Weirdhouse Cinema: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

liked other Corosawa movies. This is not Seven Samurai that's like, you know, a gripping, exciting story. This is a movie that really asks for your patients as an audience member. The pace is moody and slow. There is no central or overarching plot. There are some themes and character types that recur, but each of the eight short stories is essentially self contained, and they partake of extremely varied tones, settings, and pacing. Some of the stories are like a weird

kind of improvisational fairy tale. Some are frightening, baffling encounters with monstrous entities. Some are kind of idyllic meetings between a curious protagonist and a thoughtful character, and some are apocalyptic visions of a doomed earth. You really get all different kinds of dreams in this movie.

dream sequence. Curasawa, with signature excellence here generates a strong ambience of dreams, often, or at least it seems to me, with a one two punch of first intriguing monotony and then this emotional upwelling.

recognize this basic form. Like I had this dream and I was like I was trying to put together some Ikia furniture and I couldn't put it together. And this just kept happening for what seemed like hours, and then my dad showed up and I had a conversation with my long deceased father, that sort of thing, you know, with so like a one two punch of monotony, lost in some sort of an environment or a situation that may not have anything that's really driving it forward, and

then there's some sort of emotional upwelling. It's almost like the dream is the garden of the subconscious, populated seemingly by weeds of various thoughts, memories, and observations, and then some powerful emotional resonance emerges through and into this dream garden, taking on its trapping.

fever film. I have to say. If you find yourself sort of drifting in and out, this is the perfect film to do it. There was a time or two where I caught myself falling asleep a little bit, which sometimes happens when you become horizontal and you watch films. But it's extra interesting with this picture because like Kurrasawa has already put you into the monotony of the dream sequence, you know, into the dream world, and so you find yourself slipping into that dream world for real.

cinema without acknowledging a Kira Kurosawa. And you know, it's certainly the case too with something like a Godzilla film, even because those several of the Godzilla films we've talked about in the show were filmed by Ishil Hondakrasawa's friend and a frequent collaborator under tow Host Studios. And then on top of all of this, it's ultimately impop well to discuss cinema at all without eventually referencing Krosawa, as he's one of the most famed and influential filmmakers of all time.

It's also an anthology. This is live action and it's Corsawa, and it's also an anthology.

The first one is called Sunshine through the Rain. In this one, a young boy wanders into the forest during a sunshower when it's raining, but the sun is shining against his mother's ad vice, and he witnesses the marriage ceremony of the fox spirits, which is something he should not have seen. This first segment may be my favorite segment of all. I'm really excited to talk more about it.

The second segment is the Peach Orchard. This takes place on a festival day in Japan called the Day of Hinomatsuri or the Dolls Day festival, sometimes the Girl's Day festival. On this day, a boy follows a spectral girl dressed in pink and white out to the terraces where a peach orchard used to grow, and the spirits of the now destroyed peach trees appear in the form of dolls and perform They talk to him, and they perform a

traditional dance. The third segment is called the Blizzard. In this segment, a group of four mountain climbers are struggling to reach camp in the middle of a terrible snowstorm, and the climbers they're overwhelmed by the snow. They begin to succumb to the cold, and their leader has a blood curdling vision of a snow witch. In the fourth

meant the tunnel. While walking home after the end of a war, presumably World War II, a Japanese military officer has to pass through a tunnel on a mountain road. There he meets first an angry dog strapped with explosives, and then a soldier, and then a company of soldiers who died under his command. The fifth segment crows. This one is more lighthearted. A painter is looking at the works of How are we going to say his name in this episode? I always Vincent the painter, Vincent van

goch or Vincent van Go. I'm just going to say van Go. I know that's not the correct original pronunciation. I'm sorry. That's how I always learned it when I was growing up the paintings of Vincent van Go. He looks at these paintings, he admires them, and then he sort of appears within the artistic world of van Go and then finally meets the artist and learns things about his vision and kind of interfaces with his view of art and the world. After that, we get a segment

called Mount fou and Red. This is where the terror really ramps up. Our Corrosawa surrogate here in many of these segments are probably in all of them, you can view the protagonist as some form of Kurusawa himself, either as a child or a sort of alternate life version of himself. In this segment, our surrogate finds himself in

a massive crowd of people fleeing a disaster. We see Mount Fuji in the distance appear glowing hot, framed by explosions, and then a man in a suit appears to explain that these explosions are caused by a meltdown at a nuclear power plant, and the people are being killed by clouds full of radioactive isotopes, and it just gets worse

from there. Next we have the Weeping Demon. In this segment, a man is climbing across a craggy, desolate landscape of rocks and gravel, and he encounters a monstrous man with a horn on his head. We learn that the man has been mutated by nuclear fallout, and against a backdrop of giant dandelions, he explains the cannibalistic hell of the radioactive desert, and then in the final segment, we get a rapid sort of down shift back into out of

all the horrors, into a more contemplative mode. This is a segment called the Village of the Watermills, where our Kurosawa protagonist kind of ambles into an idyllic rural village along a river and he meets a wise old man and observes the local customs.

be more. This just feels right. Somehow it got to the right place.

