Hacker Cinema
Throne of Blood
蜘蛛巣城
1957 · Film · 108 min
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Returning to their lord's castle, samurai warriors Washizu and Miki are waylaid by a spirit who predicts their futures. When the first part of the spirit's prophecy comes true, Washizu's scheming wife, Asaji, presses him to speed up the rest of the spirit's prophecy by murdering his lord and usurping his place. Director Akira Kurosawa's resetting of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth" in feudal Japan is one of his most acclaimed films.
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8 comments on Hacker News
Not really. You can transpose a plot and/or create something based on another work with the freedom to do anything you want (see: Throne of Blood, based on MacBeth), and people will be singing your praises generations later. If conversely you take on the original name, script, characters, historical setting, aesthetic, etc collectively as if to approximate high faithfulness to the original work (one that is not genre fantasy), then putting a brazen change front-and-center (like a black Scottish king) sticks out. It will draw more attention than anything else, and maybe that's the point. There are a ton of Macbeth adaptations, they're not super-duper cheap to make, and they often lose money.
It's just an artistic/stylistic judgement, not a complaint (very few readers here are likely to go see another in the pile of Macbeth movies). A modern day adaptation even with all the original names and dialog would still work better. I don't have a horse in the race because I don't care to see yet another Macbeth.
Macbeth is fiction, albeit written long ago. Even so, I think some approaches to modern adaptation are better than others.
For instance, you can go the route of Throne of Blood. It transposes the plot to feudal Japan, and doesn't call itself Macbeth. This allows you to hit all the story beats with the freedom to change literally anything else you want, and still be "faithful" in its adaptation. I'd argue it's also a more intriguing approach for film.
Alternatively, you can opt for the original dialog, names, historical setting, and aesthetic. If you go this way, with a story set in Medieval Scotland that is not genre fantasy, then having something as incongruent as a change of race in the main character will stick out. Notwithstanding, here no one cares because a) Macbeth's been done to death, b) no one gives a damn about Macbeth. You can of course suggest that people are nonplussed about this for movies in general, but if they aren't invested in any way they may not see your film either.
So in fact you aren't likely to see this done for every film set in a historical period all the time, and the minor controversy and trolling if anything helps create buzz for a film that will otherwise flop anyway. Were you going to see it in theaters? Statistically, not likely.
"samurai" movies:
- Seven Samurai
- Rashomon
- Ran
- Throne of Blood
- Kagemusha
non-samurai:
- High and Low
- Ikiru
I would say that the essentials are Seven Samurai, High and Low, Rashomon.
I have only seen 12 of the movies on the list. I have 88 new movies to watch.
Kurosawa did the best Macbeth. If you have not seen it, I highly recommend it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throne_of_Blood
14 out of 34 of the writers in that list are from places other than US/UK [1]. Even the included works by US/UK authors like Shakespeare and Orwell and Huxley aren't merely Anglophone culture - I'd argue they're a part of human culture. Are films by Kurosawa like Ran (King Lear) and Throne of Blood (Macbeth) any less Japanese because he was inspired by Shakespeare? I'd argue not.
Could they have made a better list? Certainly, and perhaps even they would acknowledge it. Of course we can nitpick - I agree with almost none of the selections related to software. But I think "done" is better than "perfect".
[1] - Murasaki Shikibu (Japan), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russia), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Salman Rushdie (India), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), Ben Okri (Nigeria), Arundhati Roy (India), Umberto Eco (Italy), Haruki Murakami (Japan), Roberto Bolaño (Chile), Stanislaw Lem (Poland), Jung Chang (China)
To be fair, Akira Kurosawa was influenced by spaghetti westerns[0] and one of his films (Throne of Blood) is just Macbeth in feudal Japan, so the copying goes both ways.
[0]https://www.thebubble.org.uk/culture/film/kurosawa-and-the-wild-west/
Some pretty nice recommendations! I got Barton Fink, Throne of Blood...movies I'd never think about otherwise
Well, Shakespeare wrote plays, so it's generally a good idea to see them in the theater, or watch cinema versions, rather than to read them. Once you have a good idea of he action and the character interactions, it's easier to read the language.
I once saw a performance of the "bad quarto" of Hamlet and it was a terrific play, even though the language was all over the place.
Kurosawa's Throne of Blood is a great version of MacBeth even if it's in Japanese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throne_of_Blood