Throne of Blood (Kurosawa) 1957
BFI Blu Ray / 4k Ultra HD
T.S.Eliot rarely went to the cinema. However in 1957 he did see Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and called it his favourite film (though I’ve not been able to trace Eliot’s announcement back to any interview, letter or newspaper article). In 1932 he wrote an essay on Hamlet where he referenced Macbeth (Throne of Blood is a transposition of Shakespeare’s plot) as a perfect example of the objective correlative in art. That is for Eliot Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking is a sign of guilt and sufficiently powerful enough for an audience to experience than any spoken admission of her torment.
In Throne of Blood Lady Asaji sleepwalks with a face as frozen as a Fukai style mask, used in Noh theatre, to convey her emotional state. No dialogue really needed just a haunting facial expression.
Eliot may have wondered where Shakespeare’s text had gone too. The film has very few of the beautiful words (Shakespeare is even uncredited) but many beautiful images that are a perfect fusion of Shakespeare and Kurosawa. It’s almost as if the bard had adapted and pruned down Macbeth, for the screen so as to generously provide his Japanese co-author with a magnificent prompt for Kurosawa’s film language.
Throne of Blood, set in a feudal Japan, has an abundance of tragic incidents both portentous and actual which startles you with its wonderful imagery. The appearance of the witches is reduced to one evil spirit spinning her cotton wheel in an ghostly illuminated hut; Washizu / Macbeth (Toshiro Mifune on growling top form) repeatedly cries out that he’s been a fool, to his propped up sword’s scabbard, after having murdered Tsuzuki / King Duncan; the flashing appearances of the ghost of Mikki, Washizu’s former friend, in the dinner scene; the onward misty-strewn march of Cobweb forest where soldiers use tree foliage to disguise their attack on the castle; birds fleeing the forest and entering the castle, in pre-Hitchcock The Birds style, that Washizu wrongly reads as a good omen and finally Throne of Blood’s killing of him by a savage onslaught of arrows that’s today regarded by critics and audiences as an icon of Japanese cinema.
Throne of Blood is epic. However the concentrated economy of Kurosawa makes for minimal action. For the film’s more intimate interior scenes (the stylised Noh play component) are contrasted with the courtyard of Washout’s menacing castle and long takes of foggy moments where horsemen ride through the forest and along the plain. And accompanying the fog and the wind is the rain (How often in Kurosawa’s film’s does it oppressively rain, remember Rashomon and The Seven Samurai). Again and again Kurosawa’s filming of landscapes is masterly and only surpassed by the compositions of his next film The Hidden Fortress made in 1958.
Anthony Mann and John Ford’s eloquent landscape photography was at its peak in the fifties. We know that Kurosawa loved Ford’s westerns and I suspect, though I’ve no evidence, he might have also admired the sense of geography in Mann’s westerns too. It’s the judicious timing of Kurosawa’s long held shots, allowing the mist, forest and mountains to become brooding characters, which contributes so much to the doom laden atmosphere and corruption of power in Throne of Blood.
Enough to say that this is another remarkable 4k upgrade from the BFI (Some scratches and occasional white lines from their previous blu ray release have been erased). The stark black and very white monochrome photography, shaded by ghostly looking greys, glows with an intensity suiting the dark folly, ambition, greed and madness of the story. Throne of Blood still remains the definitive adaptation or re-imagining of Macbeth. An unforgettable classic.
Alan Price©2025
Throne of Blood (Kurosawa) 1957
BFI Blu Ray / 4k Ultra HD
T.S.Eliot rarely went to the cinema. However in 1957 he did see Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and called it his favourite film (though I’ve not been able to trace Eliot’s announcement back to any interview, letter or newspaper article). In 1932 he wrote an essay on Hamlet where he referenced Macbeth (Throne of Blood is a transposition of Shakespeare’s plot) as a perfect example of the objective correlative in art. That is for Eliot Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking is a sign of guilt and sufficiently powerful enough for an audience to experience than any spoken admission of her torment.
In Throne of Blood Lady Asaji sleepwalks with a face as frozen as a Fukai style mask, used in Noh theatre, to convey her emotional state. No dialogue really needed just a haunting facial expression.
Eliot may have wondered where Shakespeare’s text had gone too. The film has very few of the beautiful words (Shakespeare is even uncredited) but many beautiful images that are a perfect fusion of Shakespeare and Kurosawa. It’s almost as if the bard had adapted and pruned down Macbeth, for the screen so as to generously provide his Japanese co-author with a magnificent prompt for Kurosawa’s film language.
Throne of Blood, set in a feudal Japan, has an abundance of tragic incidents both portentous and actual which startles you with its wonderful imagery. The appearance of the witches is reduced to one evil spirit spinning her cotton wheel in an ghostly illuminated hut; Washizu / Macbeth (Toshiro Mifune on growling top form) repeatedly cries out that he’s been a fool, to his propped up sword’s scabbard, after having murdered Tsuzuki / King Duncan; the flashing appearances of the ghost of Mikki, Washizu’s former friend, in the dinner scene; the onward misty-strewn march of Cobweb forest where soldiers use tree foliage to disguise their attack on the castle; birds fleeing the forest and entering the castle, in pre-Hitchcock The Birds style, that Washizu wrongly reads as a good omen and finally Throne of Blood’s killing of him by a savage onslaught of arrows that’s today regarded by critics and audiences as an icon of Japanese cinema.
Throne of Blood is epic. However the concentrated economy of Kurosawa makes for minimal action. For the film’s more intimate interior scenes (the stylised Noh play component) are contrasted with the courtyard of Washout’s menacing castle and long takes of foggy moments where horsemen ride through the forest and along the plain. And accompanying the fog and the wind is the rain (How often in Kurosawa’s film’s does it oppressively rain, remember Rashomon and The Seven Samurai). Again and again Kurosawa’s filming of landscapes is masterly and only surpassed by the compositions of his next film The Hidden Fortress made in 1958.
Anthony Mann and John Ford’s eloquent landscape photography was at its peak in the fifties. We know that Kurosawa loved Ford’s westerns and I suspect, though I’ve no evidence, he might have also admired the sense of geography in Mann’s westerns too. It’s the judicious timing of Kurosawa’s long held shots, allowing the mist, forest and mountains to become brooding characters, which contributes so much to the doom laden atmosphere and corruption of power in Throne of Blood.
Enough to say that this is another remarkable 4k upgrade from the BFI (Some scratches and occasional white lines from their previous blu ray release have been erased). The stark black and very white monochrome photography, shaded by ghostly looking greys, glows with an intensity suiting the dark folly, ambition, greed and madness of the story. Throne of Blood still remains the definitive adaptation or re-imagining of Macbeth. An unforgettable classic.
Alan Price©2025
By Alan Price • film, year 2025 • Tags: Alan Price, film