Slavoj Zizek: ‘Akira Kurosawa does Shakespeare better than William Shakespeare’
While much of Slavoj Zizek’s philosophy and cultural theory concerns post-Marxism, politics and psychoanalysis, he is also a keen film theorist with a wide working knowledge of the history of cinema. From the early days of silent film right up to recent releases like Parasite, Zizek seemingly knows it all, and more importantly, he understands its significance from an artistic, moral and political perspective.
Back in 2019, Zizek gave a talk at the Institute for the Radical Imagination, in which he discussed the importance of multiculturalism and how it helps us to appreciate classic works of art better. “I think we should learn to respect authentic multiculturalism. True Marxists are not historicists,” he said. “It’s not, ‘Oh, to understand Shakespeare, you have to know all the Elizabethan history and so on’. No, if anything, it’s the other way around.”
“To understand Elizabethan England, read Shakespeare. You will learn more than reading somebody’s history [book],” Zizek continued. “But you know what always fascinated me? How often the best movie versions of a great work of art are the ones which transpose this work of art, the story, into a totally different cultural context. This is authentic multiculturalism.”
Zizek then went on to give his deep respect to the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and especially for his adaptations of William Shakespeare. As Zizek commented, it is through contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare that we are able to better understand the notoriously difficult-to-penetrate themes of the original works.
“For example, Hamlet. Yeah, we all like Hamlet. The best cinema version of Hamlet that I know – it’s not Laurence Olivier or this or that – Akira Kurosawa did in 1960 a Japanese version of Hamlet set in a big company,” Zizek said. “Hamlet is a student played by Toshiro Mifune. He discovers his father was killed and blah, blah, blah. With the beautiful title, it’s a genius titled The Bad Sleep Well.”
As well as the 1960 version of Hamlet, Kurosawa also provided his take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, transporting the action from medieval Scotland to feudal-era Japan with 1957’s Throne of Blood. His widely-admired epic Ran from 1985 also retold the story of Shakespeare’s King Lear in one of his best-ever cinematic efforts.
Zizek then explained that Kurosawa was also better at “doing Dostoevsky” than the praised Russian author was at doing his own work. “The best Dostoyevsky that I know, again, it’s Kurosawa [The Idiot]. I think this is the true greatness of a work that it survives transposition to a totally different culture,” Zizek said.
He concluded: “This is what Walter Benjamin would have called ‘historical openness’, this unfinished character. When we come later than the original work of art, this is a privilege for us. We can understand Shakespeare today better than Shakespeare understood himself.” Then again, we might be able to understand Kurosawa’s own work better with a modern retelling, like in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, clearly an adaptation of Seven Samurai.
