kurosawa's "dreams"

yesterday night i completed the feature "dreams" by akira kurosawa, after watching it in parts over the course of several days. currently the first "sunshine through the rain", second "the peach orchard", and fourth "the tunnel" vignettes are my favorite. in particular, "the peach orchard" captured a feeling that would sometimes overcome me as a child, that the world was unfair. i remember when i was around three or four, my mom ate the last of the rice she had cooked not knowing i was still hungry. when she offered to make more, i cried and screamed and begged to eat the rice in her stomach, which of course, she told me was impossible. as an adult, it seems silly that i tried to oppose such an obvious fact of nature. however, as a child, this very nature was unfair to me; how come once something was eaten, it could never be returned the same way? i often feel angry about the world as an adult, but this is not the same. i have never seen this feeling described in anything else.

i am also surpised by this: when i think back on the film, each vignette really feels just like a dream i'm trying to remember or a childhood memory i've revised into an abstraction throughout my life. more specifically, i finished the film feeling like i had actually dreamt these sequences. i feel like dream sequences in film are common, but i have never watched anything that actually felt like one, as opposed to just feeling "surreal". i'm not sure how kurosawa was able to do this, but i think the pacing, and the inconsequential way that he ends each vignette, imitate the experience of dreaming accurately.

i would recommend this movie to those who truly love nature.

11_25_25 19:56 bed ∗

sunshine through the rain

yesterday in storyboarding we watched the first segment of kurosawa's dreams, sunshine through the rain. it's about ten minutes long, one of eight vignettes in the full feature, inspired by the director's recurring childhood dreams.

this is one of those films where i found myself unwilling to contribute to the class discussion after watching it, not because there was nothing to discuss, but because the film is so...quiet that i felt by talking about it i would dirty it somehow. any descriptions i could think of would be as meaningless as saying watching the film was like watching oil on concrete or something where i'm probably just thinking of rainbows. i still have a bit of this feeling now, so rather than analyzing any formal elements i will just list some things i started thinking about.

it was validating to learn that a film as loved as this one (i'm guessing, since i had heard about it before) could be as slow as it is. i have always loved long shots with no cuts. i realized since watching that somewhere during a longer shot that my perception began to shift, i became both less immersed and more immersed. less immersed in the sense that i began shifting my focus to things like composition, how nicely centered the boy is in the rainbow, for instance, since nothing in the frame is moving anyway. at the same time, i became more immersed as my anticipation for what was going to happen next was supplemented with a different anticipation, an anticipation for what was going to happen in the next cut. this cycle of waiting barely rewarded with more waiting and so on allowed me to experience the film in a new way.

the environments in sunshine in the rain made me feel something that i find difficult to articulate. i'm not sure whether to call them settings or characters or more general spaces. there is something i want to say about the pillars of trees and the house that are both so like palaces, or fortresses, or something. the kitsune moving like a train through this palace. a steady, relentless beating...life force. the house as a wall we never get to cross. and something about the flatness of the flower field against the boy, filling the entire frame.

i plan to watch this movie fully, maybe this weekend.

11_19_25 13:28 putting off work at ima ∗

actually, more on obra dinn

i'm a bit embarassed that i didn't think too hard about the development when i first played it, as in i didn't fully how incredible the scale of the game is for a dev time of four years (well, that's a lot of time, but lucas pope is just one person). so maybe, not scale, but breadth? usually i love to point out how incredible it is that they were able to achieve this and this is how they did this and whatnot. but actually i think my lack of appreciation for its development while playing just speaks to my inexperience. as a player and as an artist. and also, i think it's because obra dinn was genuinely so immersive i didn't even have the chance to notice

11_17_25 9:29 int game dev lab ∗