DREAMS: An Exploration of Human Consciousness
DREAMS - TOHOAkira Kurosawa's Dreams is neither the best nor the most impactful work done by the Japanese director. Unlike the majority of his filmography, it has no proper impact on the technical or artistic elements of cinema. While it is beautifully made in its own right, it comparatively lacks the polish seen in his previous work. However, despite the film's comparative shortcomings, Dreams stands as the most personal film the director ever conceived.
Dreams is Kurosawa's first film that he wrote himself since 1944's The Most Beautiful. The scale of production for Dreams was large, as the budget for the film ($12m) surpassed the budget of his previous venture, the samurai epic, Ran ($11m). Still, in comparison to Ran, the scale and nature of the film's storytelling were quiet and peaceful. Even the horrific segments such as Mount Fuji In Red or The Weeping Demons moved at more a leisurely and explorative pace. The core reason of this pacing is so that ‘humanity’ could be at the centre of the discussion.
Such ideas are not new for a Kurosawa film, as previous features such as Ran and Dersu Uzala have been analysed as the director's exploration of his own personality. However, what separates this feature from the aforementioned two, is the exploration of Kurosawa's character being a central motif for the film, instead of using such characteristic elements as a complimentary subtext to personalise an otherwise unconnected tale. This collection of tales is not about Dersu who, just like Kurosawa, faces threats to his way of life due to advances of civilisation propagated by foreign lands. Neither are they about Ichimonji Hidetora who, just like Kurosawa, is in significant doubt of the impact that he leaves behind or the fact that his mortality might not be for long. These tales are about Kurosawa and Kurosawa alone. To call Dreams a film would be a misclassification since its emotive existence and style of presentation stands more as a showcase of a human than that of a tale.
This style of presentation marries Kurosawa's long-standing love of poetic filmmaking with semi-autobiographical elements found in features like Frédérico Fellini's 8½ and Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso. It mixes them with semi-majestic elements seen in the filmmaking style of Masaki Kobayashi and Kon Ichikawa. Ironically enough, if someone tries to explain the qualities of an ordinary dream, they might be the combination mentioned above — a romantic stroll through an unknown-but-familiar world that is as majestic as it is real.
Kurosawa understood this presentation style whilst making his film. Every concept — childhood, spirituality, art, death, universal disasters and man's mistakes — represented in the segments are subsequently linked with an emotional trait — innocence, happiness, wonder, loss, fear and regret — that in combined representation reveals an aspect of his personality. In the explorations of these aspects of his personality, Kurosawa also explored the formation, age and foundation of the thoughts that made him the person he was.
The first story where a child is forced into the line of danger is a message that the society punishes innocent curiosity without regarding age. The second story, where a child realises the unfruitful ignorance of his pure and ideal requests, comments on how the world turns a deaf ear towards reasoning voices, breaking the resolution of these voices in the process. Both the first and second story are clear depictions of a child's transition into what adults call "the real world", something that effectively relates to the director's early childhood where he and his friend Keinosuke Uekusa were described as "sensitive children" and "humanist crybabies". This "humanist crybaby" personality of the director would resurface again and again in his life, whether it was in the sympathetic style of I live In Fear, the adventurous wonder of The Hidden Fortress or the pessimistic anger of Dodes'ka-den. Each one emulating how the director's inner child comforts, wonders and throws tantrums at the world around him, and how this never seemed to leave him even when he became an adult.
Hence, with this "humanist crybaby" side of Kurosawa is the main entity of Dreams, called "I", born. Each state of "I", regardless of their age or stature, is always concerned about the greater state of human interactions and consequences, similarly crying, comforting, wondering or even fearing, the same way the director did throughout his life. Whether it is the fear of death in the third story, where the protagonist learns about fearful thoughts from an ominous entity that haunts him in his risky ventures; or the sense of "loss" and "anti-war" sentiment in the fourth story that not so subtly illuminates the consequences on lives that the act of war itself brings, regardless of the contexts; or his "wonder" of Van Gogh in the fifth where the director explains on what determinations that he himself produces and what makes a divide in his sense of "creation" and "recreations" regarding the entities he himself considers legend; or his "mistrust" of authority figures in the sixth where he unabashedly explains the consequences built up from the second story; or his "fear" in the seventh which is basically a continuation on the thoughts represented in the sixth; or his "happiness" in the last, where the director gives a reflective thought on all the personality aspects which he introduced the audience to and how, regardless of such negativity and destruction that covered most of his life, he still doesn't regret the life itself and considers his work as a "human" — not as a "legend" — which is fruitful enough to be departed in joyous celebration.
Each one of these segments starts with a quotation stating, "I had a dream", which could easily be replaced by a quotation saying, "I am like this". Such analysis and suggestions were cleared up by Teruyo Nagami, production designer and a long-time collaborator and personal friend of Kurosawa. In a 2016 Criterion interview, Nagami stated, "One way or another, Kurosawa is the protagonist in each of the episodes, that is what makes him an auteur."
As such, there is an absolute finality to Dreams, despite it not being his last. Not in a way that makes it a culmination of every filmmaking skill that Kurosawa learned over the years — for that, one should refer to the aforementioned Ran — but it is a culmination of who Kurosawa really was, how he lived, how he loved, how he feared and most importantly, how he was human.