See also individual entry for Macbeth

Throne of Blood [Original title: Kumonosu-jô], 1957. This loose Japanese-language adaptation of Macbeth, directed by Akira Kurosawa, starred Toshirô Mifune as Taketoki Washizu; Isuzu Yamada as Lady Asaji Washizu; Takashi Shimura as Noriyasu Odagura; and Akira Kubo as Yoshiteru Miki.

Michael Mullin, in an essay from 1973 titled “Macbeth on Film,” wrote that “[t]o achieve his ends, Kurosawa boldly rewrote the play, renaming the characters and setting the action in medieval Japan. Thus, the stylized acting of the Noh theatre and the ceremonies of the Samurai became the cultural analogues of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan theatre and of the courtly language, customs, and codes of Macbeth’s Scotland.” According to Mullin, “As Kurosawa transposed the play from one culture to another, he also altered the nature of the Weird Sisters and the supernatural, so that there is no explicit identification of the Old Woman with evil, nor of Macbeth’s enemies with the good. And, so too, clarifying the plot, he made pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage the triggers which sprung open first Lady Macbeth’s ambition, then, her guilt-ridden insanity” (334).

Publishing in 1974, Ana Laura Zambrano, in her essay “Throne of Blood: Kurosawa’s Macbeth,” set the film within the contexts of specific traditional “Japanese aesthetic movements” but also considered its use of film techniques. Commenting, for instance, that “[r]epeatedly the camera travels or tracks with Washizu’s soldiers as they pursue the enemy, keeping us abreast of the action as it unfolds just as the picture scrolls did seven centuries earlier. In place of a dissolve or fade,” she continued “Kurosawa lets his camera dwell on the sloping hills or the gathering fog to close a scene, particularly those of battle, in imitation of the scroll’s style. The shifting quality of his cinematography, at times making the fog glisten with heavy mist, on other occasions turning the fog into an opaque veil which hides the surrounding area from us, is,” she thought, “again in line with the contrasting styles of the scrolls, shifting from translucence to opacity as the mood and atmosphere change” (266).

In an article from 1977 titled “Time in Play and Film: Macbeth and Throne of Blood,” Charles Bazerman wrote of Kurosawa’s film that “[a]ll the cinematic techniques that control time … add up to a major difference in the overall sense of time between the play that Shakespeare wrote and the film that Kurosawa made. Between Macbeth’s precipitous rise in the early scenes and equally precipitous fall in the closing scene, he ponders the ravages of illegitimate political power and pays the spiritual price of bloody ambition. In the long, tense middle of Macbeth,” Bazerman continued, “we see a hero facing his acts and fate. In Throne of Blood the long middle is an extended evocation of fate overwhelming a hero too shallow to do anything but fear. The final movement of that cinematic choreography is Washizu trying to avoid … volleys of arrows while frantically attempting to rally [his] deserting troops. His long death agony is the last spasm of disorder, and calm returns with the regular rhythms of the final chorus.” According to Bazerman, “Macbeth struggles as he tumbles into an abyss; his struggle provides the forward motion of the play. Washizu, however, loses his way and is called to task by a world of absolutes; he can only play out disordered rhythms against the solid regularity of samurai ideals.” Bazerman thought that from “Macbeth we tend to remember the great speeches, the moments of torment and self-revelation—the agonizing thoughts; from Throne of Blood we remember the sequences of shots, the eccentric rhythms, the haunting movements—the motions of agony. Because the film can so well control what we see from moment to moment, cinematic techniques of time control add new dimensions to adapted material, but these new dimensions may be at the expense of the old” (336–37).

