Apparently Akira Kurosawa is a master director of brilliant films, and creates beautiful, beautiful imagery like no other. I guess watching his most personal and illusive masterpiece on crappy 240p quality wasn't the brightest choice, but as soon as I heard about this film I was so curious to watch it.
I'm not sure why, but I've always had extremely vivid dreams that often border on the hallucinatory when I'm still in that groggy, half-awake state, and half of my mind is still well immersed in the reality I was living seconds ago. I guess that's why dreams have always had this eerie, dangerous quality about them to me - as if your own dreams can turn against you at any moment.
Kurosawa's Dreams is supposed to be based on real dreams Akira Kurosawa had since his childhood till the day he wrote the script. That in itself is a fascinating concept, because haven't we all had those few distinctive dreams throughout our lives that even years and years after, we can still remember them detail for detail?
I think you have to sink into a dream-like state yourself when you watch Kurosawa's Dreams. It's kudos to Kurosawa's amazing talent at being able to evoke such powerful emotions of fear and enchant the viewer with such striking cinematography, even if said viewer was viewing it on a small 13-inch monitor and 240p. The film is split into eight "dreams", each separate stories with himself at the centre as a child and a man. Although it really required patience to sit through all two hours of sometimes silent imagery, each "dream" had that one striking moment that had me sitting there, holding my breath with an eerie, prickly feeling washing over me.
I loved the first four dreams, all loosely based on Japanese folklore. The silent, deadly progression of fox spirits; the slow, slow and painful clinking of chains and raspy breathes as men trudge through a blizzard; a surviving commander staring into the mouth of a black tunnel. Every single sequence makes you question why the people are doing what they're doing. But that's what gives these sequences such a pronounced dream-like quality - the characters' immersion in such nonsensical reasoning.
Isn't it amazing how he can create an atmosphere of such deadly tension, simply with a little boy and a few men and women in fox masks? I love the music, the silence, the exact movements of the foxes in this scene. The feeling of having stumbled upon something sacred and forbidden, the feeling of being caught in the act is overwhelming.
I don't know why, I just find this film so fascinating. Even though the last four dreams were decidedly tacky and over-bearing, and the whole thing a little bit lengthy and self-indulging of Kurosawa, I know that those few eerie scenes will stay on my mind for a long time to come.
Kurosawa really captured the logic of the dream-world so well. In a vivid dream, everything makes so much sense, everything is emotionally over-bearing. When you awaken, you can't remember why you cared so much about such nonsense. Yet I always get this feeling of questioning the "sense" in reality too - doesn't it all seem like such nonsense to you? Couldn't it all be a dream and we wake up to the realisation that we haven't been living in reality at all?
