Wailing woodwind wild : the Noh transcription of Shakespeare's silent sounds in Kurosawa's "Ran"

Abstract

In Chris Marker's poetic commentary to A.K., his documentary on the making of Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985), Hidetora Ichimonji, the film's tragic protagonist, looms evocatively as, "King Lear [and] yet[ ... ] not King Lear, more like Lear's echo reverberating across those castle walls built by Kurosawa on Mount Fuji." That Marker refrains from sounding the Shakespearean depths of Kurosawa's echoing of King Lear in no way minimizes the literal veracity of his statement. For one crucial aspect of Ran as film adaptation is that Kurosawa impregnates its image/sound interaction with Noh's resonant stillness that parallels in its paradox's what Jan Kott calls King Lear's oxymoronic landscape where "sounds are present by their very absence: the silence is filled with them" (116). Just as Noh thrives on an interplay of sound and what Toru Takemitsu, Kurosawa's film composer, labels "that point of intense silence preceding it, called ma" (51), so does Ran imbue its visual action with an analogous sound/silence dialectic. Kurosawa re-imagines King Lear's oxymoronic edge by having sight and/or sound suspended or silenced through a Noh-inspired medley of"audible non-images" and "non-audible images" in his filmic diegesis. Kurosawa distills Kott's aural awareness of King Lear's absent presences to a Noh-like resounding silence. But this statement can be viewed in truer perspective if we analyze how Kurosawa develops Hidetora into a Noh Lear with a heart beating like that of a Shakespearean aural phantom.