https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=117 Index des publications de auteurs Anthony Davies fr 0 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=116 This essay sets out to explore the relationship between Shakespeare’s King Lear and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. Central to the growth of Kurosawa’s interest in the narrative and dramatic structures of Shakespeare is the conflict between authority and challenge within the family. Kurosawa sets his films Kumonosu-Djo and Ran in XVIth century Japan, a more rigidly ritualised social context than is the social frame of King Lear. Dialogue is reduced to a bare minimum in Ran, but the images with which Kurosawa projects the inner world of the characters as well as the outer world of natural space carry their own searing poignancy. Where Shakespeare’s play presents a situation which moves forward into the future, Kurosawa was convinced that the characters’ actions gain credibility if they emerge from a specifically sketched past, a difference which shifts the moral stature of the central character. There are no exact equivalents for the subsidiary King Lear characters in Ran. Rather there is frequently a distribution of character qualities among supporting, sometimes peripheral, characters. Like Shakespeare’s play, Ran is concerned with the relationship between humankind and animal. The hunt, a central motif in King Lear, is graphically established in Ran, raising questions about the place of man in the natural order. In both Shakespeare’s play and Kurosawa’s film, there emerges a view of humankind in which the likelihood of descent into catastrophic darkness is counterpoised against only a glimmer of potential insight. jeu., 28 janv. 2010 15:18:22 +0100 ven., 13 déc. 2024 23:30:16 +0100 https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/shakespeare/index.php?id=116