Perceptive insights about the mysterious heart of a legendary movie and its maker.
A prismatic look at the esteemed filmmaker’s life.
In his masterpiece Rashomon (1950), Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) presents contradictory stories about a murder in 12th-century Japan, as told by several witnesses. For viewers, notes film scholar Anderer (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; editor: Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism, 1924-1939, 1995, etc.) in his sensitive investigation of Kurosawa’s life, the retellings create “a horrifying gap between our words and images about the world and the world itself.” The author successfully uses a strategy similar to Kurosawa’s in focusing on forces that shaped Kurosawa’s art, and a complicated, enigmatic, and unsettling portrait emerges. The filmmaker seemed determined to obscure his past; in his memoir, Something Like an Autobiography (1982), he never told “the whole story” about his family life, including his older brother, Heigo, who could be abusive and manipulative but also protective and nurturing. After a restless, rebellious adolescence, Heigo became a successful benshi, a performer who narrated silent movies, taking characters’ voices and adding “lyrical riffs, ironical asides, or mood-inducing groans, shrieks, and whispers.” He was “fanatical” about movies, taking his brother to see the black-and-white films of the 1920s that later indelibly inspired him. But Heigo’s influence went beyond aesthetics: in 1933, when movies incorporated sound, Heigo’s career was over. He led a strike, but when it failed, he killed himself. Reports of his suicide, however, were inconsistent, leaving Kurosawa to wonder if he had been despondent over work or a love affair; if he killed himself with his lover; if he had a child, and if the child lived or died. Anderer also traces other dark forces in Kurosawa’s life, including the great earthquake of 1923, which destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama, and “the hollowed-out emptiness” of postwar Japan. The author gives enough details about Rashomon to suffice for readers who have not seen that film or others that he examines from Kurosawa’s oeuvre.
Perceptive insights about the mysterious heart of a legendary movie and its maker.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-227-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
That sense of joy infuses these gentle essays. “Old age sits in a chair,” writes Hall, “writing a little and diminishing.”...
The writing life at age 85.
In this collection of 14 autobiographical essays, former U.S. Poet Laureate Hall (Christmas at Eagle Pond, 2012, etc.) reflects on aging, death, the craft of writing and his beloved landscape of New Hampshire. Debilitated by health problems that have affected his balance and ability to walk, the author sees his life physically compromised, and “the days have narrowed as they must. I live on one floor eating frozen dinners.” He waits for the mail; a physical therapist visits twice a week; and an assistant patiently attends to typing, computer searches and money matters. “In the past I was often advised to live in the moment,” he recalls. “Now what else can I do? Days are the same, generic and speedy….” Happily, he is still able to write, although not poetry. “As I grew older,” he writes, “poetry abandoned me….For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of hormones.” Writing in longhand, Hall revels in revising, a process that can entail more than 80 drafts. “Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.” These essays circle back on a few memories: the illness and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, which sent him into the depths of grief; childhood recollections of his visits to his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, where he helped his grandfather with haying; grateful portraits of the four women who tend to him: his physical therapist, assistant, housekeeper and companion; and giving up tenure “for forty joyous years of freelance writing.”
That sense of joy infuses these gentle essays. “Old age sits in a chair,” writes Hall, “writing a little and diminishing.” For the author, writing has been, and continues to be, his passionate revenge against diminishing.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0544287044
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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