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The source of his triumph is his viewpoint. Great tragic figures generally demand close-ups as a divine right, so that the audience can read the play of noble emotions in their features. In Ran, that shot scarcely exists. Kurosawa's cameras (he usually covers each scene with three) are always pulled back into godlike positions, and they provide a new perspective on the rages and the ultimate madness of Tatsuya Nakadai's Lear figure. From above and beyond, we perceive him not as a great man falling but as a fragile, all too human stumbler. Distance lends an analogous irony to the scenes in which his older sons and their advisers--among them a hypnotic Kurosawa invention, Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada), wife of Taro, lover of Jiro and a woman demonically possessed by vengeful needs of her own--meet to scheme multiple betrayals. Their still, geometrically formal groupings imply the characters' deluded faith that they are engaged in rational enterprises, when, of course, they are sowing anarchy's seeds.
Kurosawa visualizes his great battle scenes similarly. They begin in heartbreaking beauty, the banners and uniforms of the soldiers vivid against the dark ground where they maneuver for position in patterns as stylized as chess moves. This naturally intensifies the horror of the ensuing carnage, the mad tangle of flailing, falling bodies, of spurting blood and hacked-off limbs, in which the question of whether a man lives or dies is entirely a matter of chance. In what is perhaps his greatest coup, Kurosawa plays much of the film's central battle in a total silence infinitely more terrifying than any human cry. As he says, from where they sit the gods might be able to see this madness, but its sounds would not carry to their ears.
By placing us in their laps, Kurosawa invites us to contemplate this fact: every action we take has its effect on people we cannot see from our normal positions as groundlings. But in lifting us to these heights, he has, miraculously, not distanced our emotions. Somehow, each figure in the vast canvas has a particular and touching life of his own. Kurosawa gives the last shots of Ran to one of these minor victims of great men's grand designs. A blind youth has lost the flute that was the sole consolation for his affliction and the painting of Buddha that was his talisman. Now he wanders to the edge of a precipice, oblivious of being poised unseeing between life and death. His condition symbolizes for Kurosawa the human condition. The fusion of metaphorical weight and simple beauty in these shots also summarizes Ran's greatness. Outrage has already been voiced that partly because of industry politics in Japan, the movie has been denied an Oscar nomination as best foreign film. But in fact Ran is beyond such transitory concerns. It is a film that already belongs to the ages.