- Convenors:
-
Norimasa Morita
(Waseda University)
Rebecca Suter (the university of sydney)
Giorgio Amitrano (UniversitÀ Degli Studi di Napoli L'orientale)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Visual Arts
Short Abstract
This panel aims to shed new light on Akira Kurosawa’s three canonical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays – Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well and Ran – from eco-criticism, the most recent adaptation theory and film semiotics.
Long Abstract
Akira Kurosawa’s three films based on Shakespeare’s plays—Throne of Blood (1957), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), and Ran (1985)—have long been recognised as among the most accomplished and influential examples of Shakespearean adaptation in world cinema. These films have been extensively studied from perspectives including inter- and transcultural adaptation, auteurism, and cinematic style. Yet exactly because of their canonical status, there is, all the more, a reason to reconsider a risk that critical discourse around them becomes settled or repetitive. This panel seeks to reopen investigation by offering three complementary and methodologically distinct readings of Kurosawa’s Shakespearean films, demonstrating how new critical frameworks can still yield fresh insights into works that are often assumed to be exhaustively explored and analysed. The first paper examines Throne of Blood as an adaptation of Macbeth through the lens of eco-criticism, focusing on the theme of the marching forest and linking it to Critical Plant Theory. The second paper addresses Ran as a reworking of King Lear from the perspective of adaptation studies, interrogating how Kurosawa transforms Shakespeare’s familial and political tragedy through the aesthetics of epic cinema, Noh-inflected performance, and late-career pessimism. Particular attention is paid to the film’s strategies of transposition, amplification, and cultural translation. The third paper considers all three films together, focusing on the visualisation of Shakespeare’s verbal imagery. Shakespeare’s plays are renowned to include dense layers of metaphorical images of weather, plants, animals, disease and decay, but they are only spoken and never physically presented on the stage. Kurosawa’s pure cinema approach in his adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays lies in translating, redistributing, and reimagining Shakespeare’s verbal images through mise-en-scène such as composition, movement, colour, and silence, and montage such as cross-cutting and sound mixing. Taken together, the panel argues that Kurosawa’s Shakespearean adaptations remain fertile ground for critical inquiry. By combining eco-criticism, adaptation theory, and close visual analysis, the panel aims to demonstrate how revisiting well-known works with new questions can deepen our understanding of both Shakespeare’s afterlives in Japan and Kurosawa’s cinematic imagination.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper examines Akira Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptations—Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleeps Well, and Ran—as works of “enhanced pure cinema.” It argues that Kurosawa transforms Shakespeare’s verbal imagery into autonomous visual forms, revealing pure cinema as creative expansion.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines Akira Kurosawa’s adaptations of Shakespeare—Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleeps Well, and Ran—through the lens of an enhanced “pure cinema” aesthetic. Pure cinema is the art of narrating a story or conveying emotion primarily through visual means rather than through dialogue. While Kurosawa has long been acknowledged as a master of visual storytelling, this paper argues that his Shakespeare adaptations go beyond conventional notions of pure cinema by actively reinterpreting the source texts and augmenting them with dynamic visual elements unavailable in the original plays. Shakespearean drama is fundamentally grounded in language: blank verse, soliloquy, metaphor, conceit, and verbal imagery are central to its theatrical power. Kurosawa’s response to this linguistic richness is neither simple reduction nor straightforward cinematic illustration. Instead, he translates and expands Shakespeare’s verbal imagery into an autonomous audiovisual language composed of movement, landscape, architecture, costume, set design, props, make-up, gesture, silence, sound effects, and music. In Throne of Blood, for example, the nocturnal cutting of trees in the Forest of Cobwebs is followed by the sudden invasion of hundreds of birds driven from their nests, a purely visual invention. The Bad Sleeps Well reconfigures Hamlet as a revenge narrative set within impersonal corporate architecture, where framing and spatial design visually amplify moral opacity and institutional violence. Ran further intensifies this pure cinema approach through the use of color, large-scale choreography, and extended wordless sequences, introducing visual motifs that have no direct textual equivalent in King Lear yet convey its tragic vision with overwhelming force. By analyzing such moments across the three films, this paper demonstrates that Kurosawa consistently practices a cinema that not only minimizes reliance on dialogue but also invents new visual structures while taking cues from Shakespeare’s texts. Kurosawa’s adaptations thus reveal pure cinema not as an act of subtraction, but as a process of creative enhancement.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957) through the framework of critical plant studies, analysing how the film's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth reconfigures the play's treatment of vegetal life and landscape.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957) through the framework of critical plant studies, analysing how the film's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth reconfigures the play's treatment of vegetal life and landscape. While Shakespeare's play presents Birnam Wood's movement to Dunsinane primarily as military subterfuge—Malcolm's soldiers bearing cut branches as camouflage—I will argue that Kurosawa's cinematic interpretation expands this botanical motif into a sustained exploration of the relationship between human agency and the natural world.
