Kurosawa's Hamlet
example · film: The Bad Sleep Well (Kurosawa) ·
retold in 12 talks
Kurosawa's 1961 Japanese corporate-setting adaptation of Hamlet (The Bad Sleep Well) is the best cinema version of Hamlet precisely because it transposes it to a totally different cultural context, proving the work's universal greatness.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 11
“The best cinema version of Hamlet that I know—it's not Laurence Olivier—it's Akira Kurosawa did in '61 a Japanese version of Hamlet set in a big corporate company.”
“The best version of Hamlet is for me Akira Kurosawa from '62 set in modern Japan with a wonderful title The Bad Sleep Well.”
“the greatest movie version of Shakespeare is for me Akira Kurosawa... The Bad Sleep Well. Because of course they don't have conscience”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
authentic multiculturalism
×2
ontological incompleteness
×2
concrete universality
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Akira Kurosawa12Zhou Enlai4Salman Rushdie4William Shakespeare5Erik Erikson2Huey P. Newton2Toshirō Mifune2Jodi Dean3
alongside works
Every retelling 12
Kurosawa's 1961 Japanese corporate-setting adaptation of Hamlet (The Bad Sleep Well) is the best cinema version of Hamlet precisely because it transposes it to a totally different cultural context, proving the work's universal greatness., illustrating authentic multiculturalism,historical openness of works of art
Akira Kurosawa's 1960 film set in modern Japan shows how transposing Hamlet into another culture reveals something invisible in the original, exemplifying concrete universality., illustrating concrete universality
Žižek praises Kurosawa's film as the greatest movie version of Shakespeare, Hamlet as Toshiro Mifune returning from studies in the US, illustrating that a foreign artist at a distance can reveal dimensions of a work the original culture could not., illustrating authentic multiculturalism,productive distance,understanding a culture from outside
19:58 Slavoj Zizek's "THE PARALLAX OF LACK AND SURPLUS IN POLITICS" (LACK V, 2025)2025-03-15 · 1:28:55
Žižek cites Kurosawa’s 'The Bad Sleep Well' as an example of a 'blind spot' in Shakespeare’s Hamlet being actualized in a later work., illustrating blind spot actualized
Akira Kurosawa's film adaptation of Hamlet retroactively changes the meaning of Shakespeare's original by transposing it to modern Japan, showing how new art fills in the gaps of the past., illustrating retro-activity of art/history,changing the past
Akira Kurosawa's film 'Yojimbo' (misidentified by Žižek as a Hamlet version titled 'Only Bad People Sleep Well') is cited as a completion of Shakespeare's work, showing that later interpretations can understand the work better than the author did., illustrating ontological openness