Two Bulletins from the mid 1980s

Case One: Ran (1985). In a discussion of the contemporary representation of warfare in cinema, Paul Virilio brackets off this Akira Kurosawa film and its predecessor KAGEMUSHA (1980) from the prevailing dominant trend of “a return to the war propaganda film”. These “studies of medieval Japan” by Kurosawa are proposed as “celebrations” of the “archaeology of chivalry”.

There is certainly something nostalgic and wistful in Kurosawa's conjuring of feudal power relations: a note of regret for the loss of that era when the patriarchal Lord or King could wage war, as it were, through his very eyes and with his own body. That is what, initially at least, Kurosawa's filmic style – those enormous, static landscape vistas rendered in deep focus – celebrates: the interweaving of a great man's omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, each attribute enabling the others.

Ran, however, says something more elaborate and disquieting. Its symbolic tie to the present is not only in this looking back to what can no longer be; it also charts, within the terms of its fiction, the gradual and catastrophic move from one mode of warfare to another. Kurosawa systematically haunts and destabilises his initial premise by introducing into the plein air of feudal power the new and disturbing condition of the blind spot, the unseen, the hidden stage upon which history machinates its next move.