When a phonograph record crackles and pops it sounds just like when there's seeds in the shitty shwag you're smoking.
- Jason Philip Wierzba
- Jason Philip Wierzba
Wendy Marriott's Bright Boy with Dark Shadows
is No Longer Any Kind of a Boy
Creepy, Before We Vanish, To the Ends of the Earth, Wife of a Spy, Cloud...The Samurai and the Prisoner. It is now time for me to officially insist after having seen this new one focusing as it does on consciousness raising and the warrior mindset—tipping its hat a little to the other Kurosawa and his ongoing dalliance with Samurai Shakespeare—that Kiyoshi Kurosawa is the best and most consistent director working anywhere in the world today. His formal control clearly extends to mastery of every facet of production and postproduction. Hearing his sound designs in a theatre is always a true delight, as it very much was at the Globe last night. The Arioka Castle set is highly reminiscent of the main set from Kenji Mizoguchi's 1954 masterpiece A Story from Chikamatsu. In terms of manner and aesthetic, I would in general tend to associate Kiyoshi Kurosawa more with the presiding philosophy and strategies of Mizoguchi than with those of Akira Kurosawa, as both Mizoguchi and Kiyoshi Kurosawa are Japanese monumentalists, closer to architects or sculptors than to painters, concerned as they are with scale, geometry, and durability.
During the brief and dizzying period in 2016 when Pokémon Go took off and mobilized roaming distracted multitudes all over the planet, I very much thought I was getting a glimpse into the future of the human species. It will become easier to organize and direct people remotely, for better and for worse. When collectivized far-right edgelords stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021, some of them would go on to say in their defence that they didn't really know why they were getting on a plane and going to Washington, it having been a matter in the end of their simply following their social media and connected devises like automotons. In his previous film, 2024's Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa was the first artist in any field that I'm aware of to roll up his sleeves and deal with the omnipresent connective/vaporous cloud, the organizing metaphor that extends in historical order from the web and the net and indicates like Pokémon Go that the lives of groups can become a kind of treasure hunt that doesn't lead to any specific or determinable destination. Already in films like Creepy and Before We Vanish, we bear witness to characters whose motivations are so deeply unconscious and opaque that it becomes increasingly unclear whether those motivations originate with them in any proper sense. Set in feudal Japan during the Sengoku period and at the end of what a title card calls the age of warfare, The Samurai and the Prisoner could be said to be about a presiding historical spirit (akin to Hegel's Geist) that encompasses entire communities or nations and delineates for individuals their nebulous roll in an inchoate living apparatus. When the world war is always intimate and local, always at his doorstep, it is impossible for the war-maker or demigod to thrive or to possess a proper world-frame. Araki Murashige, the titular samurai, is unable to determine if the calamity happening around him is divine punishment, internal sabotage, or manipulation by outside forces. The prisoner, Kuroda Kanbei, becomes an Iago whose basic threat must be set aside so that a workable course of action may be forged. Whatever is a Warrior King to do? Salvation lies not in hunkering down and watching the material world fall in on you as the role in which you are imprisoned becomes instantaneously and permanently outmoded. Salvation is there for the powerful one who disconnects and walks away. To know the moment is to read the signs.
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