While Blumenthal uses Throne of Blood as a case study for the successful transformation of a literary text into filmed image, his argument largely elides the specifically Japanese elements of the play that struck the film’s first Western viewers as oddly disconcerting. Where Shakespeare comes into the film at all, Blumenthal suggests his presence is only that of “a scenarist whose vision is consonant with own” (127) as the original’s poetic language is replaced by the rich visual imagery so central to the experience of cinema. This translation of “Shakespeare’s words into Japanese images” is a theme that was taken up several years later by film critic Jerry Blumenthal, who argues that Kurosawa’s powerful manipulation of visual cues proved that Throne of Blood was no pale imitation of the Shakespearean tragedy but instead a serious, dynamic, and most of all an “autonomous work of art” (123). Seldom matched in their headlong masculine power of imagination. Scarcely has time to realize, as the images deafen and the noisesĭecorate his imagination, that he is experiencing effects of cinema Shakespeare’s lords into Japanese barons the spectator With blunt and vital irreverence theĭirector has translated Shakespeare’s words into Japanese images, Kurosawa’s Shakespeare inevitably-and fortunately-involves more 1 However, an enthusiastic review from the 1 December 1961 issue of Time magazine sounded a note that would be taken up by the later critics who would canonize the film as a “masterpiece” and “the finest of Shakespeare movies”: 2

Most viewed the film as a quaint, if somewhat flawed, version of the original text, as film critics from the New York Times, New Yorker, and Films in Review measured Kurosawa’s film against the Shakespearean original and found the result “amusing” yet ultimately lacking. When Throne of Blood appeared on American screens in 1961, the film’s first reviewers were largely critical and even dismissive of director Akira Kurosawa’s apparent appropriation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

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The art of stillness shakespeare