All art is created through perspective. Film has the additional benefit of filtering that perspective through a lens to project rays of informed light. That information is constantly manipulated to control what we’re watching and how a director wants us to experience it. This mechanic of filmmaking is often so controlled and so specific, that it can practically contradict the uncontrollable impulses of our own existence. It is the vertebrae of the mystique that film can reflect, and it rarely feels as dialed in as it does when you’re watching a film from Akira Kurosawa. The Japanese painter turned director is considered one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live, and a glance at his filmography’s touchstones would back that up. Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961), and High and Low (1963) are some of the finest films ever made, and that is only a small percentage of a filmography consisting of thirty films across five decades. One of the countless traits that threads his style together is his ability to manipulate the perspective of film. Whether it’s through high contrast light, smoky shadows, timely edits, vivid characters, or an informed semblance of structure that allows the emotional vices to be transparent - Kurosawa mastered it.
Film would be years behind without Rashomon (or Kurosawa in general if we want to be specific). It was one of the first films to take shape through a quartet of characters that claim to have experienced the same event differently than the other. The manipulation of truth through individual accounts is one of the most inspiring tales ever filmed, and we’ve seen it translated on numerous occasions. Rashomon gets all the love for Kurosawa’s ability to sway through various perspectives, but the pivot points of High and Low are extraordinary developments of a master at the height of his powers.
High and Low opens on the industrialized cityscapes of Yokohama where smoke plumes into the sky and casts a suffocating haze over the congested surface of the city. We observe this through credits being overlaid by the haunting tune of a chorus that could be the collective gasps for help from the people smothered beneath the sky. Cut to the high contrast living room of Kingo Gondo’s (a masterfully restrained Toshiro Mifune) apartment, and that feeling of despair has pivoted into a comfortable sense of reality. Although, that reality is stark with two different worlds connected by the looking glass of Gondo’s home upon the world beneath him. This is the first instance where Kurosawa transitions from one type of film to the next, and it happens instantly. Shortly after we’re thrust into a heady conversation about money and the financial power moves of National Shoes despite the decay that seems to grow around them. For the first 55 minutes we see the dilemma of Japan through the eyes of Gondo and the ransom that is to be paid to the man who kidnapped his chauffeur’s son. This dilemma feels like it has an easy solution because of the money that fills the pockets of Gondo, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. This is when Kurosawa pivots again.
What was once a seedy crime drama about the threat to industrialized money; quickly turns into a police procedural where Gondo takes the backseat, and the investigative unit takes control of the situation.
Kurosawa stops on a dime to take an uncontrollable situation out of Gondo’s hands and gives it to a police force looking to control an unidentifiable force from jigoku - the Japanese word for “Hell”. This spatial purgatory that Kurosawa maneuvers in the middle-most part of the movie should unseat every audience member. It’s not often a great film will sideline the story’s supposed protagonist, but that’s likely because this story doesn’t have a textbook lead. Kurosawa is actively challenging the story as he descends from the hilltop and into the recesses of Yokohama. Trolley stations, alleyways, phone booths, and dirty water are points of notable interest and decorated reflections that contradict the vast space of Gondo’s living room. Kurosawa is slowly squeezing us in between the first quarter of the film and the last. The relative tediousness of their investigation paves the way for the final third that is a scorched landscape. Heavily shadowed areas, buildings, muddy pathways littered with milling drug addicts and suffocating surfaces defies the freedom of Gondo’s apartment.
It’s at this point where we’re watching the harrowing truth of High and Low reach a physical conclusion. What once was a textbook crime drama has developed into a fierce documentation of the hidden truth of people being buried beneath the heavenly hilltops of the elite. Once more, it is another pivot for Kurosawa’s perspective. It isn’t an even playing field (we’re not there quite yet), but he’s submerged us in this subterranean field of social and physical decay in the blindspots that Gondo’s window can’t see.
The kidnapper is apprehended and the kidnapper requests he meet with Gondo face to face in prison. In a stunning conclusion where the kidnapper nears his fate with death, the reflections of the two men at the center of this story are cast onto each other on the glass that separates the two of them. For the first time they’re on the same level, and yet that transparent separation is still there. The kidnapper’s motives are stripped from the finale (filmmaker Takashi Miike has a great essay on that missing motive here) and we’re left with no answers as he caves to his hysterical emotions and is carried away. Leaving Gondo in front of a shuttered window that has completely isolated him from understanding “why?” as the film fades to credits. That tingling sensation of answering, “why?”, is one of the crutches of understanding a film, but perhaps it isn’t, “why?” that Kurosawa wants to answer, but rather, “what?”. The significance of this choice isn’t designed for the characters to answer, but in the final stroke of genius, Kurosawa pivots the perspective for the last time and forces us to look at our reflection on the black screen in front of us.
This story is no longer about what it means to the characters involved, but what it may mean to us. Now our perspective matters just as much as Kingo Gondo, the investigation unit, and the kidnapper. What type of conclusions can we draw on the kidnapper based on the information that was dealt to us? Is it jaded because we saw it from the perspective of the financially elite, infrastructure of the police, and the scorched terrain of the kidnapper’s reality? Absolutely. Kurosawa uses the film to extract the emotion out of us and project it back onto the film as it has been projected to us. It’s this sense of communication he’s mastered in the aforementioned touchstones of filmography that makes his work vital. In High and Low the shapes it’s constantly shifting into is so defiant of comfortable Western techniques that insist on presenting conclusions that make us feel good about ourselves. That makes us a passive viewer instead of an active one, and Kurosawa’s understanding of how to mutate perspective is a mode of filmmaking that is generating engagement at a frequent, authentic level.
This is why Akira Kurosawa is a master.
Our understanding of High and Low doesn’t stem from why any of it happened, but what may have driven this man to make the choices he did. Sure, he says the sight of Gondo’s house makes him sick, but that isn’t inciting enough. Perhaps it’s the idea that the sight of the house makes him believe that having enough money (as Gondo does) will lift him from Hell. This is false. When the financially elite perch themselves above the moat that surrounds them, it creates this illusion that money will save you if you have enough of it. The kidnapper gets his ransom and returns the chauffeur’s son as promised, and yet the story ends with him approaching death’s doorstep. Money didn’t save the kidnapper. Hell, it didn’t even keep the chauffeur’s son safe from the reaches of the boiling inferno plucking him from the heavenly compound in broad daylight. What freedom does having money grant? None. At the end of the film both of these men are imprisoned by their overreach for capital and the only people they’re left to face is themselves. Gondo’s over-mortgaged home and the kidnapper’s intersecting obstruction reflects off one another and both are cast into Hell by their own vices. Which might not be entirely reflective of who these people are, but it is absolutely the scenario that this unstable structure has forced these men into.
With that being said, that’s just one perspective - my angle. Kurosawa’s work asks, “What’s yours?”