“There is an intensity in this film that does not let go from beginning to end. ” Mamoun Hassan on Throne of Blood , March 19 2012
Mamoun was recently invited to introduce a screening of Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 masterpiece ‘Throne of Blood’ at the National Film Theatre, London.
The film is an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the warrior tradition of Japanese myth.
This is Mamoun’s introduction
“Shakespeare is a problem for film makers. He has fantastic and vivid stories and creates characters whose actions and words embody truth like no other writer’s before or since.
The problem is that, just as Mozart was accused of writing too many notes, Shakespeare writes too many words. As Hitchcock said: Cinema is not about a camera looking at actors speaking. But there is also a more fundamental dilemma: Shakespeare’s words are continually painting pictures. There is a constant stream of images, similes and metaphors.Few directors have found a way of juggling his word pictures and the screen images. Kurosawa is one who has. He abandons Shakespeare’s words entirely but retains Shakespeare’s images in his own way. What we get is both Shakespeare’s poetry and Kurosawa’s poetry.”
