Abstract
AbstractThis chapter discusses Kurosawa’s film Hakuchi, a 1951 adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot. This film finds its proper historical context in post-Second World War cultural critique which coincided with the international revival of interest in Dostoevsky. Kurosawa’s turn to Dostoevsky contributes a Japanese variant to the series of rethinkings by 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 East and the West is shown to have started from the shared premises of an ethically revised modernism that emerged from wartime trauma. Dostoevsky’s structure of consciousness as historical conscience provides Kurosawa with a means of reflection on Japanese war crimes as being a continuation of the criminality inherent in the colonial claims of Western modernity.
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