Film: Throne of Blood
One of the most celebrated screen adaptations of Shakespeare into film, Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood re-imagines Macbeth in feudal Japan.
Starring Kurosawa’s longtime collaborator Toshiro Mifune and the legendary Isuzu Yamada as his ruthless wife, the film tells of a valiant warrior’s savage rise to power and his ignominious fall. With Throne of Blood, Kurosawa fuses one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies with the formal elements of Japanese Noh theater to make a Macbeth that is all his own—a classic tale of ambition and duplicity set against a ghostly landscape of fog and inescapable doom. Incidentally, this was reputed to have been T.S. Eliot's favorite film.
Director Akira Kurosawa. 1957, 110 min. In Japanese with subtitles.
Introduction and discussion by Arthur F. Kinney, Director of the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, UMass Amherst, and Nathaniel Leonard, Associate Director of the Renaissance Center Theater Company.
Presented by the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, UMass Amherst, and the Amherst Cinema.
Call (413) 253-2547 for tickets.