The film director Akira Kurosawa was often called The Emperor. In Ran, we only need to bear witness to the demonic majesty that depicts the slaughter of Lord Hidetora Ichimonji’s retinue on the blackened, volcanic slopes of Mount Fuji to understand how well deserved that title is.
After 50 years of brutal warfare, Hidetora, now 70 years old, has murdered, maimed, and subjugated everyone and everything in his domain. He is the warlord supreme, but after the exertions of a boar hunt with his three sons, Taro, Jiro, and Saburo, he has a terrifying dream that forces him to put his affairs in order and impose his will on the peace he has so violently won. The eldest son, Taro will become the Great Lord and reside in the first castle, supported by Jiro and Saburo who will receive the second and third castles. Hidetora will keep an honorific title and a small retinue and reside between his sons.
Saburo is banished for speaking truth to power, he knows that Taro and Jiro will lust for total control (after all they are their father’s sons) and his fears are soon realised when Taro and Jiro renege on their pledge to his father when they forbid Hidetora’s personal guard to stay within his castle walls. Humiliated, Hidetora takes refuge in the third castle now abandoned by Saburo’s men. The castle, built purposely for the film, seems to grow organically from the very ash of Mount Fuji. This the bleakest of residences, as if hell has grown like a malignant tumour on the face of the earth.
It is here that Kurosawa’s true greatness as a filmmaker is revealed.
Until now the film has moved at a courtly pace, every frame meticulously constructed from the hundreds of hand-painted illustrations that Kurosawa had designed during his own exile in the cinematic wilderness. Too Western in his tastes for some, and too Japanese for others. The Emperor, in his imperial phase made over 20 films in the first two decades of his career and only four in the two decades that followed. When asked to name his favourite Kurosawa film, Francis Ford Coppola replied, “Well, so many of them are great, I mean, you could ask yourself which are the great ones, and which are merely very, very excellent.”
Donald Richie in his seminal book, The Films of Akira Kurosawa reveals The Emperor’s feelings on Ran. When asked what his best film was, instead of answering “the next,” as he usually did, Kurosawa simply said, “Ran.” Translated, Ran means chaos or turmoil and when Kurosawa unleashes Taro and Jiro’s armies on their father’s beleaguered forces, the annihilation is total and astonishing.
Backed by Toru Takemitsu’s Mahleresque score, the screen is awash with blood, painted on the battlements and the walls of the castle, all other sound has been exiled from the sequence. Hidetora’s men are skewered by scores of arrows recalling another of Kurosawa’s great works, Throne of Blood or they are shredded by the modernity of the Tanegashima matchlock arquebus. Women are unceremoniously gunned down protecting their emasculated lord, his katana broken after one feeble attack.
This is an earthly Götterdämmerung of unparalleled savagery, watched by the gods through the regular shots of the sky, red hues, and flames reminiscent of John Boorman’s own masterwork Excalibur. There is no honour in Ran only the extermination of the lower classes for the hubris of their martial lords and masters.
And when the holocaust is complete Kurosawa lets us follow Hidetora in stunned silence befitting the catastrophe, his face is a Noh mask, driven insane by his experience, a god emperor laid low descending the burning ruins of his castle before his former servants. The exquisite reds and yellows of the treacherous samurai contrast with their obsidian surrounding and echo the pageantry of imperial Japan blackened by the apocalypse of the Second World War.
Kurosawa would make three more films before his death, but Ran is his final statement, a bleak polemic on man’s inherent inhumanity, a stark reminder of our insignificance in the nihilism of our masters, a film of utter barbarism and complete beauty. The loyal samurai Tango looks on in complete despair, “Men prefer sorrow to joy, suffering to peace.”
One year on from the horrors of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine The Emperor has once again been proven right.