DREAMS _FILM REVIEW

DREAMSAkira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa, a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years. Seven Samurai, Rashomon is one of his greatest movies and”dreams” stands tall of all. Kurosawa is the first director to assign crowds (atmosphere) to his movies, especially in seven samurai; he also used black ink with the mixture of water to differentiate the rain from the background.

Dreams, a science fiction movie which was constructed with seven unimaginable sequences which can be considered as threads to human life.

Dream 1

Sunshine through the Rain

The first sequence can be an adoption from his childhood bed time stories. Mother warns her son not to go out from home when it’s raining, but the son goes to forest while raining, His mother already said it’s a curse to be on rain since it’s the auspicious occasion for the fox to dance. The boy sees the human being disguised fox dancing for traditional Japanese instrumentals. When the small boy reaches home, his mother sends him back to the forest for apologizing to fox. She also gives a clue that the fox are living under the rainbow.
Old people use to say “Fox is getting married” When sunshine’s through the rain, the rain ends leaving the rainbow. So, Kurosawa has left a clue for us to think it’s an old myth portrayed in the sequence. It’s to be noted that no parent will accept his child to play in rain. In order to apologies, the child is going in search of rainbow where fox can be seen.

Kurosawa installed eight plots in his eight dreams

1st plot – when the mother gives knife to her son. It cannot be accepted since she is the original guardian. It can happen only in dreams. This dream will not have a perfect conclusion and the director will end the sequence while the kid moves closer to the rainbow. Kurosawa attempted fiction with myth in a single platform. This dream is packed with seven greatest dreams.

The Blizzard

The Blizzard is the third dream of Kurosawa that possibly reflects Yuki-onna of Japanese myth and it can be compared to Ukraine flight crash on Andes Mountains ,Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, also known as the Andes flight disaster, and in South America as Miracle in the Andes (El Milagro de los Andes) was a chartered flight carrying 45 people, including a rugby team, their friends, family and associates that crashed in the Andes on October 13, 1972. At last 16 survivors were rescued on December 23, 1972, more than two months after the crash. Later, Alive (1993) was filmed after this incident, the lead character and the narrator is the person who survived among the 45 people.


The Weeping Demon

Seventh dream of Kurosawa “The Weeping Demon” is a mixture of social message and a fiction. Kurosawa exhibits ‘how cruel the war is ‘and also he mentions the loss of animal and plants in environment. It has a similarity of Hiroshima Nagasaki bomb blast incident which still has the radiations. The radiation reduces the chance of growing tall, it also the major cause for the Japanese why are short.

_ Lingaraja Sivanaiah