One problem with Western culture today is its entrapment in contemporaneity. This is, in other words, chronological snobbery, to cite C. S. Lewis. We think that the past has little to say to us, and sometimes when it comes to pop culture, this seems to be true. Many movies from the 1980's, for instance, are now painful to watch, even if we might have enjoyed them then. Maybe a few stand out, and we regard them as classics of the medium, but this is fairly rare, and most people today--Christian included--certainly don't watch much film from the black and white or silent eras. This is too bad. Just like other forms of art, film has a history to it, a confluence of multiple traditions, styles, nationalities, and power. Take, for example, the films of Akira Kurosawa.
His film Ikiru is one of the greatest, most powerful, movies ever made, and it ranks right up there with Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych or the Medieval play Everyman in its treatment of a man confronting his own death. Why is it so good? Partly because of the magnificent directing, partly because of the incredible acting, and partly because of the beautiful black and white photography. But also because of the theme. Kurosawa deals with life at its rawest--the failure of identity, the failure of love, the possibility of loving service, the hope for redemption from a wasted life that terminates in the death that is the ultimate affront to all our efforts at being human.
In the history of cinema, Kurosawa is a genius. Many films he made rank among the best--Ran (a reworking of Shakespeare's King Lear in Medieval Japan), Hidden Forest (which George Lucas lovingly plagiarized), Yojimbo (one of the best Samurai movies ever made), and so on. Kurosawa made so many films that some of them ended up as clunkers, but so what? His artistic genius more than makes up for his mediocre efforts by the sheer number of his nearly perfect films (such as Seven Samurai, which influenced nearly every Western made after it).
One reason why Kurosawa was so good rests in his appropriation of the Western literary tradition. He was deeply influenced by Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Maxim Gorky (his love of Russian culture is reflected in one of his last films, Dersu Uzala, which is set in pre-Soviet Russia). But this influence merely sharpens the artistic skill he already possessed and the deep insight into human nature he brought to his best work.
Kurosawa's films comport with the Christian vision of things, and sometimes they verge on an overt connection to the major themes of Christian faith: the manifold weaknesses of ordinary people, the failure of love in families, and the hunger for a Love that redeems our failures and gives meaning to our suffering.
Watching older movies--and foreign movies, at that--can turn into merely cultural posturing, such as watching opera not because you really like it but because you want to be liked by the sort of people who watch it. But in this case, don't worry about the cachet that might accrue to you by saying, "I watch classic Japanese cinema. Do you?" Watch Ikiru. It is one of the best things you will ever see.
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| Takashi Shimura , one of the greatest actors of all time. |