Way that you know, gets into this a bit as well. And Yeah, one of the things that I found very interesting is that like he's apparently, you know, very much kind of a loner, a man of few words. There, you know, he would what he would say about his process and A and and certainly in his directorial approach was often succinct and to the point. But uh, but

he wasn't. He was admittedly like not somebody that would talk about theory a lot like it kind of like he sees it in his head, he knows exactly how he wants it to work, and then you know, some amount of experimentation finding that that form. But he's he's not spouting a lot of theory. He's not then doing a lot of a film theory analysis of what worked

and what didn't. And it's kind of left to all of the people that he influenced to come back and continually rewatch and describe exactly what he was doing.

an artistic vision. You know, they're using their techniques and their skills to sort of put what they see in their head on the screen, versus the humanistic vision that is more concerned with themes and characters and film as narrative and film as kind of I don't know, an abstract product, something that you could explain and talk about and interpret the meaning of. And I think you could easily make the case that Corrusawa is very much both.

Like you could make the argument that he is one more than the other, but in both directions.

As of this recording, the film is not on Criterion Channel, but as with any streaming service, titles come and go there. I don't know if that's simply the case, or it has something to do with the Warner Brothers aspect of this production. I'm not sure, but yeah, you can definitely get it on Criterion Collection, Blu ray or DVD, but it's not on Criterion Channel right now, all right?

extras on the disc that I just referenced. So, Krasawa was the youngest child and a moderately wealthy Japanese family descended from the former samurai class. His initial creative interest was painting, which is interesting given one of our segments in this film, but he followed his gifted older brother,

Hego in his passion for cinema. Hago worked as an on site silent film narrator or benshi at this time and apparently enjoyed some amount of success there, and as Akira lived with him at the time, he was able to gain entry into an array of films, plays, and circus performances, which he would later cite as being very

influential on his craft. Now, Hago's work dried up with the decline of silent films during the nineteen thirties, Akira moved back with his parents and two of his sisters, and Hago sadly died by suicide in nineteen thirty three. In nineteen thirty five, the Kurra Crosawa answered an advert in the newspaper from Photo Chemical Laboratories PCL. This is what would go on to become Toho Studios. They were seeking new assistant directors to engage in a mentor apprenticeship program,

and so Akira submitted an essay. I've read that it was kind of a cheeky submission where he's like, the prompt was something like what would you do to fix a Japanese cinema And he's like, it can't be fixed or something. I don't know, but at any rate he won them over. He received a callback, and he went on to work with numerous established and up and coming directors.

A special note his mentor, Kajiro Yamamoto. Kurosawa also took to screenwriting during this time, saw the value of that, and he served as a second unit or assistant director on numerous films and wrote screenplays for a handful of films before co writing and filming his first directorial effort with nineteen forty three's Sanshiro Sugata, a serious judo drama. I've not seen this one, but I've seen some clips from it, and they discussed it in the extras on

the disc. It would spawn a nineteen forty five sequel, which he also co wrote and directed. In the twenty eleven documentary Kursawa's Way on the Criterion Collection disc, they point out this picture's sublime portrayal of action. So it's a judo film. It's a wrestling picture, but like a serious one, not like a Santo picture or some of the latter, you know, Japanese pro wrestling of pictures and

so forth. But the action is really interesting because it has pointed out in this documentary, there's less of a focus on the actual grappling, or certainly the most impactful physical moments of the grappling war on audience responses, audio, emotional responses to the impact. So we won't actually see the impact. We'll see how people respond to it, and then we'll see sort of the results of that impact,

which is very interesting. So Kisawa's wartime work included propaganda films, which apparently also included, to varying degrees, the Judo Pictures, especially the sequel. His work during this time sometimes was seen as too Western by sensors, and his nineteen forty five film The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, a period piece, managed to run a foul of both imperial Japanese sensors and then subsequently American occupation sensors, for being in one case too democratic and then in the

other case too feudal. I guess this is often the case. If you're managing to piss everyone off, maybe you're doing something right.

