The Medieval Motion Picture

The Politics of Adaptation

A. Johnston, M. Rouse, A. Johnston, M. Rouse, Kenneth A. Loparo, Philipp Hinz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349294435, 9780230112506
• eBook ISBN: 9781137074249
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Providing new and challenging ways of understanding the medieval in the modern and vice versa, this volume highlights how medieval aesthetic experience breathes life into contemporary cinema. Engaging with the subject of time and temporality, the essays examine the politics of adaptation and our contemporary entanglement with the medieval.

CHAPTER 1

“NOW IS THE TIME”: SHAKESPEARE’S MEDIEVAL TEMPORALITIES IN AKIRA KUROSAWA’S RAN ^*

Jocelyn Keller and Wolfram R. Keller

The decision that sets the tragedy of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (Japan: Toho, 1985) in motion is prefaced by the main protagonist’s announcement: “Now is the time!” In its immediate context, the “now” marks the moment when the old Lord Hidetora Ichimonji transfers his power to his oldest son, Taro, making the latter the “head of the House of Ichimonji, the lord of the land.” Hidetora himself plans to keep only a few retainers and “the title and forms of lordship,” leaving to his other sons the (smaller) castles he once obtained from his neighbors by brutal conquest (p. 13).¹ Hidetora’s decision results in the eponymous chaos of Kurosawa’s film. Hidetora’s “now,” however, has much wider implications, highlighting how time, how temporalities are constructed. More precisely, the film reflects on the politics of constructing temporalities and attendant representational, aesthetic concerns. Adapting William Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play crucially concerned with the transition from the medieval to the modern, Kurosawa’s medieval Japanese setting transfers Shakespeare’s engagement with temporalities into a different cultural framework, multiplying and transforming further Shakespeare’s already multiple temporalities.

It may seem odd to discuss Ran in the context of medieval film, given its temporal setting in sixteenth-century Japan, more concretely in the Sengoku or Warring States period (1392–1568), which precedes the Edo period, the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868). Unlike the earlier period, the Edo era was peaceful and prosperous, but also isolated Japan from the West; ironically, historians often argue that it was the introduction of European firearms in 1543 that made possible the period of prosperity. Ran, then, is set in a transition period, which Western audiences might easily construe as Japan’s development from medieval to (early) modern; but for audiences versed in Japanese history, the film rather depicts the transition from a decentralized kind of feudalism to a more unified version of the same.² Engaging with a transition from one historical period to another, Ran replicates Lear’s temporal structure—and, we would add, the complications attendant upon chronology and teleology, upon periodization.

Shakespeare’s Lear, we argue, self-consciously addresses the problems and politics of constructing temporalities. Written and first staged at a time that asserted its modernity against a medieval Other, Lear, while ostensibly set in pre-Christian days, represents a form of medieval feudalism as it transitions rapidly into Machiavellian modernity, as critics frequently observe. On closer inspection, Lear emerges as exposing the illusions of periodization insofar as the play consistently unveils the presence of the medieval in the modern and the modern within the medieval. The play interrogates the strategies through which the modern constructs itself as an inversion of values, through which it claims to be what the preceding period was not, thereby exposing as ill-advised a nostalgia for a feudalism that never existed, while simultaneously rejecting Machiavellian dissimulation as a desirable means to an end. Moreover, Lear reveals the constructedness of the aesthetic valuations implicit in temporalities, especially the supposedly related shift from (medieval) poetry to (modern) theater. Reflecting the advancement of Shakespearean authorship, this shift is epitomized in the poet-playwright’s, that is, the Fool’s “merlinesque prophecy” at the play’s center, which encapsulates succinctly the play’s juggling of multiple temporalities.

Their common interest in constructions of temporality and related aesthetic concerns, we believe, marks the strongest link between Lear and Ran, a connection scholars have been reluctant to discuss in terms of adaptation,³ since Ran’s plot is not particularly “faithful” to Lear. Kurosawa himself observed that the plot’s broad outline only accidentally resembles Shakespeare’s play.⁴ Once aware of the connection, though, Joan Pong Linton surmises, Kurosawa “had questions about the play that he tried to work out in his film. The result . . . is an ongoing conversation with King Lear, one that never becomes explicit but that informs his engagement with history.”⁵ Anthony Dawson concurs: Just as Shakespeare did not read his sources primarily for the story, Kurosawa reads Shakespeare “from the inside, responding to the complex dynamics of the original work.”⁶

It is especially the complex dynamics of time, we argue, that the film interrogates by using a medieval setting in order to come to terms with the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust, marking the beginning of a nuclear age of fear. Ran is a “King Lear for and of the eighties, when the world seemed poised on the brink of nuclear destruction.”⁷ In “feudalizing” the nuclear threat, Ran also comments on revisionist tendencies in 1970s Japanese historiography and the nostalgia for Japanese medieval samurai culture. Ran intervenes in such debates—and it does so by engaging with and transforming Lear’s multiple temporalities.

