In our latest Film Studies series, filmmaker and educator Patricia Gruben – founder of the Praxis Centre for Screenwriters – unpacks different approaches to writing for the screen, focusing here on adaptation from literary sources.
Shakespeare’s primal conflicts have expanded into a cultural spectrum ranging from faithful British transcriptions to American musicals and Bollywood gangster dramas. Shakespeare himself adapted earlier sources to the social and political concerns of his day. Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 epic homage to Macbeth draws on the minimalist style of Noh drama with its masklike makeup, stylized gestures and stripped-down set design in place of Shakespeare’s language-based performance, while alluding to the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence and the social fractures of defeated postwar Japan. For contrast we’ll view clips from Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, an adaptation of Hamlet set in occupied Kashmir, and other international versions.
Film studies tickets are $18 or
The director’s vision of Macbeth as a samurai is still a stunning reading, not merely of Shakespeare, but of history, power and sexual politics.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
With its all-pervading sense of doom, this is a serious contender for the finest celluloid Shakespeare of them all.
David Parkinson, Empire
Akira Kurosawa’s remarkable 1957 restaging of Macbeth in samurai and expressionist terms is unquestionably one of his finest works — charged with energy, imagination, and, in keeping with the subject, sheer horror.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Patricia Gruben is a filmmaker and former associate professor of film at Simon Fraser University, as well as founder and long-time director of Praxis Centre for Screenwriters (now the Screenwriters Lab at the Whistler Film Festival.) Her films have been screened at TIFF, VIFF, Sundance and the New York Film Festival, and her writing on film has appeared in international academic and popular journals. Her new feature film Heart of Gold will be released in 2025.
2:00 pm
2:30 pm
Patricia Gruben
Akira Kurosawa
Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Minoru Chiaki, Akira Kubo, Takamaru Sasaki, Yoichi Tachikawa
Japan
1957
In Japanese with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Monday February 10
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography
Asakazu Nakai
Original Music
Masaru Sato
Art Director
Yoshiro Muraki
Also in This Series
Throne of Blood
In this week's Film Studies talk, filmmaker and educator Patricia Gruben considers how Shakespeare's dramas have been translated to feudal Japan (in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood), New York gangs in the 1950s, and to occupied Kashmir, among other examples.
The Hours
Patricia Gruben leads us on an investigation into translating interior monologue to the screen, taking the case study of how Virginia Woolf inspired the Academy Award winning film The Hours by way of Michael Cunningham's best-selling novel.
Full Metal Jacket
Kubrick's famous Vietnam war film was inspired by two sources, Gustav Hasford's semi-autobiographical novella The Short-Timers, and Dispatches, a nonfiction account by Michael Herr. Both writers worked separately on the script, which Kubrick consolidated.