Drawing on recent scholarship in critical plant studies, including Jeffrey Nealon's Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life and Jon Pitt's Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan, as well as broader work at the intersection of phenomenology and environmental humanities such as the theories of Luce Irigaray, the paper intends to explore how attention to vegetal life might inform broader discussions within political ecology concerning forms of existence that operate according to logics quite different from those governing human and animal life.
Through close analysis of Kurosawa's visual treatment of forest imagery, the paper will investigate how the climactic forest sequence, but also broader formal choices such as the use of mist-laden forest landscapes or the prominent integration of wood and bamboo in architectural spaces, create a more complex representation of vegetal presence than the source text provides. It will then explore how these cinematic strategies invite reconsideration of the forest not merely as setting or symbol, but as an element possessing its own material significance within the narrative.
By introducing a focus on botanical imagination, the paper aims to expand comparative scholarship on Kurosawa's adaptations, showing how his engagement with Shakespearean drama reflects the author’s cross-cultural orientation toward the natural world. More broadly, it intends to show how ecocritical methodologies, and specifically attention to plant life, can productively reframe critical discussion of well-studied literary and cinematic texts.
Paper short abstract
This paper reinterprets Kurosawa’s Ran as a polyphonic reworking of King Lear, arguing that the film operates through intertextual hybridization rather than simple adaptation, and represents the most fully realized expression of Kurosawa’s late style.
Paper long abstract
This paper aims to reinterpret Kurosawa’s Ran, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, as an example of intertextuality and cinematic polyphony. Ran is one of Kurosawa’s most striking adaptations from literary sources. As in his other renditions of novels and plays originating outside Japan, Kurosawa relocates the source text into a Japanese setting, apparently disregarding its original cultural context. This strategy has often been interpreted as a form of displacement that sacrifices contextual specificity in order to concentrate on plot, treated as a purely narrative device.
A closer examination of Kurosawa’s adaptation strategies, however, reveals the opposite tendency. His interest in plot is marginal; rather, he seeks to capture the conceptual core of the original work through a process of hybridization, in which the literary source is bred with elements of different cultural and aesthetic traditions. This method characterizes his adaptations of Western literature, from The Idiot and The Lower Depths to High and Low, and reaches a paradigmatic form in Throne of Blood, widely regarded as one of the most accomplished Shakespearean films. With its highly stylized acting, rigorously controlled proxemics, and mask-like facial make-up, Throne of Blood offers an explicit tribute to the aesthetics of Noh theatre.
In Ran, however, the influence of Noh, though still present, is suggested more indirectly, while the degree of intertextuality increases significantly. Alongside Shakespeare’s tragedy—freely rewritten and reinvented—Kurosawa draws on medieval Japanese war tales, Kamakura-period narrative scrolls, and Western epic traditions, including John Ford’s classical westerns. Whereas Throne of Blood centres its narrative on a limited number of protagonists, Ran unfolds an impressive range of elements that combine and resonate across visual, narrative, and symbolic registers. The result is a sombre and mournful polyphony centred on the figure of Hidetora, a ghostly Japanese King Lear. I argue that Ran, though generally less celebrated than Throne of Blood as a Shakespearean adaptation, marks a decisive advancement in Kurosawa’s expressive power and can be read as the most fully realized expression of his late style, in the sense articulated by Adorno and Said.