Frames per second: Cobwebs of patriotism

Standing for the National Anthem before watching <i>The Throne of Blood</i> provokes thoughts on nationalism

Last week, an unsuspecting group of people, including me, queued up in front of the Stein auditorium at the India Habitat Centre (IHC) in New Delhi for a show of Akira Kurosawa’s Kumonosu-Jo (1957). The audacious adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth — transposed by Kurosawa from the medieval Scotland of the original to the medieval Japan of samurais — was initially described by the New York Times as “brutish and barbaric... fantastic and funny”. Since then, it has been accepted to be an autonomous work of art, replacing the Bard’s poetry with powerful cinematic imagery. I had seen the film 10