fifties Raschaman, which earned him international acclaim, including recognition at the Academy Awards in nineteen fifty two, and from there, Kirasawa went on to write and direct some of the best regarded films in cinema history, including but not limited to, fifty four to seven Samurai, fifty seven's Throwne of Blood, fifty eight's The Hidden Fortress, sixty one's Yojimbo, sixty threes, High and Low, nineteen eighties Kejimusha, The Shadow Warrior, and

nineteen eighty five's Ron. These decades entailed various ups and down industry changes, some unsuccessful Hollywood projects, most notably Runaway Train, which would ultimately be directed by another director nineteen eighty five, various setbacks and excursion of the Soviet Union to shoot nineteen seventy five's durso Uzala, and a comeback partially produced by influential American directors who he had heavily influenced himself.

And this was increasingly important as Japanese studios were in this time less likely to back him, and so he was increasingly turning to outside and foreign financers. And certainly that's the case with Dreams.

But at the same time, there was like a lot of excitement for it, especially among directors who admired his work so much. And another interesting wrinkle is that apparently, I mean, this comes as a surprise I think for many because I know when I started watching Krosawa films, they were airing i think on Turner Classic Movies and

or American Movie Classics. Even it seems weird that they would be on American movie class American Movie Classic showed a lot of different films, but at any rate, I had ready access to them on television on cable, and nowadays, you know, you have all these excellent criterion collection editions. But apparently for a while they weren't all necessarily available on home video, with the exception of Dreams because of the Warner Brothers connection.

The Sea Is Watching would ultimately be made in two thousand and two by a different director, among a couple of other posthumous screenplay credits. Now, to come back to something I was talking about here earlier, one of the things driven home by numerous Japanese and international directors in Kursaw was way the documentary is that he is really

the epitome of a director's director. I imagine you could take that a step further now and say that he's a director's director's director, or to that effect.

is going to work on you. You are going to You're not going to necessarily unless you're, you know, making an effort to You're just it's going to. Its spell is going to work. You're not going to be maybe thinking about how he's shooting everything. Because in part of it, too, I think, is because he was so influential, many of the things he did simply became more or less standards of filmmaking.

Hope born nineteen forty seven. Born into successful acting family. He's also a musician, having been in the nineteen sixties band The Savage Joe. I included an album cover from The Savage They don't look very savage. They look just like some very clean cut guys here. Yeah, they look like they're they're ready to head down to the sokop. Yeah.

But he subsequently launched a successful solo career, and I think in this he took on a more edgy persona and often had kind of like a like a nihilistic kind of like dressed in black, wearing sunglasses thing going.

If you out there are fans, write in and tell me all about it.

protagonist is quite passive. That just varies a lot between the segments, and there's no narrative continuity between them, but there is a kind of thematic continuity, like the segments are strung together by associations and preoccupations rather than causality. And so this was making me think. I was trying to the performance, like, do the events of one dream

at all affect the protagonist in a different dream? And I think you could see it going both ways, Like the events of the movie never seem to be literally additive, and yet they may be kind of like the other dreams are kind of stirring in the memory of the protagonist in the other segments. You know, I don't know exactly how you would read that into Tara Oh's performance here,

but that does feel right. It feels like it's part of his story that there is I don't know, somehow, like not complete conscious knowledge of what was dreamt in the other dreams, but a kind of vague sense of I've had a feeling like this before.

stand in. Sometimes he's more of a voyeuristic figure or even an avatar by which we experience the dream, though his role is more personal and intense in certain segments, namely the Tunnel, which we'll get to.

in subsequences. I the Dreamer is played by a child a couple of different actors I believe, Mitsunori Issaki born seventy seven, and then another actor by the name of Toshiko Nakano playing younger versions of the Dreamer.

Last Megalopolis. That's one I haven't seen, but that one's kind of famous for a couple of different reasons, including the fact that hr Giger designed something for it, twenty twelve's Helter Skelter, and Oh, I don't know anything about this one, but sometimes the title just catches you twenty sixteens. If Katz disappeared from the world, I'm enthralled. I need to know more about that one, but anyway, she's won

multiple acting award in her native Japan. All right. In the tunnel sequence, we have a ghostly figure from the past that shows up, Private Naguchi played by Yoshitaka Sushi born nineteen fifty five, another Ron cast member who was also in a number of other pictures, including two other Kurosawa pictures, sixty five's Red Beard and nineteen seventies Dotsukatton. Now late in the picture, we're going to have an old man character who is fabulous, played by Chishu Ryu,

who lived nineteen oh four through nineteen ninety three. Award winning and long lasting Japanese actor, his work spans six decades, and his other credits include Red Beard, nineteen fifty three's Tokyo Story and nineteen eighty five's Mishima, a Life in four chapters. He also appeared in Vim Vendors Until the End of the World in nineteen ninety one.