King Lear ’s Multiple Temporalities

Shakespeare’s representation of time and construction of history are frequently studied, but the underlying interpretation of temporalities has only received critical attention recently. In the last decade or so, Shakespeare’s use of the medieval and questions about periodization (especially within medieval studies) are on the verge of becoming a veritable field of research.⁸ Our reading of Lear and Ran takes its cue from Andrew James Johnston’s argument that medieval texts self-consciously construct their “medievalness,” which, in turn, invites the temporal Othering of the medieval. Shakespeare’s plays often appear to chart (teleological) chronologies—from the medieval to the modern—that ultimately serve to veil continuities with and dependence on medieval precursors,⁹ including the medieval advancement of new modes of authorship, which literally (albeit obliquely) emerge in the interstices between the medieval and the modern.¹⁰ It is precisely the construction of such temporalities—of the nostalgia for a well-ordered, collective premodern world of transparent loyalty pitted against a dissimulative, capitalist modernity seemingly conducive to individualism—that concomitantly reflects questions of artistic (self-)presentation, which crucially play into Kurosawa’s aesthetics and politics of adaptation. What looks like a medieval kingdom’s straightforward transformation into a capitalist one, ultimately complicates reductive (teleological) constructions of temporality, exposing the constructedness of both the medieval and the modern. Moreover, Lear renders palpably transparent the syncretism of medieval and modern forms of artistic expression so carefully hidden in other Shakespearean works, a syncretism that characterizes Shakespearean authorship in fundamental ways.

Obviously, Lear is not set in late-medieval England. The play’s sources, most of which depend on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (ca. 1136), place Lear’s tragedy in pre-Christian times.¹¹ Critics, however, usually identify Lear’s world as medieval. Grigori Kozintsev argues that Shakespeare blends “periods and locales,” enabling him to “compare, emphasize, generalize.” Many scholars perceive the “ancient” characters’ mindsets as being feudal and scholastic, placing the well-being of the collective above the individual. Edmund’s ideology strikes this universe like the “fire of lightening,” bringing in its wake the rule of “Dame Avarice”; a world governed, as Jan Kott argues, by “huge Renaissance monsters, devouring one another like beasts of prey.”¹² Charting Lear’s chronology, John Danby is not quite as horrified by Edmund’s nascent capitalism, characterizing him as “a normal, sensible, reasonable fellow: but emancipated,” a fusion of the “politic machiavel and renaissance scientist.” Like Shakespeare himself, he is a “careerist on the make.” Edmund challenges medieval collectivism, advancing a new kind of individualism. Pitting the “medieval vision” against “nascent capitalism,” Shakespeare may have preferred Lear’s world, and yet, says Danby, he portrays the “New Men” sympathetically.¹³

A cursory glance at the way the characters envision their own time seems to validate the play’s linear movement from medieval to modern. In the feudal world everything is as it seems—as opposed to the new world, where, Cordelia asserts, the “glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not” reigns supreme (1.1.226–27). Edmund’s capitalist enterprise is associated with dissimulation, rationalized as the means to an end. The play’s depiction of the old and the new worlds generates a poetological and meta-theatrical dimension frequently linked to the opposition of a “medieval” poetry pitted against “modern” theater; a generic shift often reflected in interpretations conceiving of Shakespeare primarily as “the working dramatist.”¹⁴ The nexus of play-writing and modernity is most obvious in Edmund, a Machiavellian modernist who embodies Time itself,¹⁵ insofar as he times himself and others. He is able to do so, because he is “superbly adept at fooling others by his ability to don roles as a skilled actor does,” he is the “master plotter of King Lear, fulfilling the role of dramatist.”¹⁶ It is Edmund’s rhetorical dissimulation that lies at the heart of this acting-playwriting enterprise. At the play’s beginning, Edmund shares with the audience his sense of entitlement to “Legitimate” Edgar’s land. Musing on his illegitimacy, he discusses himself as a person “Who in the lusty stealth of nature take[s] / More composition and fierce quality” than those born legitimately. Edmund’s self-assertion generates transgressional agency, his scheming, captured suitably by reference to his thriving “invention” with which he will “top” his half-brother (1.2.11–12, 19–21, emphasis added). The transition from the medieval to the modern is thus associated with a playwright’s dissimulative abilities (see esp. 1.2.181–82).

Persuasive though this staged transition from medieval to modern and the concomitant inversion of values seems, scholars have begun to challenge such teleological readings. Danby himself notes that Lear offers alternatives to a “simple either-or.” In a nuanced revaluation of the medieval-modern binary, Richard Halpern acknowledges that Lear “is at least partly ‘about’ the transition from feudalism to capitalism,” while emphasizing that the “transitional thesis enfolds a number of implicit assumptions, many of them contestable.” An analysis of Edmund’s supposedly proto-capitalist characteristics brings feudal remnants into view, prompting Halpern’s argument that as much as Edmund evokes “the Renaissance new man,” he ultimately drives this conception back “to a culturally anterior form.” Extending this line of argument, he sees Lear as charting a “fantastic” counter-chronology, “the transition from capitalism to feudalism.”¹⁷

The play’s undermining, ind...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Temporalities of Adaptation
• 1. “Now Is the Time”: Shakespeare’s Medieval Temporalities in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran
• 2. Dracula’s Times: Adapting the Middle Ages in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• 3. Rethinking Anachronism for Medieval Film in Richard Donner’s Timeline
• 4. Otherness Redoubled and Refracted: Intercultural Dialogues in The Thirteenth Warrior
• 5. Crisis Discourse and Art Theory: Richard Wagner’s Legacy in Films by Veith von Fürstenberg and Kevin Reynolds
• 6. Adaptation as Hyperreality: The (A)historicism of Trauma in Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf
• 7. Perils of Generation: Incest, Romance, and the Proliferation of Narrative in Game of Thrones
• 8. Arthurian Myth and Cinematic Horror: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense
• 9. Marian Rewrites the Legend: The Temporality of Archaeological Remains in Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian
• Bibliography
• Index