Description:

This talk examines Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 The Idiot as an example of how film transpositions can alter the way we read their literary source texts. Kurosawa’s film involves not only a cultural and temporal shift of Dostoevsky’s plot to post-World War II Hokkaido, but also a chronotope that blends the traumatic aftereffects of the hero’s illness with the broader Japanese postwar experience. I argue that Kurosawa’s interpretation of Dostoevsky’s execution motifs, his focus on trauma, and his establishment of a post-apocalyptic time in particular, while transforming the novel considerably, also invite us to reexamine its structure, contrasting temporalities, and psychological portraits in fruitful ways.