My first and only previous viewing of Hakuchi came while our local yet world famous Pacific Film Archive was relatively new. I'd been working my way through George Sadoul's Dictionary of Film, naively fantasizing catching everything in it, checking off items I did manage to see, and lucking into complete (or nearly) retrospectives of a number of directors including Renoir, Ray, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa. The Idiot may have been for me as a reader the most special of the translated Russians and Sadoul's running-time entry for Hakuchi -- "265 mins. (original version); 166 minutes (general release version)" broke my heart. In the years since, though I haven't actively looked, I've encountered no clue as to the content of the destroyed footage, no hint as to whether anything at all, even memory or hearsay, may remain. Can there be anyone still living who saw the full version? Are there accounts in untranslated Japanese film literature?
The film as it stands strikes me as Kurosawa's most imperfectly realized. Whether he or someone else did the criminal reedit, it begins with disparate scenes linked by narrative intertitles. These intrusions so closely resemble the apologetic substitutions for unrecoverable scenes in recent film restorations that I imagine they represent the cuts. Background and setup seem the most obvious place to have cut. The explosive scene around the fireplace and wad of money, now just bizarre, unsupported, seems precisely where an airhead producer might have begun the film. As the film nears its end, scenes flow into one another with increasing ease. But, really, who knows? What have we lost, if even those delicate later convolutions suffered the knife? Donald Richie, in The Films of Akira Kurosawa, nods at the controversy over the film's length and Kurosawa's failed defense, yet whines about the early intertitles as if they were part of the original design.
Despite all that, the casting of Setsuko Hara as Taeko (Nastasya Filippovna) makes me wonder if the film was doomed anyway. Her beauty, as least in this film, is a cold thing. I recall Nastasya as a flighty, sometimes generous woman able, with varying success, to hide her feelings behind good-natured laughter. Men's verbal ploys and attacks often ratcheted upward her gaiety. As much as beauty, unpredictability drew men to her. We -- I mean men -- both desire and fear beauty, and we both desire and fear women's unpredictability. Taeko's so deliberate nearly always that there's too little explanation left in the film for the other two men's entrancement with her, and too little for Myshkin's. She's so dark and so darkly clothed, almost as if in mourning, so sedate, so prone to miming each thought before she speaks it that she appears fifteen years older than her rival Ayako. No small part of The Idiot is the spontaneity of Nastasya, the irony with which the fight over her turns a fluid creature into an achingly deliberative one. Taeko's silence should resound while the two men mourn her. It doesn't because she never lived anyway in Hakuchi. Did cut scenes destroy Taeko's mirth, imbue in its place this haggard wisdom? Did somebody cut Taeko's laughter?
The film as it stands strikes me as Kurosawa's most imperfectly realized. Whether he or someone else did the criminal reedit, it begins with disparate scenes linked by narrative intertitles. These intrusions so closely resemble the apologetic substitutions for unrecoverable scenes in recent film restorations that I imagine they represent the cuts. Background and setup seem the most obvious place to have cut. The explosive scene around the fireplace and wad of money, now just bizarre, unsupported, seems precisely where an airhead producer might have begun the film. As the film nears its end, scenes flow into one another with increasing ease. But, really, who knows? What have we lost, if even those delicate later convolutions suffered the knife? Donald Richie, in The Films of Akira Kurosawa, nods at the controversy over the film's length and Kurosawa's failed defense, yet whines about the early intertitles as if they were part of the original design.
Despite all that, the casting of Setsuko Hara as Taeko (Nastasya Filippovna) makes me wonder if the film was doomed anyway. Her beauty, as least in this film, is a cold thing. I recall Nastasya as a flighty, sometimes generous woman able, with varying success, to hide her feelings behind good-natured laughter. Men's verbal ploys and attacks often ratcheted upward her gaiety. As much as beauty, unpredictability drew men to her. We -- I mean men -- both desire and fear beauty, and we both desire and fear women's unpredictability. Taeko's so deliberate nearly always that there's too little explanation left in the film for the other two men's entrancement with her, and too little for Myshkin's. She's so dark and so darkly clothed, almost as if in mourning, so sedate, so prone to miming each thought before she speaks it that she appears fifteen years older than her rival Ayako. No small part of The Idiot is the spontaneity of Nastasya, the irony with which the fight over her turns a fluid creature into an achingly deliberative one. Taeko's silence should resound while the two men mourn her. It doesn't because she never lived anyway in Hakuchi. Did cut scenes destroy Taeko's mirth, imbue in its place this haggard wisdom? Did somebody cut Taeko's laughter?