Discussing Kurosawa’s film in an essay from 1977 titled “Throne of Blood: A Morality Dance,” Marsha Kinder wrote that “[i]n place of the language, Kurosawa uses a number of visual polarities to develop the [film’s] moral conflicts. Simultaneously, these polarities emphasize important features of the cinematic medium and transform the drama into a kind of morality dance. First, Kurosawa creates a self-reflexive tension between performance and observation,” so that in “Throne of Blood, characters repeatedly perform actions or relate narratives in front of an audience. Most particularly, Washizu (Macbeth) is developed as a character who moves between two roles—forceful actor and foolish observer. Throughout the film,” she continued, “the boundary between action and judgment, performer and audience frequently breaks down. We in the audience are also drawn into the tension; the film trains us how to observe the moves, interpret what we see, and make it the basis of our own performance.” According to Kinder, “The second polarity is between the concreteness of art and the elusiveness of reality: the palpable physicality of the cinematic image is based on insubstantial light and shadow. To accentuate this paradox, Kurosawa sets his drama in a highly physical world. Men, horses, and birds move dynamically through tangled forests, heavy gates, and wooden forts.” But she suggested that the “recurring image of white mist that permeates the film dissolves the solidity of these environments and makes all physical action seem insubstantial.” Finally, “The third contrast is between motion and stasis—the moving image within a static frame. The paradox of motion is implicit in the demon’s prophecy that Washizu will not lose a battle until the forest moves to the fort; Kurosawa fully exploits this incident in visual terms and gives it new meaning in the cinematic context. Making a forest move is no more miraculous [he thought] than creating the appearance of motion out of still photographs—the illusion that lies at the center of cinema” (340).

In an essay from 1983, Jack Jorgens, in an article titled “Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood: Washizu and Miki Meet the Forest Spirit,” wrote that “[s]eldom … is there such a chasm of understanding between characters as in the meeting of Washizu and Miki with the Forest Spirit. Washizu and Miki think they are riding back to their Lord after fighting valiantly for him. Instead,” Jorgens continued, “the Spirit, sitting like a spider at the center of a web, mocks them, confuses them, obscures their vision, entangles them in fear and ambition. Kurosawa seems closely allied to the Spirit. He too enmeshes his characters in a formal pattern so rigid that it becomes an aesthetic equivalent of Fate.” Thus, the “Spirit’s turning wheels, which resemble reels of film at an editing table, seem to inscribe the circles followed by Washizu and Miki as they ride in circles in the forest, and are caught up in the cycles of war, fear, and ambition that give the illusion of movement in this futile form of feudalism.” Jorgens reported that Kurosawa “tells his entire story in flashback, framed by fog and the barren hills where the proud Forest Castle once stood. This emptiness, which is perhaps what the Buddhist Spirit is contemplating as she chants to the mortals in the forest, makes the human strivings of the story seem meaningless.” According to Jorgens, “Kurosawa makes these strivings seem even more meaningless by trapping the characters in severe patterns of symmetry, repeated action, anticlimactic movement, and stage artifice” (172).

Anthony Davies, in his 1988 book Filming Shakespeare’s Plays (152–66), thought that Throne of Blood was the Kurosawa Shakespeare film that “most rewards intensive discussion,” since Ran was so recent that “assessments of its affinity with Shakespeare’s King Lear are still critically tentative” (152) while “the dramatic rise and fall in Throne of Blood bears a remarkably close relationship with the dynamics of Shakespeare’s Macbeth” (153). He reported that the “initial reception of the film in the West was not enthusiastic,” noting that it was often dismissed, including in the New York Times (154). Davies wrote that “[b]ecause this film dispenses with all but the most essential dialogue to carry forward the narrative, we are placed in the position of having to rely wholly on” visual details (155), such as the “spatial polarity between the castle and the forest; the world of man and the world of nature,” as well as “the vertical and the horizontal,” as in the contrasts between soaring tree trunks and the castle, with such oppositions symbolically related to contrasting worldviews. Contrasts continue into the final scenes of the film, as the forest advances slowly and Washizu falls quickly, and the “intricate organization of this polarity between movement and stasis and between controlled movement and frenzy justifies itself thematically in the culminating overthrow of both man-devised and natural logic—the fulfilment of the prophecy that something as rooted as a forest will move” (161).

