Tuesday, March 1
The tragedy
When Shakespeare did a tragedy, he really meant it. I finished up Ran last night. It was an adaption of William Shakespeare's King Lear.
Almost everyone who mattered, both good and evil, died painful deaths. Even Lady Sue, the parallel character of The Duke of Albany in Lear, was not spared. She was dastardly assassinated by her sister-in-law.
I felt so frigging bad after the show. Granted, I studied Macbeth, one of the four wings of Shakespeare's tragic and tragicomic productions, for a good two years in preparation for my 'O' levels.
But Lear (Ran) was not, as most tragedies, a picture of a calamity in which the sudden blows of fate seem still to honor the head which they strike, and where the loss is always accompanied by some flattering consolation in the memory of the former possession.
It was a deep fall from the highest elevation into the deepest abyss of misery, where humanity is stripped of all external and internal advantages, and given up a prey to naked helplessness.
As in Macbeth terror reaches its utmost height, in King Lear the sense of compassion is exhausted. The principal characters here are not those who act, but those who suffer.
- TheatreHistory.com
When Shakespeare did a tragedy, he really meant it. I finished up Ran last night. It was an adaption of William Shakespeare's King Lear.
Almost everyone who mattered, both good and evil, died painful deaths. Even Lady Sue, the parallel character of The Duke of Albany in Lear, was not spared. She was dastardly assassinated by her sister-in-law.
I felt so frigging bad after the show. Granted, I studied Macbeth, one of the four wings of Shakespeare's tragic and tragicomic productions, for a good two years in preparation for my 'O' levels.
But Lear (Ran) was not, as most tragedies, a picture of a calamity in which the sudden blows of fate seem still to honor the head which they strike, and where the loss is always accompanied by some flattering consolation in the memory of the former possession.
It was a deep fall from the highest elevation into the deepest abyss of misery, where humanity is stripped of all external and internal advantages, and given up a prey to naked helplessness.
4 Comments:
that was such a gorgeous, epic, tragic film...that sister in law was frightening too..yikes...
i remember being kinda shellshocked leaving the theatre after seeing it...even after all these years; and while i loved it, i've hesitated to watch it again.
Yes, it was such a tragic film. This 160-minute historical epic won several international awards, but it was not a hit in Japan. I don't know why that is so. Perhaps the brutality of it turned the people off.
It's hard to imagine that A Kurosawa was 75 when he made that film.
Ran was a brilliant movie. But it is a bit long in places, and more than a bit of a downer. I love it anyway.
Slow and long in some places, yes, definitely not for the tired viewers.
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