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Macbeth's first line in Shakespeare's play, "So foul and fair a day I have not seen," announces the theme of moral ambiguity and confusion in time of war, and initiates a scene from which the play's whole action flows. On the way home from battle, Macbeth and Banquo (who, we have learned, have both fought bravely for King Duncan against traitorous rebels) encounter an unholy trinity who are themselves ambiguous. They "look not like th'inhabitants o' th' earth / And yet are on't." They "should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / inat you are so." They riddle in three voices of royal futures and then vanish. This brief but pregnant encounter provides the raw material for the most remarkable scene of Akira Kurosawa's adaptation of Macbeth, Throne of Blood (1957). Kurosawa is one of the few filmmakers to adapt Shakespeare, whose screen images have the density and power of Shakespeare's poetic images, who understands his task is translation both into a new culture and into a new medium.1 In seventy shots full of lyrical motion, beautiful compositions, and dramatic power, Kurosawa initiates the major themes and conflicts of the film, and offers an interesting Japanese reinterpretation of Shakespeare's vision of the supernatural.
Scenes in other films usually develop from the principle of climax (e.g., the shower murder in Hitchcock's Psycho, Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain, Boeldieu's death in Grand Illusion). Kurosawa in this sequence uses anticlimax. While returning home from battle, Washizu (Macbeth) and Miki (Banquo) have become lost in a tangled, foggy, labyrinthine forest. Twice in their ride through the forest on magnificent horses, they stop in bewilderment: first (shot 2) to notice the paradoxical weather consisting of sun and rain, daylight and darkness, and second (shot 18) to discover they are riding in their own footprints, that without realizing it they have ridden in circles. When Washizu fires an arrow up into the trees (to get a sense of direction? suspecting sorcery?) a flash of lightning, a crack of thunder, and hideous echoing laughter reveal that "an evil spirit of the forest" holds them there. Miki says that with his spear he will fight his way free, and the two spur their horses into a violent...