Quote o' the Day: Akira Kurosawa

Sidney Lumet once asked Kurosawa about a particular exterior shot in Ran. "It's such a striking way to frame it, why did you shoot it that way?" Kurosawa said "If we went any further right, there was a mall, if we went any further left, there was a Sony factory."

—Tweeted by Andrew Jackson Lynch, via OG, original source unknown

[CORRECTION: The above is the "folk" version and isn't quite accurate. Reader Scott Kirkpatrick found the real source and the exact quote. Please see the "Update" at the bottom of the post. —Ed.]

I laughed when Oren passed this along. Is there any more persistent necessity in photography than the constant editorializing our minds are engaged with as we continually frame the picture field? For all my persistence in experimenting, I've never really been able to just forget about framing and shoot, as if instinctively. And I'm always puzzled at the persistent urge I have to editorialize reality by excising certain "unwanted" things from the frame. In this picture, which I drove up to take this morning so I could show you the weather today, I can't get rid of the trees in the foreground, but I would if I could.

Even clouds. I'm always trying to arrange the clouds to make them more...cloud-like?! Where do these ideas come from? It's no wonder Plato/Socrates was fascinated by the question, in the ideas about the world of ideal forms that I never quite understood in The Republic. I'm always striving to make reality look more like the shadow on the cave wall...to make the clouds look like an idea of "cloudishness" that somehow exists independently in my head.

At least Kurosawa had a solid reason to exclude the mall and the Sony factory—because he was filming historical dramas to create the illusion of a time before malls and factories. What's my excuse?

Maybe the idealized notion I carry around is somehow just the cumulative aggregation of all the clouds I've ever seen, blended in memory. Anyway my persnickety tendency to be fastidious about framing is something I've fought with all my life.

I think I'd better go lie down now, my brain hurts.  :-)

Sky-show
There was a real show in the sky today, and for a few precious minutes we got our first rain in weeks, complete with thunder. It's been painfully dry here. The farmers are hurting. I'm working on part three of the "working hard" series, and the revamped GX9 impressions.

No post tomorrow, so have a great weekend wherever you are.

And Happiest of Juneteenths to celebrants! May the wishes of every peaceful demonstrator come true before the next Juneteenth rolls around.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad)

UPDATE Saturday afternoon: Our friend Scott Kirkpatrick, a Professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem who I wrote about when he chartered a plane to come out to the hinterlands for a visit, found the source. It wasn't in Kurosawa's Something Like An Autobiography, he relates, which stops at 1950 with Rashomon; wasn't in the liner notes of the Criterion Collection edition of Ran; and he couldn't find it in The Warrior's Camera, Stephen Prince's survey of Kurosawa's oeuvre and accomplishment.

"But Sidney Lumet wrote a book on Making Movies that is recommended to film students like my son, Tom," Scott writes—and, sure enough, the preface begins with:

I once asked Akira Kurosawa why he had chosen to frame a shot in Ran in a particular way. His answer was that if he'd panned the camera one inch to the left, the Sony factory would be sitting there exposed, and if he'd panned an inch to the right, we would see the airport....

Many thanks to Scott for his good sleuthing! —MJ

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Tex Andrews: "Re 'It's no wonder Plato/Socrates was fascinated by the question, in the ideas about the world of ideal forms that I never quite understood in The Republic. I'm always striving to make reality look more like the shadow on the cave wall...to make the clouds look like an idea of "cloudishness" that somehow exists independently in my head....What's my excuse?'

"I think this is what separates 'capital P' Photographers from the rest of the visual arts—an inability to accept that the thing you are making, a photograph, bears as much relation to reality as a dream does...or a painting. It is not that reality! It's not a record of reality. Reality is holistic and infinitely changing, and a 'moment' isn't a moment at all, but a fluid river of time-space. A photograph is just a slice out of that, like a slice of brain from a CAT scan—that's not a brain!

"So, you are so right to invoke Plato and the cave here. When we make art (and things that could be art if they were contextualized as such, see Duchamp, or for a photographic example Atget), we're really making shadows. Shadows are pretty cool, no ding on them. Shadows are their own reality,they are things, part of the Big Reality, and a photograph,once manifest, then is its own reality, like other objects. So, be free and don't worry about your totally correct impulses—you need no excuse.

