Akira Kurosawa's dreams

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Movie
German title Akira Kurosawa's dreams
Original title Yume
Country of production Japan ,
United States
original language Japanese ,
French ,
English
Publishing year 1990
length 119 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Akira Kurosawa
script Akira Kurosawa
production Steven Spielberg ,
Hisao Kurosawa ,
Mike Y. Inoue
music Shin'ichirō Ikebe
camera Takao Saitō
cut Tome Minami
occupation

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams ( Japanese Yume ) is an episodic film of director Akira Kurosawa from the year 1990 , the actual on dreams based director, from various stages of his life. The colorful film works more through visuals than through language. The eight dreams together encompass a human life and range from the 1910s to the 1980s.

action

Sun shining through the rain

An old legend in Japan tells that the foxes get married when the sun shines through the rain. In this first dream, a five-year-old boy defies his mother's word to stay indoors with the rain. In the nearby forest of sequoias he becomes a hidden witness of a slow wedding procession of the animals. But he is caught by them and runs away. When he tries to get back into the house, his mother tells him that a fox has already been there and has left a short sword. She brusquely tells him to commit suicide with it, since the foxes are angry; she was not allowed to let him back into the house and slammed the gate before him. The boy has to find the foxes and ask for forgiveness, but they rarely forgive. So he moves to the mountains, to the place under the rainbow , to find the kitsune camp.

The peach garden

Hina-Matsuri , the girls' festival, traditionally takes place in spring when the peaches are in full bloom. It is said that the dolls that are shown before this day represent the peach trees and their pink flowers. But a family had mowed their garden, and the about twelve-year-old son is missing something at this year's festival. During an argument with his older sister, he sees a girl running out of the front door of the house. He follows him to the bare garden. The dolls in his sister's collection have come to life, they stand in front of him on the terraced bare slopes and judge the boy for cutting the precious trees. When they notice how much he loved the peach blossom , they reward him with a dance to Gagaku, accompanied by ceremonial music . This means that the peach trees - which previously only existed as stumps - bloom in full splendor for the child until they finally wither again.

Snowstorm

A group of climbers are fighting their way through a snow storm. They are covered in snow waist-deep and can only talk desperately to find their way back to their camp. A beautiful woman (perhaps the Yuki Onna of Japanese mythology) slowly appears out of nowhere and tries to lure a climber who is barely conscious into the afterlife. The group wakes up when the sky clears over the summit and they see that they were right at the camp.

The tunnel

A Japanese officer returns home from the war , walking with sagging shoulders along an orphaned road at dawn. He comes to a gaping dark tunnel that must be crossed. From there, a dog jumps at him, loaded with a rucksack with stick grenades sticking out of it. In fact, it is an anti-tank dog and the luggage is explosives. The dog, baring his teeth and growling angrily, drives him into the echoing tube. When the tunnel is finally behind him, the Yūrei of the dead soldier Noguchi appears to him , with blue skin. You know each other, the soldier died under his command, even in his arms. He regretfully tries to teach his subordinate that he did not make it, but the ghost is homesick for his family.

The ghost disappears back into the tunnel, from which a hundred of fallen blue-faced soldiers then marched towards the officer, his destroyed 3rd Company. He gives a shouted speech and orders the dead to march back . Then the officer breaks down crying. He sees the demonic dog again.

crow

An adult Japanese strolls through a Van Gogh exhibition. The picture “ Bridge of Langlois ” with the laundresses in the foreground becomes real and lively so that the man can move around in it. In the end he meets Vincent van Gogh ( Martin Scorsese ) himself, who is out and about with his painter's easel in the last months of his life. He describes his art with conviction - and driven like a locomotive . What Van Gogh paints in this sequence must be “ crows over the wheat field”. Then the person continues to err through Van Gogh's pictures and sketches, accompanied by Prélude No. 15 in D flat major by Frédéric Chopin , which is not played in the original order of the bars, but with interchanged passages.

Fujiyama in red

The Fuji erupts, the whole area is bathed in scary red glow. The adult fights against the flow of a crowd in Tokyo, sirens wail in the background, six nuclear power plants have exploded, if you tell him, one reactor after the other is well ordered; The explosion clouds can be seen rising into the sky behind the Fujiyama. Individual refugees on the beach ponder how small Japan is, you have to go into the sea like lemmings. Littered luggage and rubbish show how many people must have reached the bottom of the ocean. In front of the surf, the refugees discuss radioactivity , leukemia , mutations and individual isotopes . A scientist drowns himself.

The weeping demon

The adult stumbles through a post-apocalyptic steamy stone desert. He meets a pathetic human-like monster, similar to an oni . This tells about what it once looked like here and about nuclear war . Above all, terrible meter-high dandelions have taken over the land. Screams of pain fill the area. In the midst of the plants, the demon explains the hierarchies of the new world to him.

In fact, it is a retelling of the Buddhist parable of the same name .

