For the first time, the College of Foreign Languages & Literature and the College of Communication collaborated to host a joint mentor activity, “The Intersection of English and American Literature and Film – From Shakespeare to Dickinson.”
Marked as a powerful starting point, the movie Throne of Blood, directed by Akira Kurosawa, was played on 19th March on campus. For many years, it has been regarded as one of the best film adaptations of William Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth. Kurosawa transforms the East-West dialogues into one and another expressive scenes. Furthermore, the alterations he made to the story and the structure of Macbeth for this film are commonly deemed a rare success in localizing Shakespeare's plays in an Asian context. While his effort made the film more approachable and familiar to the Japanese audience, he also maintained the essence of Macbeth, displaying a tragedy derived from the complex interplay between desire, greed, and suspicion.
After the film was over, Professor Tom Sellari, who teaches Shakespeare in the Department of English, and Professor Yae-Wei Wang, a professor from the Department of Radio and Television, had an enthusiastic discussion about the adaptation of Throne of Blood.
Sellari mentioned that it was hard for him to enjoy the film the first time he watched it. The music and performance from Noh, a traditional Japanese masked drama, were not as appealing as the quick dialogue of Shakespeare's original play. However, he later added that after watching it several times, he learned to like the film and even discovered some interesting parts that he had never noticed before. Nonetheless, Sellari still pointed out some unsatisfying elements in the film. He said it was not very meaningful to compare the film to the original since the dialogues in the film were far fewer. Moreover, he asked the people in the room whether they could see whether Macbeth and Lady Macbeth loved each other because their relationship in Kurosawa’s version was displayed in a way that he could not see the affection they showed for each other in the original Shakespeare play. However, this different depiction can be seen as a possible or alternative approach rather than a flaw. Sellari emphasized that it was not always helpful to compare text and film because whenever an adaptation happened, it was always a matter of keeping or leaving something. Adaptations could rarely and were never meant to be the same as their original works. Before giving opinions on the film, Wang first expressed his excitement and gratitude for this screening and discussion event, since hosting a college mentor activity together with the College of Foreign Languages & Literature had been on his to-do list for a long time. Having experience acting in Macbeth in his youth, Wang said he was blown away by how brilliantly Kurosawa turned Macbeth into a piece of work that seemed to originate from Japan almost seamlessly. Another aspect was Kurosawa’s ability to transform textual conversations into visual scenes. In particular, he praised the mise en scène, a method to tell stories through the composition of scenes, in Throne of Blood. Wang also applauded Kurosawa’s distinct usage of horses in the story such as, how the characters’ inner struggle and unsettled state of mind were presented through the running horse in a restricted area in one of the scenes.
Regarding the success of the screening and discussion on 19th March, Li-Hsin Hsu, the chair of the Department of English, expressed her surprise and hoped more activities like this could be hosted by both colleges in the future, stimulating more unexpected sparks from the teachers and students from different departments.
