the episodes move from childhood to old age. a boy watches a fox wedding in the rain and receives a knife for seeing it. mountaineers meet a figure in a blizzard. a soldier meets the lost platoon that still follows him. a painter steps into van gogh’s wheat fields and finds the artist there.
i saw a dream like this.
kurosawa kept dream notes for years. in interviews, he said the film used dreams he had actually experienced. some childhood dreams stayed with him for seven decades before he could film them. spielberg and lucas helped finance the work, and scorsese played van gogh.
this work does more than use one dream as a starting point. it turns a long record of dreams into cinema. some segments are gentle and others are frightening. kurosawa kept both, allowing the full range of his dream life to shape the film.