a different character. But he's generally pretty good. Sometimes it's certainly a little broader in his performance, but yeah, that's a good point is he does seem to be essentially trying to play Vincent van Go here, and I was also thinking this is also perfect like dream logic, you know, like I had a dream last night and I was having a conversation with Vincent van Go, but he was also somehow Martin Scorsese at the same time. Yes, that's

kind of the vibe here. Another fun little cameo, I guess would say in that particular segment, the woman in the fields that the dreamer initially interacts with before being sent in the direction of Vincent van Go is played by Catherine Cadau. Kursaw was longtime personal translator and director of that twenty eleven documentary Charsawa's Way.

and two thousand and seven's Glory to the Filmmaker. He won the Japanese Academy Award for composing multiple times.

not like you really notice. It's not like ILM came in and made all the Fox people look like wookies or anything. I don't know. It's like the effects are I guess, really good and often invisible.

viewers to understand that these are humans. So I get the impression that carasaw will, maybe even's head of them, scale back a little bit on things, because you know, often I think it's the case in this picture that otherworldly beings they do have a kind of like stage presence, Like they certainly come off like human beings in makeup,

and there's not there. There doesn't seem to be an overt attempt to portray them as overtly otherworldly beings, Like there's a humanity to them that I guess is essential here.

he is heading out, it starts to rain. And I don't know, somehow that beginning in itself, even before we really are thinking of this as a dream, that's so evocative of childchildhood, you know, the feeling of wanting to go outside and play and it starts raining, Or at least it was for me. I don't know that that feels like such a familiar and cutting kind of frustration.

So the boy, he's come out the door of his house, but he stands under an archway in the gate that goes around the outside of the home, and he's watching the rain come down, and it is a sunshower, so the sun is shining even though there is precipitation. And then from the background, we see the boy's mother emerge from the house and she hurries out into the courtyard to gather some baskets of something. I think maybe she was drying some kind of food items in the sun

or something. And she's pulling the baskets inside, and she calls out to the boy and she says, you're staying home. The sun is shining, but it's raining. Foxes hold their wedding processions in this weather and they don't like anyone to see them. If you do, they'll be very angry. And she runs back inside. So actually, maybe here should we do a little sidebar on the folklore of the Kitsuni no yumeiri. This is the fox's wedding.

We don't see really the tops of the trees. We just see these column like trunks, and the ground is covered in sprouting plants with long green leaves that come up to the boy's waist, and we can see sheets of rain and mist are billowing sideways through the gaps between the trees, and then you can also see individual shafts of sunlight crossing down through holes in the canopy, and all this together makes the air appear to have a kind of silky, shimmering texture. It's so beautiful and

it looks like a place absolutely where magic happens. And as we watch the scene, there is just this mounting sense of the strange and unreal. For example, one thing, you see a close up of the boy who is he's walking silently through the woods. He's looking around, not saying anything, and I noticed he's dry. It's raining, but he's not wet. There's no music, no talking, just this kind of soft skittering sound of rain on the leaves, and the boy just keeps looking around, wide eyed, like

he is expecting to see something. And then he does see something. There's a bank of white mist, and through it he sees the outline of a shrine carved in stone. And then slowly music begins. We hear drums and a wood block and a flute playing a slow, mysterious melody. The rhythm on the drums in the woodblocks is also kind of slow and stuttering, and over the background of this music, the boy watches a procession of figures slowly

marching out of the fog. They are human dancer in fox makeup rob as you were saying there, they're distinctly human in forms, so they didn't try to make them quadrupedal or anything. They're standing upright basically human, but their faces are painted a rosy white color, with red fur over their noses and cheeks, and they have whiskers. The women are wearing veils over their heads, and the men wear a sort of disc shaped hat. The first two

men in the procession are carrying these cylindrical objects. I'm not sure what these are, but they might be some form of paper lantern. I know that fox wedding processions in folklore are sometimes said to be carrying paper lanterns like you can see them as dancing lights.

just in it. You know, who knows if the dream is going to is going to continue on to some point of emotional upwelling, though of course it will in this case.

have such a child in my house. And angry fox came looking for you. He left this, And then from a pouch in her sleeve, the mother produces a tonto knife. The boy takes it and he pulls the knife from the sheath and the mother says, you're to a tone by cutting your belly open. And I was like, WHOA. That hits hard because this is a little child. This is not like a you know, not even like an like the little kid, and it hits hard. But this to me felt so real as a child's dream turning

into a nightmare. It is so much more unacceptably threatening and dangerous than adults like to imagine children's dreams are. But this is, I mean, this is what I remember children's dreams being like that. There's a way that the child's mind is sort of uncensored. It is it like it goes to much more bold and horrible and frightening place, says than adults want a child's mind to go to.

