concludes as Ross and Angus enter and deliver news of the king. There are many ways this scene can be staged. Shakespeare's directions are sparse. The inclement weather is evident from the text. Macbeth and Banquo enter and find the witches, and the witches vanish, with no indication as to how this is to be accomplished.
Kurosawa treats these opening scenes in very interesting and creative ways. The three witches are combined into one female spirit, an old woman who sits in a tiny, open hut and spins on a spinning wheel. The turning wheel itself is a symbol of divination and of spirits who see into the future in western culture, and it is apparently so in Japan as well. The witch does not appear at the beginning, but a sense of supernatural power is created by the ominous words of the unseen chorus, which returns at the end to reiterate its theme. The supernatural is also evoked through the desolation of the landscape and the
...