This clip is the culminating scene in an Akira Kurosawa short called "Sunshine Through The Rain." The film begins with all of its pieces in set. There is a little boy and an older woman, there is a rainy day that is also sunny, and there is a fable concerning foxes. The older woman lets the little boy know that on a day that is rainy and also sunny, the foxes hold their wedding processions in the forest (which must not be watched.) Compelled by that sublime quality we call curiosity, the little boy sneaks out into the forest regardless, where he witnesses something we might not expect - it is not foxes, but people in fox-masks that come dancing through the forest, and there seems to be a sort of conflation between the real and the unreal here. They are clearly not foxes, although in the world of the film they might represent foxes - similarly, the tale might have been fictitious, yet the implications of danger within it seem very real. In this way, Kurosawa makes both the fictitious seem less contrived and the known less knowable, leaving behind nothing but a sense of unconvinced wonder "for grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer." (Longinus 137)
Furthermore, Longinus tells us that "persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force," (Longinus 137) which serves as further reminder that the space between what we know we know, what we know we don't know, and what we don't know we don't know is the space that will give birth to the sublime when explored carefully. The details in the story are few, and yet they are carefully selected and highly-packed - of the sublime, Longinus says that "the first of [the procedures that produce the sublime] attracts the reader by the selection of details, the second by the density of those selected." (Longinus 140) At the point of the film to which we discussed, the details mostly entail binaries - old woman and young boy, rainy and sunny days, fabled foxes celebrating in human celebration and what appears to be humans dressed and moving as foxes - the space that charges it all is always that space between, which the foxes (or fables, story, wonder itself) rule - the danger comes when you acknowledge that space, or even worse, step into it, but the foxes themselves must always be there both before and after intrusion. Also, the initial warning is given weight - at first it seems a mother attempting to keep her child from pneumonia, but it turns out that there is nothing practical in her tale, except if one wants to view the tale itself as practical.
After the event in the forest, the child returns home to a welcoming which isn't so warm. His mother is waiting for him, and with her a blade that one of the foxes has left at the house under the instructions that the child must kill himself with it. The only option that remains to the boy is if he rushes after the fox, returns the knife, and asks for forgiveness. Finally, the build-up to the scene I've posted done - or is it? The reason I've chosen this scene is that it is a conclusion, although all it does is build, and its power is contained in an instant. Rather than the accumulated effect of art, "sublimity, on the other hand, produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind." (Longinus 137) This combined with Longinus' idea that "there is nothing so productive of grandeur as noble emotion in the right place" (Longinus 139) provide for a scene that is too large to unpack. In a way, I think the short film is about curiosity, that faculty which demands a larger playground, finding one too big and now in the nearly impossible (but undeniable) place of having to negotiate with it. As Longinus puts it, Kurosawa has "[wheeled] up one impressive unit after another to give a series of increasing importance," (Longinus 141) only to leave the little, frail boy naked against the scene of huge wonder which is the final gesture towards absolute sublimity.
Other instances of sublimity:
Hawkins solo (second)
and Bud Powell
Longinus. "On The Sublime." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
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