The Dreams:
Sunshine through the Rain
The Peach Orchard
The Blizzard
The Tunnel
Crows
Mount Fuji in Red
The Weeping Demon
Village of the Watermills
What do dreams tell us? What do these of Kurosawa tell us? From what stuff are Dreams constructed? Mine, never as lyrical as these in this film, typically take the events of the day, mix them up a bit, add a bit of extraneous information, pour on some garbled insight, add some emotional coloring, and then become sort of an amalgam of what has occurred during the day offering new and I would hope fresh insights about that which has transpired during the course of my day.
Of course, in Kurosawa's Dreams, none of the dreams are disjointed like mine. All the dreams are much more structured, and follow a discernible narrative, but all are nonetheless, clearly magical. Of the eight, I am hard pressed to make a choice of a favorite; it seems so difficult (the clouds of drifting peach blossoms like a blizzard of snow, in “The Peach Orchard"; simply unforgettable). One, ‘Crows’, however, took several of Van Gogh's paintings and made them live.
I lost track and am not quite certain of exactly which paintings were made live in the film. As the artist character walked the fields in France, he came upon ‘Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing’ made alive, Women Washing, the stone Bridge itself, all in Van Gogh’s glorious colors. Later the artist character walked along the road across the same fields Van Gogh painted, and then met up with the Van Gogh himself painting, played by Martin Scorsese, complete with the bandage and the missing ear. I may be wrong, but next occurred, ‘The Sun rising behind Mont. Majours’ and then in a burst of flight, ‘Wheat Field with Crows’ ( one of the last works before Van Gogh’s suicide ) with hundreds of Crows squawking and flapping in flight covering the screen.
For more information about Van Gogh, all of his individual paintings, his letters to his brother Theo, and much more, please see the following website:http://www.vggallery.com/index.html
From E. H. Gombrich’s ‘The Story of Art’, here is information regarding the individual paintings on the screen and what Van Gogh was experiencing during that portion of his life ( Van Gogh completed hundreds of paintings over the course of the final three years of his life). I quote this Gombrich at length and apologize for the length but it seems there's so much information ( especially the final paragraph ) that Grombrich conveys here that points directly to not only Van Gogh, but other artists, art, and my feelings for Kurosawa's work and his in this film.
In the winter of 1888, while Cezanne was painting his landscapes and still lifes in Aix, there arrived in southern France another painter in search of the intense light and colours of the south. He was a young and earnest Dutchman called Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh was born in Holland in 1853, the son of a vicar. He was a deeply religious man who had worked as a lay preacher in England and among Belgian miners. He had been profoundly impressed by the art of Milet and its social message, and decided to become a painter himself. A younger brother, Theo, who worked in an art-dealer’s shop, introduced him to Impressionist painters. This brother was a remarkable man. Though poor himself, he always gave ungrudgingly to the older Vincent and even financed his journey to Arles in southern France. Vincent hoped that if he could work there undisturbed for a number of years he might be able one day to sell his pictures and repay his generous brother. In his self-chosen solitude in Arles, Vincent confided in his letters to Theo, which read like a continuous diary, all his ideas and hopes. These letters, by a humble and almost self-taught artist who had no idea of the fame he was to achieve, are among the most moving and exciting in all literature. In them we can feel the artist’s sense of mission, his struggle and triumphs, his desperate loneliness and longing for companionship, and we become aware of the immense strain under which he worked with feverish energy. After less than a year, in December 1888, he broke down and had an attack of insanity. In May 1889 he went into a mental asylum, but he still had lucid intervals during which he continued to paint. The agony lasted for another fourteen months. In July 1890 Van Gogh put an end to his life. He died younger than even Raphael. His career as a painter had not lasted more than ten years---the paintings on which his fame rests were all painted during three years which were interrupted by crises and despair. Most people nowadays know some of these paintings; the sunflowers, the empty chair, the cypresses and some of the portraits have become popular in coloured reproductions and can be seen in many a simple room. That is exactly what Van Gogh wanted. He wanted his pictures to have the direct and strong effect of the coloured Japanese prints he admired so much. He longed for an unsophisticated art which would not only appeal to the rich connoisseurs but could give joy and consolation to every human being. Nevertheless, this is not quite the whole story. No reproduction is perfect. The cheaper ones make Van Gogh’s pictures look cruder than they really are, and one may sometimes tire of them. Whenever that happens, it is quite a revelation to return to Van Gogh’s original works and to discover how subtle and deliberate he could be even in his strongest effects.
For Van Gogh, too, had absorbed the lessons of Impressionism. He experimented with the use of bright, pure colours which he did not mix on the palette but applied to the canvas in small strokes or dots, relying on the beholder’s eye which would see them all together. Some of the younger painters in Paris had built up a whole scientific theory on this type of ‘pointillisme’ which should heighten the intensity of colour effects. Van Gogh liked the technique of painting in dots and strokes, but under his hand it became something rather different from what the Impressionists had meant it to be. For Van Gogh used the individual brush-strokes not only to break up the colour but also to convey his own excitement. In one of his letters from Arles he describes his states of inspiration when ‘the emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without being aware of working…and the strokes come with a sequences and coherence like words in a speech or a letter’. The comparison could not be clearer. In such moments he painted as other men write. Just as the form of the writing in a letter, the traces left by the pen on the paper, impart something of the gestures of the writer, so that we feel instinctively when a letter was written under great stress of emotion---so the brush-strokes of Van Gogh tell us something of the state of his mind. No artist before him had ever used this means with such consistency and effect. We remember that there is bold and loose brush-work in earlier paintings, in works by Tintoretto ( St. George’s Fight with the Dragon ), by Hals ( Pieter van der Broecke ), and by Manet (Monet working in his boat ), but in these it rather conveys the artists’ sovereign mastery, his quick perception and magic capacity of conjuring up a vision. In Van Gogh they help to convey the exaltation of the artist’s mind. Van Gogh liked to paint objects and scenes which gave this new means full scope---motifs in which he could draw as well as paint with his brush, and lay on the colour thick just as a writer who underlines his words. That is why he was the first painter to discover the beauty of stubbles, hedgerows and cornfields, of the gnarled branches of olive trees and the dark, flame-like shapes of the cypress ( Landscape with Cypresses near Arles ).
It is clear that Van Gogh was not mainly concerned with correct representation. He used colors and forms to convey what he felt about the things he painted, and what he wished others to feel. He did not care much for what he called "stereoscopic reality", that is to say the photographically exact picture of nature. He would exaggerate and even change the appearance of things when this suited his aim. Thus he had arrived by a different road in a similar juncture to that at which Cezanne found himself during these same years. Both took a momentous step of deliberately abandoning the aim of painting as an "imitation of nature". Their reasons, of course, were different. When Cezanne painted a still life, he wanted to explore the relationship of forms and color, and took in only so much of "correct perspective" as he happened to need for his particular experiment. Van Gogh new wanted this painting to express what he felt, and if distortion helped him to achieve this aim he would use distortion. Both of them had arrived at this point without wanting to overthrow the old standards of art. They did not pose as "revolutionaries"; they did not want to shock the complacent critics. Both of them, in fact, had almost given up hope of anybody paying attention to their pictures-they just worked on because they had to.
Neither dreams nor the dreams in this film, nor some films are overly concerned with correct representation. Films can, "…exaggerate and even change the appearances of things when this…” suits the Director's aims. As Kurosawa does here, in this film, all the better so for our emotional benefit, enjoyment, and experience.