The village with the water mills

Daiō Wasabi Farm in Azumino, Nagano, Japan

The grown-up self walks through an original village in the most beautiful sunshine and meets an old man who works as a basket weaver between babbling water mills and streams. This tells slowly, calmly, sensibly and convincingly about the advantages of being in harmony with nature. He enumerates in detail why he does not need what modern amenity at all, how. z. B. machines or electric light.

The film closes with a happy, colorful, loud funeral procession for a woman who led a good, long life in the village with the water mills .

This episode was recorded at the Daiō Wasabi Farm in Azumino , Nagano Prefecture .

Reviews

Vincent Canby , The New York Times , August 24, 1990 points out that at that time one should have expected a summary, a coda , by Kurosawa, but this again delivers something completely new: a series of short, partly fragmentary fairy tales Past, present and future. In doing so, the filmmaker could have realized exactly his vision, without consideration. It is about a lot: fears of childhood, the attraction of the afterlife, the nuclear doomsday, environmental pollution, art and the essence of time and memory .

“[…] A series of eight dreams in which his childhood memories, fears and hopes are combined with fairytale magic to form an intense, colorful dance of extraordinary poetry. An urgent invitation to return to the roots of life and creation and to discover the secret of existence even behind the banalities. "

“At 80, Kurosawa […] is impatient with artifice; he has long since proved himself a master of complex narrative. Now he wants to tell what he knows as simply as possible. There are no wild juxtapositions of the creatures of his sleeping world with the images of his waking world. They are, after all, products of the same sensibility. The rhythms of his editing and his staging are serene - hypnotically so. His is not to shock us into surrendering to his visions but to seduce our consent to them. And this he does in one of the most lucid dreamworks ever placed on film. "

“At 80 [...] he wants to tell us what he knows as simply as possible. There are no wild equivalents of the creatures of the dream world and the images of his waking world. Ultimately, they are only products of the same sensibility. The rhythm of its editing and staging are relaxed - and hypnotic. In doing so, he is not trying to submit us to his visions, but rather to elicit our consent. And this with one of the clearest depictions of dreams that have ever been captured on film. "

- Richard Schickel : Time , September 10, 1990

“It is beautiful despite itself because the beauty lies in the attitude of the director. This is indicated not only in the didactic intent but in the slowness of everything, in the amount of respect intended, and in the enormous and brazen sincerity of the work. That a director in 1990 could be this steadfast, this serious, this moral and this hopeful is beautiful in its own right. "

“He is beautiful beyond himself because the beauty lies in the director's attitude. This is evident not only in the didactic request, but rather in the whole slowness, in the amount of respect brought in and in the enormous, outrageous security of the work. That a director could be so steadfast, so serious, so moral and so hopeful in 1990 is beautiful in and of itself . "

- Donald Richie , Joan Mellen : The Films of Akira Kurosawa 1990

“Films are also an art of conveying invisible things. [...] 'Akira Kurosawa's dreams' seeks the 'inner truth', the human soul . "

- Josef Nagel : Secrets of the Soul - For the re-performance of "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams" in film-dienst 2003

Rotten Tomatoes sees the film on September 24, 2007, however, only 56 percent (16 reviews), while in January 2020 the rating of over 15,800 moviegoers is 86%. In the IMDb in 2007, the film scored 7.6 out of 10 points (4,900 audience ratings), which rose slightly in January 2020 to 7.8 with 22,300 ratings, which suggests that appreciation has increased over time.

Others

  • The IMDb lists Ishirō Honda for his direction without credit of the tunnel , Fujiyama in red and prologue and epilogue of the weeping man-eaters , and for first- and second-mentioned episode for authorship. This also calls him the "assistant director". He is listed in the opening credits as "Creative Consultant".
  • The shooting continued in Gotemba / Shizuoka , Memambetsu-cho / Abashiri / Hokkaidō and Midori-ku / Yokohama / Kanagawa in Japan.
  • The American Industrial Light and Magic was involved in creating the special effects.
  • The first performance in the Federal Republic of Germany was May 31, 1990.
  • The Wiesbaden film evaluation agency awarded the “ rating valuable”. In Austria a “particularly valuable” was awarded.

Awards and nominations

Web links

Footnotes

  1. a b c d Lexicon of International Film . Volume 1, p. 53.
  2. a b Josef Nagel: Secrets of the Soul - For the re-performance of "Akira Kurosawa's dreams". in film-dienst 10/03, p. 10 f.
  3. ^ A b Vincent Canby , The New York Times , August 24, 1990.
  4. Richard Schickel: Night Tales, Magically Told, September 10, 1990 in Time Magazine, online resource, accessed September 24, 2007, translated by Wikipedia.
  5. ^ Donald Richie , Joan Mellen: The Films of Akira Kurosawa . University of California Press, 1999, ISBN 0-520-22037-4 , pp. 223 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  6. a b c document , IMDb and subpages, accessed on May 24, 2007/28. May 2008.
  7. opening credits.
  8. ^ Document ( Memento of April 6, 2005 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on May 24, 2007.