And this felt like a real dream in multiple ways, with like the you know, the threat that you have to cut your own belly open, but also in the in the way that the mother is not comforting, like he's done something bad and the mother has become alien and threatening to him.

You must go prepared to die for your sin. And then as the gate is almost nearly shut all the way, she says that until they forgive him, she can't let him back in. And then finally the boy speaks. He pleads that he doesn't know where their home is, but the mother says, of course you do. Their home is

beneath the rainbow. And so now we and the gate shuts, and so, now afraid and alone, the boy sets out again into the woods with the deadly knife in his hands, and eventually he comes to a clearing and it's a meadow full of flowers. It's just huge mass of flowers, millions of flowers, all in bloom in spring colors yellow, white, pink, and violet, and this mysterious music swells and then we can see the boy from behind. This is probably the

most iconic shot from the film. The boy is now entering a narrow valley framed by dark mountains, and in the middle ground there there's the meadow of the spring flowers, and a rainbow bends over the field. And this has got to be the most beautiful and certainly the most frightening use of a rainbow in a film that I can think of, because it's a rainbow that's obviously not just a disconnected vision that is pretty to look at,

as rainbows are often in movies. This is a place, and it is the spectral castle of the vengeful Fox Spirits. And the boy stands there facing the rainbow. He's clutching the knife. He is amazed and afraid, and he begins again to walk to its center, and the music is swelling up with these ominous notes on the woodwinds and then fade to black. Yeah, and that's the end, So

we never see him face the fox Spirits. In the true essence of a dream, these vignettes often begin in the middle of the action, or begin with a kind of unexplained arrival, and they often stop right in the middle of the story as well, usually right as the tension is kind of rising to its peak.

very strong opening segment here. I agree on the danger and seriousness of children's dreams displayed here, and it seems a fitting way too, to look at the way that children are you eventually thrust, maybe without warning, into you know, out of their lives of protected curiosity and into a more serious world of reality. Though of course in this case it's it's it's not quite reality. It's a supernatural threat.

But still it's like his world of just sort of play and curiosity has suddenly taken this sharp turn into a into threatening confines.

at the transition from winter to spring. I think these days it's often on March third, where families pray for the well being of their daughters. It's sort of a health and well being of our Daughter's Day. And the festival includes the display of dolls known as Hena Nino or Hena doll, which are styled after the imperial court

of the Hayan period. So the protagonist, the boy, he brings a tray of goodies to his older sister who is with her friends, and they're in a room with a tiered display of Hena dolls in the background, and the boy stops to look at the dolls and there's kind of a strangeness, a music sting that indicates something is a little striking or unusual. And then he realizes that he brought more food to his sister and her

friends than is needed. He thought that she had five friends with her, but there are only four friends there now, and he insists that he saw another girl with them earlier, but the sister tells him no, there are no other girls here. He is being strange. But then he sees the girl again. The other girl is dressed in pink and white, and she's watching him from the hallway, but she disappears when he tries to get his sister to look and see the.

an Emperor doll Man, the leader of them all. He addresses the boy sternly, and he says that they will never return to his house again because his family cut down the peach orchard that used to be on this hill. And he explains that they are the spirits of the peach trees, which are celebrated on the Dolls Day festival. And there seems to be kind of an implication that because of the family's treachery, they will also withhold their blessings from the family, and the boy begins to cry,

and the Emperor yells at him. He tells him it's too late for tears. But then the Queen Doll remembers something. She says, this is the same boy who cried for the trees when they were being cut down. They say they remember he even pleaded with his family not to do it, not to cut down the orchard, and the Emperor at first he scoffs at this. He says that was only because the boy knew he would stop getting peaches to eat, and all of the members of the

court laugh at him, but the boy protests. He says no, He says you can buy peaches at the store, but where can you buy a whole orchard of trees in bloom. He says he was crying because he loved the trees at themselves as living things, and then he starts to cry again. And then the doll people seem sort of ashamed. You can see them sort of looking at their feet and hanging their heads. And the emperor accepts the boy's explanation.

