I find the connection fascinating. The only difference I would put in is that Kurosawa's Ran is very simply filmed in terms of technique. Sidney Lumet talked about this on the Criterion DVD Kurosawa pans and tilts the camera, but unlike Seven Samurai he's no longer concerned with going all out with his technique, with stretching the boundaries of it. While both filmmakers do have a similar sense of dark, looming poetry in getting the locations, the significance of the sky (maybe something else to think of in terms of those shots is that Kurosawa meant for it to be like it's all from God's POV- in Eisenstein's Nevsky, there is a good chunk of Christianity, but I thought it wasn't really pushed too hard until near the end) is something to ponder. Nevsky, on the other hand, gets his camera around like it's going out of style, and naturalistic filmmaking is definitely not his game. Kurosawa I think is after something a lot more concrete, and maybe it was also cause the films were made in different time periods- I'm sure Eisenstein had a bit more to concern himself with in the censorship field with Kurosawa- but Ran is much more bloody and bleak and disparaging.
The battles in the two films both have epic sweep and moments of gut-wrenching circumstance, but there's also the feeling in Nevsky that we'll know how all of this will turn out. Ran doesn't give us that- it's also not based around the pride of the country (you don't hear any grandstanding 'our country is great' songs)- but rather just the sense that all of this violence will only turn out bad. Strangely, while Eisenstein never really commends any of what goes on in battle, and it's possible the one of the first of its kind to show how brutal and uncompromising (even for the wicked German side it's sad to see what happens through the ice), there is still the sense of the thrill of battle, of the liveliness of it. Also, hear the music that goes on in comparison with the destruction of Hidetora's castle and Provofkiev's (is that how it's spelled) battle scoring. I almost want to go out and kill some Germans listening to that music. Kurosawa's composter is tuning it to a totally different key though, one where the mood is almost unpleasant, foreboding. Maybe, in the end, it's also a case of two cultures too.
I won't disagree too much with your first point regarding jump cuts, and I think that it would be amazing to see both scenes in a shot by shot comparison. But if anything I think Ran's battle scenes are more closely in similar tactics with Battlehship Potemkin and the Odessa Stairs- there's no way out on both sides, just destruction.
"Watch out, he's got a candy cane!"
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