"Thanks for bringing this up, and your photograph was a great starting point, as was the great lead in from Lumet and Kurosawa."

Bill Poole: "Re 'I can't get rid of the trees in the foreground, but I would if I could.' I'm not sure why you would want to do that, as the tops of the trees almost exactly duplicate tops of the clouds. Looks like compositional genius to me."

Mike replies: I like you, Bill, I like you. You are far above average in intelligence and most probably good-looking too.

Mike Chisholm: "I expect you'll be inundated by comments from us ancient philosophers, but: other way round. What we see and perceive are the shadows on the cave wall. Reality (the 'ideal forms' of which those shadows are flickering distortions) is behind us. Which is the Great Teaching of the British Christmas pantomime, where children are encouraged to scream hysterically, 'It's behind you!' when the hero persistently fails to perceive the menacing Ideal Form. Best wishes, Heraclitus."

Mike replies: You are correct. So then when a flower photographer rejects twenty or a hundred blossoms as imperfect and finds one which suits his ideas, and jockeys to find a position which shows that one paragon to proper advantage, the true reality is the ideal of the 'Flower' in his mind which all the other actual blossoms do not live up to. Is that correct Sir? This is why Plato's cave always flummoxed me, because it seemed to my unschooled brain that he had it backwards!

Mike Chisholm: "No, that's not it. Reaching into my bag of photographic metaphors, the best I can do is: 'reality' is this one massively awesome raw file, out of which our risibly inadequate processors make our own individual pathetic-but-adequate conversions, inside which we live our deluded little lives. That's right, reality is a Fuji X-Trans file. The truth is out there. Heraclitus."

Mike: That I can wrap my head around. BTW, did you know some people call you "The Obscure One"? (According to the Wikipedia article on Heraclitus.)

Bill Tyler: "If you have any interest in what goes into making a movie, the Lumet book is excellent. As a photographer, I especially enjoyed his discussion of lens focal lengths with Twelve Angry Men as an example. Many of the other choices he discusses are also applicable to still photography."

Mike replies: I'm halfway through it. Started reading it yesterday when Scott found the reference.

Comments

[Moose]

Must . . . resist . . . fist . . .of . . . PS

[GRIGORIS KOSTAKIS]

maybe with a drone you could have a photo without the trees in the foreground. i have thought of buying a selphie stick to use with my smartphone for the same reason. just to have a higher viewpoint than my extended arm. i have not bought it yet though.

[Richard Parkin]

“I'm working on part three of the "working hard" series, and the revamped GX9 impressions” . I assumed you had pulled part two, it no longer exists in the index nor in a search.

[Andy F]

I reckon you could get that shot without the trees if you had a drone ;)

[David Lee]

Thank you Mike. Both my father and my mother were racist. They couldn’t hide it. They tried hard, very hard to educate us not to be like them. I think they succeeded. Three or four years ago, as a father’s day present, my son wrote me a long letter. One of the things he wrote was, thank you dad, for never allowing me make a racist comment about anyone.

Happy Juneteenths everyone.

[Jeff]

I seem to recall one of your older posts where you wrote that you did not like pictures that had too perfect framing; rather that you appreciated the imperfections of, say, edge intrusions. I don’t recall your exact words, but the comment stuck in my mind, as it seemed the opposite of what I expected. You also mentioned along the way, I think, that you were not a great fan of Paul Strand. He is a photographer, in my view, who set an example for consistently paying attention to the edges and to details, and I remember his stating that ‘almost’ getting composition and framing right wasn’t good enough. I like imperfections, stray elements, in some pictures, if they are strategically placed to add visual interest and counterpoint, and to avoid boring or cliche. But that also requires careful attention to detail. The continual striving for those moments and results - when it all comes together - is part of what makes photography so interesting and challenging for me.