Assessing the film in his 1989 book Shakespeare, Cinema and Society, John Collick asserted that “Kumonosu jo is a movie that directly acknowledges its artistic and cultural roots,” including its roots in five-section Japanese Noh theatre in such matters as the “interaction between the human world and the supernatural,” the attention called to artificiality, an emphasis on warrior culture, the occasional focus on female characters, and an occasional focus in the Noh plays on madness—a connection relevant to both the male and female leads (178). Collick saw this film as one of the two “bleakest expressions of Kurosawa’s liberal pessimism,” with a stress on “the individual conscience which sees the world dominated by deterministic political forces.” According to Collick, Kurosawa “read Macbeth as a study of possession and futility: there is no redemption or reconciliation; no attaining of Buddhahood in his first Shakespeare film. Instead the dream of the wandering priest has become the inescapable and ever-present nightmare. The film represents an impasse in the liberal view of politics in Japan during the late 1950s” (181).

Peter S. Donaldson, considering this adaptation in his 1990 book Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors, offered an especially probing approach, one full of detailed analysis and also brimming with many still photos from all the films discussed. He provided very detailed discussions of particular scenes; related the main character to tendencies in Japanese feudal culture in general; and argued that “Throne of Blood displays [two major] styles—‘traditional’ and ‘Westernized’ —and “dramatizes the relation between them. It is a self-reflexive work that examines its own seduction by Western practice, a representational allegory in which the power of the cinematic image to offer the illusion of depth and plenitude parallels the ambition, revolt, and parricide of its main character, Washizu, Kurosawa’s Macbeth” (71). Donaldson suggested that the moving forest not only “break[s] down the forest/castle opposition on which so much of the visual structure of the film is built, but it also, in its motion, squeezes out the dimension of depth. This movement alludes to and reverses the visual design of the film’s opening minutes” (86). Donaldson considered the final “death stroke” suffered by Washizu to be especially memorable and surprising, saying, “The shot is not merely unexpected … but hints at a supernatural retribution” (87). Donaldson summarized his main argument by writing that “[i]n treating Throne of Blood as an allegory of cinematic practice, I have tried to suggest that Macbeth’s temptation by visions of power and self-realization is paralleled in the film by the lure of Western perspectival cinema and its claim to representational plenitude and depth. In a series of contrasts between vision (or action) in depth and the treatment of the screen as a flat or iconic surface, Kurosawa,” Donaldson continued, “dramatizes his own temptation by Western modes of representation and Western values, his departure from and return to a more characteristically Japanese cinematic practice and the values embodied in that practice” (89).

In an essay from 1994 titled “Kurosawa’s Shakespeare Films: Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well, and Ran” (234–39), Robert Hapgood called Throne of Blood a masterpiece; said it had “located something compellingly cinematic about Macbeth (234); praised its fidelity to the play; explored various influences on the film and on Ran” (235–36); and commended its “daring … form and style” (238). He stressed its emphasis on “a few motifs (rain, mist, strong winds, forests, castles, night)” and its concern with distinct geometrical shapes; called the film’s tone not only “detached but sardonic”; and concluded that in “style as in genre, Throne of Blood is one of a kind” (239). Also in 1994, in an essay titled “Macbeth on Film: Politics,” E. Pearlman claimed that Kurosawa ignored the issue of Washizu’s successor, so that, “[u]nlike Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which invests monarchy with the potential for justice and morality Throne of Blood does not contain the seeds of a healthy polity within the ruling elite” (256).

Daniel Rosenthal, in his book from 2000 titled Shakespeare on Screen (76–77), wrote that “Washizu, the Macbeth figure in Throne of Blood, has all of his Shakespearean counterpart’s courage, but none of his eloquence. This wild-eyed samurai (Toshiro Mifune at his fiercest) rarely says more than a dozen words at a time, and his language is as plain as the floorboards of his castle. There is,” Rosenthal thought, “no poetry in Throne of Blood’s sparse dialogue, and little subtlety in its characterization, but its pace, atmosphere and imagery have a power that is absolutely Shakespearean” (76). Astonished by some of the bad reviews the film first received, Rosenthal also quoted a British assessment declaring it the “only work that ‘completely succeeded in transforming a play of Shakespeare’s into a film’” (77).