He says he's a good boy and that he will be allowed to see the orchard in bloom one last time. And then there's a dance with all of the figures taking place on the terraces, and they perform these choreographed movements to symbolize the flowering of the trees. And then at the end of the dance, the boy sees the peach trees blossoming again, and there are petals falling everywhere. He also sees the girl in pink, and he tries to run after her, but suddenly he's back in the

real world and all the trees are chopped down. Now they're just bare stumps, all except one. There's one tree that has a limb covered in flowers, kind of bouncing in the wind. And he goes over to it and he looks at it, and the end, what was going to happen next we don't get to see.

little bit more cursory and talking about this one. Basically, it is four mountain climbers who are going up this mountain. They get hit by this blizzard. They're struggling in the snow. We see for a long time just them fighting against the wind and the snow, trying to make their way up hill but it is and they're trying to make the way to camp, but they can't see which way

they're going. There's disagreement about whether they're on the right track, and eventually they begin to sort of get snowed in. They succumb to the snow and they're being covered up and they're freezing, and they sort of settle down, and there's the implication that if they do this and they don't reach camp, they're going to die. And then we see things from the perspective of the lead climber. It's sort of the leader of all of them, who's been

trying to rally his friends to keep going. We see a figure begins to sort of put blankets over him, these shimmering blankets and shawls that go over his body

like layers of snow. And this is from what I've read, this is supposed to be a traditional figure from Japanese folklore known as the yuki onna, which might be like the snow princess or snow fairy, snow witch, something like that, the snow spirit, who I think is often threatening in nature and here or she's ambiguous at first, but then I think by the end we can learn as definitely a threatening figure.

are mountains in Japan. The tale of the Yukiyono was famously adapted in the nineteen sixty five film Kaitan, which we might come back to. The core stories involve her sparing a handsome young man during a blizzard like after like brutally killing his compatriots with winter powers, but then sparing him on the condition that he never tell anyone about this, and so the young man survives, and then, as luck would have it, he meets a beautiful young

woman the next day. The two fall in love, they're married, they eventually have children, and yet the whole time, this need to tell the story of the woman in the snow steadily builds up inside him, till one day he breaks and he tells his wife about what happened in the snow that day. And I don't want to spoil anything, because it's pretty pretty amazing, but essentially we see the ramifications of him breaking his promise to the YUKIONO.

he sort of tries to he revives his compatriots. I think they're all still alive, and he sort of shakes them, tries to get them to wake up, and then they realize their camp is like right there, they're right beside it and they didn't know because of the storm. A lot of reviewers flag this, I at least from what I've seen online, as their least favorite segment. I think primarily because of how slow and monotonous parts of it are.

Like it is very dreamlike in that respect, especially in the first half of them just fighting through the snow and the wind is blowing. But I don't know. I like this segment, and I really like the part where the snow witch speaks. You know, when the snow witch comes up over him while he's lying down. She's putting the shawls over him, and there's some kind of modulation on her voice, like it's doubled or something, so it sounds very strange. And you hear her saying, the snow

is warm. It's so frightening.

necessarily have. And as he comes up the road, he faces the entrance to a tunnel. It's hard to say exactly why, but there is something really just cursed and ominous about this tunnel. I don't think it's a set made for the film. It looks like it's probably just a real concrete tunnel somewhere.

but they were at least trained. So in this case, it is a dog with a kind of saddle on its back, covered in pockets, and the pockets are stuffed with grenades. It is a bleak and horrifying image.

into the tunnnnel, which is cavernous and echoing. We see these tracking, these moving shots going through the tunnel, just looking up at the ceiling of the tunnel as kind of light plays on it as he's walking along, and we can see the officer's breath, we hear his boots kind of clapping and reverberating as he makes his way down to the other end, and then we see at the emerging side of the tunnel the sky is dark blue and illuminated by a red lamp, which I thought

was interesting. Kind of reminds me of that Charles Dickens ghost story we talked about last October, the signalman with the ghost or the premonition appearing by the red light at the end of the rail tunnel. And so after the commander comes out the other end of the passage, he stops because he hears steps behind him. Who's that He turns around to see and it is a ghost. It is a soldier in combat uniform with rifle and helmet and his skin painted blue blue fleshed being who

should not be and the commander recognizes him. This is someone known to the protagonist. This is Private Naguchi, but Private Naguchi was killed in action and Noguchi is confused. He believes maybe he is still alive. He remembers going home after the war and being given rice cakes by his mother, remembers being comforted by his mother, but the commander has to explain to him, no, that was a dream you had. This is a dream about you know, the dreams of others. That was a dream you had.