[robert e]

Here's what Giorgio Vasari had to say about photographers, ca. 1550 (before Photoshop was invented, obviously):

"...he can’t work from memory or enhance what he copies from life, and so give his work the grace and perfection of art which are beyond the reach of nature, some of whose aspects tend to be less than beautiful."*

So true: even the most able photographer can edit only so much, while the accomplished painter can "correct" every aspect and detail of reality. (Sure, now there's Photoshop, but who uses that? And whether it makes things easier is arguable.)

There's a major silver lining, though. We get to blame reality when things don't work out. That is no small gift, having reality itself as your arch-nemesis. The painter, on the other hand, has nowhere to hide.

*OK, so Vasari was ostensibly disparaging Titian, and possibly Venetian artists in general, piling-on to Michaelangelo's criticism. On the other hand, we have only Vasari's word for it. My guess is he overheard some amateur photographers grousing in a cafe and decided to put those words in the great master's mouth when he sat down to write his great opus. Because writers, too, can edit reality.

[Jim Witkowski]

You need more height. Get a drone.

[Dave Levingston]

Re: removing those foreground trees. I wasn't there, but two ideas occur. 1. Stepladder. 2. Get on the roof of your car, like Ansel.

[John Krumm]

Yes, you are hitting on a truth here, the poetry of photography has a certain artificial aspect, as does poetry. You are presenting something you hope is more than the thing itself, as so many have said, ideally in a way that doesn't draw too much attention to that fact. This "more" might be an idealized version, it might be something else. Most poetry is bad poetry, of course. :)

[William Lewis]

Love the Kurosawa quote.

Likewise I love your comment to the peaceful protesters. But I can't help but think of the annual ... promise? prayer? ... at the end of the Seder: "Next year in Jerusalem!" Very few had that dream come true; very few will have their dreams of equality come true here, I fear. May the Good One prove my cynicism wrong!

[Hendrik]

I seem to have witnessed an instance of "sky show", of "editorialized reality" right here. Still flabbergasted.

I hallucinated reading, on TOP, the second part of the GX9 review. It was somewhere between the several "Working hard" posts and I remember it so vividly, I could almost quote from it. And yet, when I came back here yesterday to reread, it was gone. Oh (capital "O"!). Now I've come back and it's still not here. I must have dreamt it, but what a rant of a dream - or would that be: a dream of a rant - it was. ... But then, if I dreamt it, why does my browser history show I visited a link to it? Curiouser and curiouser ...

[Roberto Carlin]

"I would if I could". You should consider buying a drone then!

[Speed]

Mike wrote, " I can't get rid of the trees in the foreground, but I would if I could."

Modern technology to the rescue. Mount your camera on a modern UAV (drone) and fly it above the trees. As for framing, present day 360 degree cameras allow you to capture everything (!) and frame in post.

Not cheap but not impossible either.

[David Aiken]

I once spent several months taking photos of boring scenes and processing and reprocessing images in my spare time to learn how to make the clouds look more like clouds. It taught me a lot about exposure and about processing that paid off in other areas as well. The same could be said for blue skies.

If there's two things that trying to make things look "real" taught me, it's that I have to pay a great deal more attention to how those things really look than I usually do, and that my ideas of how things normally look, which often inform the way I process an image, are gross simplifications that fail to accurately capture the way they look when I pay attention to them.

[Daniel]

Trees in the way? You need a Fred Picker Autograph model Zone VI saw...

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Nice edit, Moose! I was thinking the places where the near trees overlapped the far shore would be annoying (and maybe they were; but your result is good that way). (Would be harder to do to stand up to a gallery-size print!)

[HR]

This is a short 8 minute video, but very interesting:

Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement

Can movement tell a story? Sure, if you’re as gifted as Akira Kurosawa. More than any other filmmaker, he had an innate understanding of movement and how to capture it onscreen. Join me today in studying the master, possibly the greatest composer of motion in film history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doaQC-S8de8

[Rubal]

You need to get a drone to possibly shoot them

[Moose]

"Nice edit, Moose!

Thanks, David!

(Would be harder to do to stand up to a gallery-size print!)"

Yes, but easier to start with the original file, not a small JPEG. \;~)>