Mysteries of Cinema by Martin Adrian;

Author:Martin, Adrian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UWA Publishing

Part V

Genre Games

14

Mr Big: Gangsters and Power

Two Bulletins from 1985

Case One: RAN. In a discussion of the contemporary representation of warfare in cinema, Paul Virilio brackets off this Akira Kurosawa film and its predecessor KAGEMUSHA (1980) from the prevailing dominant trend of ‘a return to the war propaganda film’. These ‘studies of medieval Japan’ by Kurosawa are proposed as ‘celebrations’ of the ‘archaeology of chivalry’.1

There is certainly something nostalgic and wistful in Kurosawa’s conjuring of feudal power relations: a note of regret for the loss of that era when the patriarchal Lord or King could wage war, as it were, through his very eyes and with his own body. That is what, initially at least, Kurosawa’s filmic style – those enormous, static landscape vistas rendered in deep focus – celebrates: the interweaving of a great man’s omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, each attribute enabling the other.

But RAN says something more elaborate and disquieting. Its symbolic tie to the present is not only in this looking back to what can no longer be; it also charts, within the terms of its fiction, the gradual and catastrophic move from one mode of warfare to another. Kurosawa systematically haunts and destabilises his initial premise by introducing into the plein air of feudal power the new and disturbing condition of the blind spot, the unseen, the hidden stage upon which history is machinating its next move.

This is how, from the start, Kyoami the Fool (Shinosuke Ikehata) taunts the Lear-like hero, Lord Hidetora (Tatuya Nakadai), with his game of making others believe that he senses something moving in the open space of which they are unaware, and thus warning them of its potential; it is what the magnificent Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) will exploit to the hilt in her plan of revenge (via the duplicity of her appearance and manner); it is the new regime of war that Hidetora invites upon himself and his world the moment he thinks he is handing his power down to his solely trusted and beloved son, instead of passing it, as in fact is the case, into the arena of treacherous, shifting group alliances.

Symbolically, then, the catastrophe (ran) of the title, and the frightening image of ignorance perched precariously at the edge of the abyss with which the film leaves us, is not so much existential (universal and timeless in art cinema’s preferred interpretive mode) as immediately and relevantly political: registered profoundly, albeit suggestively, is our terror in suddenly facing the nuclear age, and trying to comprehend the steps that got us here.

Case Two: MIXED BLOOD. Paul Morrissey’s film, remarkable in many respects, – is another that guts primitivist nostalgia with a cold blade of catastrophic escalation. It evokes a believably pure situation of urban warfare: the modern feudalism of gangs and clans in a New York ghetto, well beyond the checks of conventional law and order, complete with a contemporary embodiment – appropriately twisted – of the all-powerful Lord; just this once, in the figure of Rita La Punta

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