Kurosawa Akira's The Idiot: Where the East meets the West

Abstract

Hakuchi, Kurosawa Akira's 1951 film adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, finds its proper historical context in post-World War II cultural criticism. In this period an interest in Dostoevsky was shared by many artists and intellectuals who sought the larger cultural causes of the catastrophe that had involved all industrial nations. Kurosawa's turn to Dostoevsky contributes a Japanese variant to the series of ethical revisions of modernism attempted in Europe by such artists and thinkers as Thomas Mann, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Mikhail Bakhtin. For them Dostoevsky represented an alternative model for an ethically differentiated collective consciousness, in opposition to the now discredited father of modernism, Friedrich Nietzsche. Through a reading of the film's crucial scenes and motifs, Kurosawa's cinematic mediation between the West and the East is shown to have started from the shared premises of the ethically revised modernism that emerged from the wartime trauma.