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Kurosawa Akira's The Lower Depths: Beggar cinema at the disjuncture of times

ABSTRACT Kurosawa's The Lower Depths (1957) has been seen exclusively as a literal adaptation of Maxim Gorky's drama with no content on its own and therefore as a merely formalist exercise in transforming a theatre play into a film. Breaking with the received film-as-theatre approach, this article contextualizes the film within the 1953 Japanese debate on ‘beggar photography’ and photographic realism and Kurosawa's cinema of the 1950s. Morphing the iconography of post-war misery together with the iconography of the Tokugawa period, Kurosawa's cinematic rendition of Gorky's play not only countered the ideological tendency of post-occupation Japan to avoid realistic representation of its war-inflicted destitution but also linked this representation to its causes in the nationalist and militarist past.