A Film Canon

The strongest cinematic appropriation of Macbeth, Throne Of Blood fuses Shakespearean and Noh drama into Kurosawa's most apocalyptic vision of the turbulent Sengoku period. On the one hand, Kurosawa deflects the parameters of the traditional Noh stage into elements of his mise-en-scene - the ceremonial cypress foundation and painted pine backdrop become the tangled brambles of Spider-Web Forest, dominating the foreground in a similar manner to the vegetation in Rashomon; the proscenium itself becomes the entrance to Washizu's (Toshiro Mifune) fortress, clarifying it as the province of the film's most explicitly theatrical concerns; and the heavily polished floors and minimal recourse to props, special effects and other stage devices become the shimmering, heavily abstracted Mount Fuji landscape, which fuses roiling fog and volcanic soil into a single, seething mass. On the other hand, as the characters and narrative structure approach the ritualistic typology of the Noh world, Shakespearean interiority is projected onto the mise-en-scene, imbuing its serenity with a more Western, cerebral dimension, and rupturing it with moments of extreme, centrifugal frenzy, in which people and animals find themselves bound by impossible, contradictory imperatives, as if the entire natural and supernatural worlds embodied Macbeth's sublime hallucination: "Is this a dagger that I see before me..."