In his 2002 book Shakespeare in the Cinema, Stephen Buhler declared that “[b]y far the greatest variation on Macbeth is Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Kumonosu-fo, alternately titled Castle of the Spider’s Web or Throne of Blood in America.” Buhler said that this film “combined the stark visual poetry of John Ford’s westerns with the stylized tenets of his homeland’s kabuki theater to present a samurai story,” although “Shakespeare’s … words have successfully been replaced by imagery, which is at once vivid for the viewer and functional for conveying information the Bard had expressed in words.” According to Buhler, Kurosawa saw it as “a tale of politically motivated murder during Japan’s civil wars that is informed and enriched by parallels to Macbeth.” The actors’ “rigid expressions”—resembling “full-face masks” —reflect the influence of Noh theatre, which helps explain “why the film does not work as a psychological drama, since Kurosawa’s approach purposefully forces us to focus on the surface of people, objects, and events” (193).

Graham Holderness, in his 2002 essay collection titled Visual Shakespeare (64–68), called Throne of Blood “the most complete translation of Shakespeare into film,” adding: “The text is abandoned altogether, not even translated; the action [is] shifted from medieval Scotland to feudal Japan; a western Renaissance tragedy becomes an Oriental samurai epic. This most celebrated of all Shakespeare films has been praised particularly for the completeness of its transformation of drama into cinema” 64), with Holderness commenting that “Throne of Blood is self-evidently not Shakespeare; and therein lies its incomparable value for strategic use in a radical exploration of the play. If the text can be reproduced in a virtually unrecognisable form, then the plurality of the text is proved beyond reasonable doubt.” Terming Throne the “play’s alter ego,” he thought that studying it could help “liberate some of [the play’s] more radical possibilities of meaning” (68).

John Russell Brown, in his brief 2005 book on Macbeth (138–42), saying that the difference between this film and the play “are immediately obvious,” and admired the movie’s “powerful images” (138); commented that “the alterations made to Shakespeare’s handling of the story pinpoint difficulties that Shakespeare must also have met” (139); thought that Shakespeare’s three witches have more impact than Kurosawa’s one old woman; and suggested that Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth is more effective than Kurosawa’s substitute figure (142).

In an essay from 2006 titled “Lost in Translation: Reconsidering Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ and Kurosawa’s ‘Throne of Blood,’” Erin Suzuki wrote that “[w]hile the vision of liberal humanism that Kurosawa presents in Throne of Blood is extraordinarily bleak, and quite possibly representative of the perceived emptiness or limitations of the radical potential offered by Western politics, culture, and filming techniques of the time, he does not champion or advocate a complete return to the static traditionalism represented by the Noh figures in the film.” She noted that “Noh plays were traditionally used to celebrate the feudal period as an ‘idealised and mythical age of bravery,’” but “by using Macbeth as a source in the place of a traditional Noh cycle, Kurosawa’s film presents the period as far more bloody, unjust, and Machiavellian than those who cherished the myth of ancient chivalry and honor would care to believe. Instead,” she continued, “rather than simply juxtaposing one against the other—Japanese against Western form, written text against filmed image, stillness against motion—Throne of Blood unites them all in a new form of movement that is not represented simply as the clash of two opposites, but rather as the transition or motion between the two states.” Thus, “Neither an attempt to represent transparent truth about the universality of Shakespeare and the triumph of the will nor a turn away from the West to a celebration of the Japanese past, the nihilistic vision of Throne of Blood represents a particular stage of liberal disillusionment in a Japan caught between the hard-learned lessons of its militaristic past and the unfulfilled promise of a democratic future” (101).

Also publishing in 2006, Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, in an article titled “Brushing Up Shakespeare: Relevance and Televisual Form” (164–72) explored such matters as the film’s emphasis on isolation versus belonging (164), its fuller treatment of isolation (165–66), its use of women as symbols (167–68), its focus on powerful women (168), its “pervasive sense of uncertainty” (170), and Washizu’s death by arrows (172).