You were shot in battle and you passed out, and you woke up, and you told me you had that dream where you went home and saw your mother and she gave you rice cakes. Then you died in my arms a few minutes later, and Noguchi is so confused. He's he points out a light in the mountains beyond and he says, that's that's my parents' home, that house right there where the light is. But the commander argues

with him. He tells him that he has to act up, that he is dead and he has to go to his rest, and he eventually the ghost seems to give in. He turns about face and he walks back into the tunnel. But it's not over because then here comes everyone, the entire company who served under this commander, and they come marching out of the tunnel. Information they're you know, they're like calling out drill instructions. They call him marching and

they stand in order in front of him. And here there's a confrontation where ultimately the commander has to accept his responsibility for their death in battle, where he says he would like to blame the stupidity of war for the deaths of his men, but he knows in his heart that he bears personal responsibility for sending them into certain doom because it was it was a feudal attempt,

but he sent them into battle anyway. And I feel like this moment highlights a theme that I think appears in multiple segments of this movie, which is the theme of individual responsibility versus a kind of collective blame or stupidity. Specifically, like there's a theme of the inadequacy of placing blame

for tragedies on abstract, impersonal forces or diffuse collectives. So there's the case here, But then the same thing happens in the next segment in Mount Fujian Red where or actually two segments later, where there's like a bureaucratic man in a suit and glasses who kind of contrasts a force of impersonal stupidity and arrogance that allowed the nuclear meltdown in that segment to occur. But then he acknowledges that he is personally to blame somehow, though he doesn't

explain how. And this seems to be something that's on the dreamer's mind. It's one of these themes that comes up in multiple cases.

And then you might think the encounter is over, but there is another escalation because we get the return of the dog. So the anti tank dog runs back out again and begins it starts snarling and menacing the officer, and once again it just ends at this moment of heightened menace where we don't know how it resolves.

that can be raised so boats can pass underneath. But there's a carriage, a horse drawn carriage on the wooden part of the bridge, and then down in the foreground there are women washing clothes in the river. And our protagonist just sort of wanders into this scene and it's reproduced in a spectacular way. I love the way that the color qualities of the van Go paintings are recreated in the sets and the lighting that Kusawa puts together here.

into a blue sky. The version we see a van Go portrayed by Martin Scorsese, and this vignette seems to resemble the figure, at least as I found in a Vango painting called Painter on the Road to Tarasan or Terrascon. Again, I'm not sure how to say that, but he's got a you know, a wide straw hat and just a lot of stuff with him. You know, he's got all his gear and his painting and a satchel and all that. The VANGOI meet is very distracted, you know, he's never

really giving the protagonist his full attention. His attention is on the scene and the landscape. And there's a lot of idea of like, you know, what's really valuable here is this scene and its beauty, and I must consume it and process it and turn it into something and that's what that's what matters. And I'm sort of halfway giving you enough attention to talk to you, but only about what I I'm.

sees Mount Fuji just it looks like hot lava. It's just you know, glowing hot, and there are these explosions, and he learns that it's due to a nuclear meltdown. And as we talked about, they have these discussions. A man in a suit appears and he kind of explains things.

There's this long digression about the different colored like the different colors of fog and what radioactive isotopes they represent, and how each one kills you in different ways, and they're like, well, we color coded them so you can know which type of fog is killing you, but it

doesn't help you survive. It seems to be some kind of commentary on like the absurdity of like false senses of security provided by technology and that there are these, you know, threats that people just kind of rush into and we're given false assurance that it's going to be okay, but in fact that that was all you know, that was all just rosy talk, and in fact this is real stupidity and people are really to blame for this disaster.

meltdowns happening like behind the mountain. But at the same time everything has like the flavor of volcanic eruptions, so it's like both things at once without being either.

anyone can do. Again, ends right at the height of the action, and then goes on to the next segment, another nuclear horror segment called The Weeping Demon, where our protagonist is wandering in this volcanic landscape very much it's almost like the slopes of Mount Fuji maybe, where there's a kind of dark volcanic soil and all these rocks and mist and fog billowing everywhere, and he encounters this monstrous looking figure with a horn on his head, which

I think is initially styled to be some sort of some kind of onny.

demons who have two or three horns. And they're also hungry, and then we see there's like a scene where the demon is like, come, I'll show you, and he leads the protagonists to this overlook where they look down at these gross like pools of pink and red water, where all of these demons are like running around them in circles in a way that suggests representations from Dante's Inferno, where you know, in hell you will have the damned sort of like running in pointless circles around something.

