Dreams 1990 is one of Akira Kurosawa’s most underappreciated pieces of art. It is a series of eight Kafkaesque fables based on his fevered dreams. Dreams movie is a rare cinematic treasure that enigmatically created a live portrayal of Kurosawa’s artistic genius. He made his last film with the help of his long-term admirers Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese.
Surrealism in Dreams
The interpretation of each story could be different according to the audience’s perspective. There is no definite head or tale of the story like an average human dream. There are a lot of illogical elements and themes that enhance the abstract expression of Kurosawa’s creation. The mesmerizing amalgamations of nature still leave a lot of messages that entail the personality and vision of the creator. The protagonist who wanders around in different vignettes represents young Akira Kurosawa.
Almighty Nature
He portrays a spiritual relationship between humans and nature through childhood reminiscence, traditional folklore, synthetic disasters, primitive lifestyle, and nature’s Vengeance in the embodiment of volcano eruptions, blizzards, and deformed humans. The serene visual representation of nature with eclectic color palettes adds to the fairytale enchantment of Kurosawa’s universe. Kurosawa is known to depict human existentialist virtue amidst capitalist corruption in boundless systems and kingdoms. In Ikiru (1952), Kurosawa presents an old gentleman on the verge of dying. He regrets spending or wasting all his years under piles of paper, sitting in the corner of a public municipal corporation, and not living his life to the fullest. In Dreams, Kurosawa depicts capitalist greed that is inconsiderate of the Almighty Nature and thus faces the consequences through impactful allegories.
In ‘The Peach Orchard”, the small kid (Kurosawa) encounters the spirits of the orchard trees, which have taken the form of traditional dolls on the special occasion of Hina Matsuri, signifying the arrival of springs and a tribute to the dead trees. In ‘The Weeping Demon’, the protagonist encounters a deformed human with a painful horn on his head. There is abnormally grown vegetation. It is subsequently the outcome of the nuclear meltdown near Mount Fuji in the previous fable, ‘The Mount Fuji in Red’. Due to nuclear explosions, there is a loss of a stable biosphere. All the corrupted government bureaucrats and multi-millionaires are paying for their sins. They agonize with painful horns as they serve for their last judgment or doomsday. Thus, there is an allegory of karma where men are paying for the exploitation of mother nature. In ‘Village of the Watermills’, the young Kurosawa (most likely the protagonist) enters a peaceful village without electricity. He meets an old inhabitant who tells him the importance of a primitive lifestyle over the complexities of urban technology. He further shares his wisdom of living sustainably over contaminating nature.
Ode to Japanese Roots in Dreams 1990
Each dream refers to historical events, cultural elements, and traditions that built modern Japan. We can feel Kurosawa’s emotion for his home country, where he spent all his life. His greatest films have Japanese roots with a universal expression of humanity which helped him to connect with his international admirers. In ‘the Tunnel’, a commander on his way home after surviving the second world war faces the ghost of a dead commander who comes out of the tunnel. A platoon of dead army men continues to follow him. He apologizes for sending them into battling the war and commands them to go back into the tunnel, which they oblige.
In ‘Mount Fuji in Red’, he signals at many man-made and natural destructions that Japan faced but still stood firm as one of the world’s superpowers. Japan is an epicenter of several volcanic and earthquake-prone mountains. Thus, the country has survived many earthquakes in the past decades. Further, at the end of the second world war, Japan faced the worst disaster known to humanity. The radiations of Hiroshima Nagasaki have affected the genetics of multiple Japanese natives who still suffer its after-impact. In the story, a nuclear eruption near mount Fuji causes the citizens to run away with their belongings haphazardly. The protagonist gets left with a corporate worker and a mother with two children. The worker recounts that even sea creatures could not survive the harmful radiation. He fears that they might not hang on any longer.
Kurosawa honors the origin of Japanese heritage and customs by bringing alive the legend of Kitsune, Yuki-Onna, and Hina Matsuri. In ‘Sunshine Through the Rain”, a young kid is cautioned to see the wedding of Kitsunes. Kitsunes are foxes with supernatural powers in Japanese folklore. As the Kitsunes come to know about the boy, they send a tanto (knife) as a message to bring it to them for forgiveness at a house amidst the rainbow (where the foxes live). In ‘The Blizzard’, a mountaineer surviving a deadly blizzard encounters Yuki Onna (a Japanese spirit), who offers him a blanket and protects him from death. The wide angles that captured the Kitsune’s house under the Rainbow and the dancing dolls (representing the dead orchard trees) create one of the most memorable cinematic moments.
Comparison: Mirrors by Andrei Tarkovsky
Mirrors is considered Tarkovsky’s best work and is also an ode to his childhood memories, fevered dreams, blurred flashbacks, and significant events in Russia. Unlike Dreams, Mirrors have a non–linear narrative. Mirrors have strong pathos that takes us back to the nostalgia of the Russian countryside that we have never experienced before. Tarkovsky created dark and empty spaces to portray the loneliness around his mother that he felt while growing up. Tarkovsky’s father went to fight the war while he and his family used to long for him amidst the darkness of their big empty cottage. In Dreams, Kurosawa expresses his emotion toward Japan without including any of his close acquaintances. All the characters in his dreams were fictional except one of the fellow artists that he admired. He met Vincent Van Gogh in one of his most renowned paintings ‘Wheatfield with crows’. In Mirrors, Tarkovsky (the main protagonist) is the spectator of his mother’s life, while in Dreams, Kurosawa’s muse changes in every story.
