Kagemusha (1980)

Réalisateur:

Akira Kurosawa

Writers:

Masato Ide (writer)
Akira Kurosawa (writer)

Release Date:

6 octobre 1980 (USA)

Genre:

Drame | History | War

Plot:

When a powerful warlord in medieval Japan dies, a poor thief recruited to impersonate him finds difficulty...

Plot Keywords:

Impostor | Samurai | Substitution | Japan | 1570s

Awards:

Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 19 wins & 3 nominations

Avis des utilisateurs:

Better than Shakespeare

US Showtimes:

(register to personalize)

Ensemble

Tatsuya Nakadai	...	Shingen Takeda / Kagemusha
Tsutomu Yamazaki	...	Nobukado Takeda
Kenichi Hagiwara	...	Katsuyori Takeda
Jinpachi Nezu	...	Sohachiro Tsuchiya
Hideji Otaki	...	Masakage Yamagata
Daisuke Ryu	...	Nobunaga Oda
Masayuki Yui	...	Ieyasu Tokugawa
Kaori Momoi	...	Otsuyanokata
Mitsuko Baisho	...	Oyunokata
Hideo Murota	...	Nobufusa Baba
Takayuki Shiho	...	Masatoyo Naito
Koji Shimizu	...	Katsusuke Atobe
Noboru Shimizu	...	Masatane Hara
Sen Yamamoto	...	Nobushige Oyamada
Shuhei Sugimori	...	Masanobu Kosaka

Autre(s) titre(s) :

Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior)
Kagemusha the Shadow Warrior
Shadow Warrior
The Double
Kagemusha - Director's Cut (France) (director's cut) [fr]
Kagemusha, l'ombre du guerrier (France) [fr]

Durée:

179 min | Argentina:162 min | USA:162 min

Pays:

Japan

Langue:

Japonais

Couleur:

Couleur (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Son:

Dolby

Classification:

Australia:PG | South Korea:12 (1998) | Iceland:12 | Portugal:M/12 | Argentina:13 | Chile:14 | Finland:K-12 | UK:PG | USA:PG | West Germany:12 | Singapore:PG

Emplacements De Pelliculage:

Gotemba, Shizuoka, Japan

Company:

Kurosawa Production Co.

Anecdotes:

To secure part of the funding required to make the film, Akira Kurosawa teamed up with the Suntory Whiskey company to create advertisements for the drink on the set of "Kagemusha". These advertisements are included as extras on the Criterion edition DVD.

Guillemet:

Masakage Yamagata: How old are you, sire? Fifty-three, as I remember.
Shingen Takeda: Why?
Masakage Yamagata: And you still behave like a five-year-old child. People gather, scatter, they go left and right following their interests. That is not surprising. But then I find you like this. With such a narrow mind, you must not dream of rulership. Go back to your own domain. You are a mountain monkey. You should be gathering nuts in the mountains of Kai.

Connexions De Film:

Referenced in Brazil (1985)

Better than Shakespeare

I saw the director's cut about twenty years after I first saw the film. Kagemusha is as magnificent now as before, but what has changed in the meantime is my appreciation of the meaning of Shakespeare's plays. The history plays and most of the tragedies were about the political dilemmas facing the new Tudor state. The Elizabethan audience sat on the edge of their seats waiting to see how political order might be restored once it had been set in disarray. The Wars of the Roses sequence culminates in the late political tragedies -- Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear. The question is always the same. How is an impersonal modern state possible when its leader is a person, the King? Or is rule by office compatible with the human flaws of the person occupying it? Shakespeare was the client of a conservative aristocratic faction, no rabble-rousing democrat he. But he went so deep into this political question in the course of writing all his plays that he dug deeper into this core issue of modern politics than anyone since.

Kurosawa approaches the same question through the notion of a double,"the shadow of a warrior", Kagemusha. Here the contrast between the office of the political leader and its personal incumbent is brought vividly to life in so many ways. The period is the Japanese equivalent of England's War of the Roses, the transition from feudalism to the beginnings of the modern state. The losing side in this case is the one that tries to resolve the contradiction of personality and office by a subterfuge, a thief masquerading as a lord. The winning side and founder of the Japanese state is the Tokugawa clan. The climactic battle symbolises the passage from traditional to modern warfare, as the horses of the losers are mown down by fusillades of gunfire. The credits run as the corpse of the double crosses a submerged flag whose abstract symbolism shows us which aspects of feudalism the modern state will borrow. Personality is vanquished.

The aesthetic vision animating this movie is incredible. There is so much to look at and admire, perhaps interpret. One striking feature for me was the persistent strong breeze ripping through the banners, a symbol of the winds of change running through 16th century Japan, contemporary to Shakespeare's period. Because this drama was made by and for the modern cinema, in many ways Kurosawa's masterpiece is better than Shakespeare.