Shakespeare in translation

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The ongoing "Shakespeare in Washington" celebration has a movie component. Several of the better-known Shakespearean features are being revived at the American Film Institute Silver Theatre as part of a series called "Shakespeare in the Cinema."

The most antique examples are about to be showcased at the Library of Congress' Mary Pickford Theater, which begins a series called "Screening Shakespeare" on April 20 with a program consisting of early silents, made between 1905 and 1912. The shortest is a 40-second fragment of a duel from "Macbeth." The longest is a half-hour digest of "As You Like It."

During the next two weeks the AFI Silver Theatre will showcase two of the greatest achievements in this tradition: Akira Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" (1957) and "Ran" (1985). Splendid as pictorial spectacles, the movies are distinctive in part because they imaginatively transpose landmarks of English-language theater, "Macbeth" and "King Lear," respectively, from one language and culture to another. In the process they extend the range of meaning in the original plays, reconcile disparate artistic traditions of the Elizabethan stage and the Noh drama — and confirm the creative potential of cinematic adaptation in the hands of a master stylist.

Mr. Kurosawa died in 1998 at the age of 88. This passing and the release of "Ran" are still within living memory of most art-house moviegoers. "Throne of Blood," now in its 50th anniversary year, belongs to a more distant, albeit illustrious, period of Kurosawa classics.

Like many imports of that time, it was slow to reach the U.S., opening here in November, 1961 — long after its Japanese premiere in January 1957.

Mr. Kurosawa had abandoned an earlier "Macbeth" project when he heard about Orson Welles' intention to shoot a film version in the late 1940s. He ended up with the more satisfying variation, although "Throne of Blood" — titled "The Castle of the Spider's Web" in Japan — proved a box-office disappointment for its distributor, Toho, which was hoping for a spectacle to duplicate the popularity of "Seven Samurai" three years earlier.

The fatalistic emphasis that controls both settings and characters in "Throne of Blood" keeps conventional human interest and empathy at arm's length, but this was Mr. Kurosawa's first historical movie after "Seven Samurai," so the pictorial influence of the triumphant earlier film is unmistakable. Mr. Kurosawa reunited numerous crew members and cast members, and the unit again simulated the same period — an age of warlords in the late 15th or early 16th century — with a comparable dedication.

Shakespeare's play envisioned an age of Scottish warlords perhaps four centuries earlier. The war-torn backdrops seem thematically interchangeable, but you're pretty certain that Mr. Kurosawa is illustrating his period with more vividness and authority than even gifted stage directors are likely to bring to "Macbeth."

The sacrifice of Shakespearean language, including all the eloquent speeches associated with the title character as he descends from warrior to murderous usurper, helps to facilitate an exotic, elaborately pictorial downfall. The downfall is anticipated wherever the camera directs your attention: weather, landscape, costuming, settings, gesture, voice, sound effects.

The opening and closing images seem to emerge from a metaphorical mist of antiquity as they disclose the ruins of the title castle. In the body of the film it materializes in a kind of glowering, doomed, weirdly spidery magnificence along Mount Fuji's volcanic slopes.