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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.