Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

I'm usually not interested in other people's dreams.  The conversation usually starts like this:  "I had the strangest dream."  Then the person insists on telling me a story made mostly of nonsense, and when the story (mercifully) ends, the conversation usually ends like this: "Isn't that weird?"  That is sometimes followed with: "What do you think that means?"  Example:

"I had the strangest dream.  I was in the grocery store, and they didn't have any milk, so I asked if they had some in the back and they invited me to the back room to check with them.  I went along and found gallons and gallons of milk, but they were all sitting outside the cooler, and a giant spider was guarding them.  I said, 'What about this milk?' and the clerks all laughed at me.  Then the spider started chasing me, but it wasn't a spider anymore; it was a crab.  I ran for a while until one of the clerks hollered at me to start running sideways and the crab couldn't get me.  But then the crab got me and when I turned, the crab was my second grade teacher, and then I woke up.  Isn't that weird?  What do you think that means?"

Uh, yeah, that's pretty weird, but also frustrating to hear.  I'm used to stories with your typical beginning-middle-end structure, so when I hear a story with a beginning of sorts and a middle or something like a middle, and an ending that is always the same ("Then I woke up.") my instincts as an interpreter of stories is to try and organize the information.  I get frustrated easily when stories don't make any sense, when details are introduced with no payoff or clear direction, and when suddenly, the elements of story that we typically consider anchor points — identities of characters, locations of stories, objects for the dreamer to accomplish — can change without warning or logic.  This is the nature of dreams, not the nature of storytelling.

In short, when a person recounts a dream to me, that person is annoying me.

This is through no fault of his/her own.  I just want to hear a story that makes sense, and I can't expect a dream to do that, nor can I expect the rest of the world to dream in effective three-act story structure.  But in a way, I do expect that.  I'm not saying I'm right; I'm just saying.  I can't tell you everything.  All I know is that I hate hearing people talk about their dreams.

So when presented with Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, I run the risk of extreme frustration and fatigue.  Here's a two-hour film in which Kurosawa essentially makes film adaptations of his own dreams, with the exception of one vignette, "The Tunnel," which Ishiro Honda directs here.  Dreams is a series of eight vignettes, each with a male protagonist, presumably Kurosawa himself.  In each vignette, the protagonist is at a different age and experiences different realms — a forest in summer, a spring full of cherry blossoms, a windswept, snowy mountainside, and so on.  The adventures starkly contrast with each other.

Oddly, I don't find myself frustrated at all.  Perhaps this is a question of timing.  I tend to watch slower films on Sunday afternoons, when the rest of the world is slow, too (in my head).  Kurosawa was such a visionary, he dreamt in stories.  Each dream, despite fantastic elements, spins coherent stories anyway.

Like "Crows," the one about the painter who, when wandering the Van Gogh museum, steps into a painting and finds himself talking to Van Gogh, played by Martin Scorsese.  This Van Gogh is a brusque New Yorker Dutch painter.  They talk about drive, cutting off an ear, and how little time there is left to paint.  Then Van Gogh is gone, leaving the aspiring painter to wander Van Gogh's paintings in a search for the master.  He eventually finds Van Gogh, walking in the distance, and then the dream is over.  The painter never catches up to him.  Pretty silly sounding, but highly effective on screen.

Dreams is an enigma is Kurosawa's body of work, but at this late stage of his career, he obviously felt free to do what he wanted, and here he uses his dreams to ruminate on themes such as the futility of war, mankind's potential to destroy the world, and the pursuit of art in a world in which the artist has little or no control.  I'm combining his themes a bit here, but that's what I take away from this film.  His latter-day works are often derided, but even Kurosawa's weak films are still better than most films released around the same time.

I teach a class in which I give an assignment that requires students to choose from my school library's holdings on DVD and write about them.  Dreams is the only Kurosawa film we have at present, but this is a perfect film for a visual arts school.  Naturally, I'd love if the library had all of Kurosawa's films, as well as another 1,000 DVDs, but I'm content with what we have for now, and with building my own library at home and keeping Kurosawa's entire oeuvre on hand for my own use.  In August, Criterion will release Kurosawa's first four films in an Eclipse set.  I'm all over that.

Kurosawa turned 80 the year this film was released.  He lived another 8 years and made two more films, wrote a few more, and a final film, a documentary on Noh theatre, is rumored to be released in 2010.  Kurosawa would be 100 years old this year, and organizations around the world are holding screenings and celebrating his life and work.  Even his minor films are great.