act of tree poisoning as an existential process", Vera finds Charisma less "fine-tuned" than Cure, as if Kurosawa has lost control of his tonal segues. Notwithstanding, he praises Kurosawa's "talent for unsettling closures."
With Ningen Gokaku (License to Live, 1999), Vera observes that Kurosawa "approaches tragedy from an oblique angle, looking at the target with sidelong glances; you never hear him coming until he's right behind you, ready to blindside you with a single, overwhelming blow." He wonders if Kurosawa isn't "in love with death, or more to the point, with the nothingness that seems to lie beyond death"?
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Although his initial intention was to create a video podcast essay to contribute to the Kiyoshi Kurosawa Blogathon, Matt Zoller Seitz ran out of time and, instead, reprinted his November 2005 New York Press review of Kurosawa's Pulse at The House Next Door. Any contribution by Matt is a welcome honor and we look forward to when time affords his video essay. Matt's Pulse review impressed me for describing so presciently Kurosawa's own definition of horror as a "roiling emotional undercurrent: the dread that comes from contemplating death." Matt explains: "Pulse chills us to the marrow by daring us to admit the unspeakable truth: that despite thousands of years' worth of religious and philosophical assurances, we still don't know if being dead is better than, equal to or worse than being alive, and we will never know until we're dead ourselves."
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Though not specifically tailored for the blogathon, Francis "Oggs" Cruz has generously offered two reviews previously written for his site Lessons From the School of Inattention. The first is a response to an early film of Kurosawa's—Jigoku no keibîn (The Guard From the Underground, 1992)—and the second from the more recent Sakebi (Retribution, 2006).
Oggs observes the purposeful illogic of the alternate universe of The Guard From the Underground. Much is left unaccounted for in the "visual allure" of the film's alterity. Less invested in his characters than in the sheer delight of filmmaking, Oggs discerns that Kurosawa is emulating Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), which makes the cut in Kurosawa's essay "What Is Horror?" "Somehow," Kurosawa writes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, "it's horror." For a "Kurosawa completist" like Oggs, The Guard From the Underground is "watchable fare."
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At The Listening Ear, WeepingSam—that "old fart at play"—likewise comments on Retribution, appreciating the "characteristic intense sadness" that Kurosawa brings "to his apocalypses." Via screenshot analysis, WeepingSam notates Kurosawa's stylistic device of compositional shots incorporating background lighting effects that suggestively silhouette—indeed "haunt"—his foreground characters.
Dread—as the registered response to an awareness of death—has prevailed throughout the entries offered to this blogathon and Bob Turnbull at Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind has turned a discerning ear to the sound of dread in Kurosawa's films. Noted for their rumbling resemblances to the scores of David Lynch, Bob offers choice samplings from Pulse, Séance and Retribution.
Cross-published on Twitch.