Discussing the Japanese adaptation in his 2007 book Studying Shakespeare on Film (99–107), Maurice Hindle offered detailed discussion of particular scenes; considered the film’s meta-cinematic aspects; and concluded by commenting that “[Grigori] Kozintsev’s comment that he thinks Kurosawa’s film is the finest of Shakespearean movies … is no doubt inspired by the fact that Kurosawa had been so successful in achieving Kozintsev’s own ambition as a Shakespearean film-maker, that of making the aural visual.” Hindle thought that “[a]nalysing his film shows that the power of Kurosawa s ‘visual’ poetry derives from a design of delivering the story and inner life of Shakespeare’s drama in a structure of images whose meaning and effects draw on a highly formalistic non-Western dramatic tradition (Noh theatre) and film genre (the samurai movie) that are arguably as rich in cultural signification and resonance as the verbal text of the Shakespearean original” (107).

In comments on Throne of Blood in his 2008 book Shakespeare and Film (42–45), Samuel Crowl first discussed Kurosawa and his films in general; then commented on his use of “tracking shots at the start of this film”; and noted the use of “powerful visual images,” metacinematic effects, and elements of Noh drama (43–44). Crowl said that in drawing on so many different influences Kurosawa operates much as Shakespeare himself did (44).

In an essay from 2009 titled “Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and East Asia’s Macbeth,” Yuwen Hsiung compared and contrasted Throne of Blood with a Chinese play titled Kingdom of Desire (78). He noted that both are set in pre-modern times (79), that both begin by emphasizing supernatural powers (80), that both depict symbolic castles (82), but that whereas Kurosawa’s film emphasizes collective guilt, Kingdom of Desire emphasizes individual responsibility (84). In another essay from 2009 titled “Silence and Sound in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood,” Lei Jin argued that in Kurosawa’s film “Shakespeare’s introspective speeches have been transformed into a contrast between [meaningful] sound and silence” (95).

Mark Thornton Burnett, discussing this film in an essay from 2013 (59–68), noted, among other things, that “as generations of critics have argued, citing linguistic and rhetorical tropes of consanguinity, Lady Macbeth and the witches in Macbeth share a malign kinship. Of Kurosawa’s three Shakespeare films, Throne of Blood is arguably the closest in incident, design and articulation to source; certainly, it openly acknowledges its debts,” unlike two others (64).

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (374–76), Peter Cochran called this “the most successful attempt ever at transposing a Shakespeare plan into a different culture and different medium” but suggested that the couple featured here are not tragic, as in Shakespeare’s play (374). He then noted similarities and differences between the two works (374–76).

Gayle Allan, in an essay titled “Home Sweet Home: Visual Representation of Domestic Spaces in Macbeth” in a 2014 volume on Shakespeare’s play, noted that the various homeplaces depicted in Macbeth are often associated with danger and death, observing that “[s]tage adaptations of Macbeth necessarily depict only the interiors” of the various castles mentioned, “and there is rarely any distinction between them. Glamis, Forres and Dunsinane are often conflated, both in the collective consciousness of the play, as well as their representations on stage. Film adaptations,” on the other hand, “have the opportunity to depict both the exteriors and interiors of the domestic spaces in Macbeth, and without the material constraints of the stage, the conflation of the spaces is no longer necessary but this distinction is seldom made.” She continued that frequently “film depictions of Macbeth’s castle(s) absorbed and displayed a long, visual tradition, that of a Gothic castle, a combination of medieval Gothic architecture and ‘the Gothic’ aesthetic of some Victorian literature and art. Newer film adaptations of Macbeth,” however, “situated in more modern times and spaces, have looked beyond the castle walls to very different kinds of domiciles, but still remain, to some extent, within the Gothic.” Allan first focused on the films by Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Kurosawa before discussing whether recent changes in the play’s settings suggest new ways of looking at the play or whether they are basically superficial (529–30).