as part of a scheme to keep prices high. And and but they talk about other people who did other things who may have become even worse kinds of demons themselves. And so another just bleak, horrifying segment that also ends with the demon just menacing the Krusauur protagonist and the protagonist is running away down the side of the mountain, looking constantly like he's about to go headlong and tumble away.

foot in a small rural village beside a river. There are these old wooden water wheels turning in the current, and I guess they're running mills, and they're flowers blooming everywhere, and kursaw, what really takes time to show us the nature around there, to show us like green water plants waving in the stream, kind of like hair blowing in

the wind. And the dreamer comes in and he watches the children as they sort of gather on a little island in the stream that's bridged, you know that they reach by bridge and they pick flowers there, and they take the flowers and they lay them all on a stone. It's a very just beautiful, kind of gentle scene. And the dreamer meets an old man who's working on a water wheel mechanism of some kind, and they have a long conversation where the old man just kind of explains

his philosophy. They talk about all kinds of things. He A big part of it is him talking about how they don't need technology in this village. The man's like, don't you have electricity here? And the man's like, we don't need it and he's like, yeah, but what about at night when it gets dark? And the guy's like,

night is supposed to be dark. And so the main thrust of the old Man's philosophy is that people and people in the cities think that labor saving technology will make them happy, but secretly it just makes them more miserable, and they don't realize it until they have already destroyed the natural world and they can't get it back.

you've seen this kind of vibe. And I believe and I would go as far as to say, like this the sequence too, like it feels very much in line with like a Miyazaki film too, and that we have just such vibrant colors, like this is the world in full bloom. This is like it is almost like an Eden to some extent. And oh and by the way, I should mention that that documentary Cursaw Was Way also

features interview segments with me asz Aki. He's one of the many directors who talks about his admiration for Cursawa's work.

and this is another part of his philosophy. He says, well, when someone dies young, it's sad, but when someone dies in old age, it's a joyous occasion because they lived a full life. So the people march and they sing happy songs. And the woman who died in the funeral that's being celebrated today was almost one hundred years old. In fact, she was this old man's first love when they were both very young. She broke his heart she married another, and then he just laughs about it.

on it. It's hard not to think about the man who died as being kind of suggested as another version of the visitor of the dreamer here and then from here, the old man goes off to celebrate the death of his first love, and the traveler watches the funeral march and listens to the happy music, and he feels kind of infused with the goodness and the happiness of this place, and we hear the music as well. That's the end.

That like, in several of the more nightmarish scenes, especially, there is a dilemma faced by the characters in which they can either be annihilated, they can cease to exist or live on transformed into something tortured and unnatural. This is a major theme of the Weeping Demon. It comes up in Mount Fuji and Red, where they talk about the idea of immediate death versus a slow death from

the effects of radiation. It comes up in the Tunnel because the dead soldiers can't acknowledge that they are dead and they must cease to exist. Thus they go on in this baffled, twisted state of blue undeath. This clearly seems to be something that is on Krosova's mind. Another thing is across multiple scenes, I noticed a repeated theme of people getting no help from authorities and in fact

authority figures suggesting that you must die like. There are multiple scenes where someone is denied aid by someone who should help them, or by an authority figure like a parent the mother in the first sequence, or a government official or a military commander.

there is promise in coming to see it. And so I think the clear statement of the idea is that the natural world is absolutely vital to us, but that we remain blind to how important it is until we have already destroyed it. This theme is made very plain in the speech given by the old Man and the final Dream, where he's talking about the virtues of living simply and being in harmony with nature. He talks about the false promise of happiness through technology and convenience and materialism.

But you see this theme occur at different levels through I think most of the segments, like the boy in the peach orchard is redeemed by proving that he hated the idea of cutting down the peach trees, and that he loved the orchard for the living beauty of the plants, not just for the produce. Not just for the material, you know, the peaches they grew.

They become part of it and they work with it, and it makes even death a happy thing.

But certainly there is a lot of wisdom in the movies plea to be more conscious and protective of nature and to see ourselves as being in an absolutely vital kind of personal relationship with it, each one of us, and also together as a community.

gohe and close it up. But hey, we'll be back next week with another cinematic masterpiece. Stay tuned for that one. Just a reminder that Weird House Cinema this is the episode that publishes on Fridays and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. We're also experimenting with a standalone playlist of Weird House Cinema, so you can find Weird House Cinema listed separately on whatever platform it is you having to get your podcasts at. So check that out and if you are on a letterbox dot com. You

can find us there. We are Weird House. That's our username, and there's a list of all the films we've covered thus far, and sometimes a peek ahead at what's coming up next.