In an essay in the same 2014 collection (“Weird Space in Macbeth on Screen”), Victoria Bladen discussed “the various spaces that the weird sisters are commonly associated with in screen adaptations, drawing examples from a range of films,” including Kurosawa’s, and exploring “the means by which directors have conveyed the sisters as emanating from supernatural spaces,” especially “peripheral spaces.” Her essay also examined “how the sisters have been closely associated with the inner, psychological spaces of the Macbeths in some versions” as well as with “weird space” (521).

Warren Chernaik, in another essay from the same 2014 collection on Macbeth, commented on four different films of Macbeth, asserting that “[o]f all these versions, only Nunn and Kurosawa treat the weird sisters and the ghost of Banquo, as Shakespeare does, as liminal figures, straddling the borderline between the real and the imaginary.” He thought that in Throne of Blood, “Kurosawa presents a world in which nature and the supernatural (seen as continuous, indistinguishable, in the figure of the Forest Spirit) exist independently of the futile strivings of human agents, mocking their hopes and pretensions” (53).

Finally, in one more essay from the 2014 essay collection of Macbeth, Dominique Goy-Blanquet, in “Phantom of the Cinema: Macbeth’s Ghosts in the Flesh” (27–29), summarized some of the film’s plot, especially concerning the supernatural (28) and concluded that the characters Kurosawa depicts “move in a world where no clear distinction appears between what they see or imagine and what actually is, in which accordingly, the human will, the possibility of choice and ethics, have little place” (29).

In a brief book from 2014 devoted entirely to Kurosawa’s film, Robert N. Watson examined it closely from start to finish, noting that “[a]lthough some of Kurosawa’s collaborators have said they did not even read Shakespeare’s play in preparing their screenplay, the director clearly sought out visual parallels to Shakespeare’s specific language, and drew on some large moral and existential ideas that Shakespeare articulates. The dominant theme of this film,” Watson continued, “is the futile struggle of the self against nature. Kurosawa implicitly condemns the doomed battle of human pride and desire against an indifferent universe of overpowering scope, weight and persistence, but also mourns the suffering of the great human spirit tricked into waging that battle.” The film, he thought, revealed “Kurosawa’s controversial humanistic investment in the individual—at moments heroic, and perhaps inevitable” (8–9). According to Watson, “in Macbeth, [any] pessimistic nihilism is mitigated (characteristically of Shakespeare) by a contrary suggestion of a more positive determinism that harmonises with human values, as divine Providence defends virtuous linear royal inheritance through the medium of natural order.” But he thought that “Kurosawa pays less attention to that optimistic view: he undermines the benign aspects of both supernatural and monarchical control, and consistently employs the visual aspects of his medium to reinforce a message that (depending on the cultural position of the viewer) invites a Buddhist or nihilist interpretation” (8–9). Watson wrote: “No wonder, then, that Kurosawa recognised and welcomed, in the Macbeth story, an occasion for ‘setting the ritualised gesture of traditional Noh theater and the static frame—popular in early Japanese cinema—in tension with the realistic cinematic conventions popular in western film, which he uses to represent the idea of transparent free will and human agency.’” According to Watson, “Like many other great works of art, Throne of Blood is a profoundly ambivalent exploration of human morality that is at once intensely localised and transhistorical—and is deeply self-conscious about its medium” (15).

Delores P. Martinez, in an essay from 2018 titled “From ‘Scottish’ Play to Japanese Film: Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood,” asserted that “[d]espite the fact that Throne of Blood gave rise to various critical reactions (from being called an ‘awful’ version of Shakespeare to ‘the best’), and apparently offers opportunities for western over-interpretation, orientalising the significance of the film so that it would appear to be beyond western comprehension,” she thought that “essentially Kurosawa’s version of Macbeth is about how Shakespeare should look and feel, not just about how he should ‘sound.’ Kurosawa understood that in a film version of Shakespeare, the language of the camera becomes another possible mode of interpretation—another mode of understanding, and another way of exploring the consequences of violent action.” According to Martinez, “His use of Noh is a clear clue to the importance of the visual for understanding his meaning, but it is almost too personal an interpretation: [The film] remains difficult for many viewers, including Japanese audiences” (n.p.).