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Few filmmakers have had a career so long or so acclaimed as Akira Kurosawa, perhaps Japan’s best-known filmmaker. His films greatly influenced an entire generation of filmmakers the world over, ranging from George Lucas to Sergio Leone.
His first credited film (Sugata Sanshiro) was released in 1943; his last (Madadayo) in 1993. His many awards include the Legion d’Honneur and an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement.
Kurosawa was born in Omori, Tokyo, the youngest of seven children. He trained as a painter and began work in the film industry as an assistant director to Kajiro Yamamoto in 1936. He made his directorial debut in 1943 with Sugata Sanshiro. His first few films were made under the watchful eye of the wartime Japanese government and sometimes contained nationalistic themes. For instance, The Most Beautiful is a propaganda film about Japanese women working in an armaments factory. Judo Saga 2 has been held to be explicitly anti-American in the way that it portrays Japanese judo as superior to western (American) boxing.
His first post-war film No regrets for our youth, by contrast, is critical of the old Japanese regime and is about the wife of a left-wing dissident arrested for his political leanings. Kurosawa made several more films which deal with contemporary Japan, most notably Drunken Angel and Stray Dog. However it was a period film Rashomon which made him internationally famous and won the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival.
Kurosawa is best-known for his period pieces or jidaigeki like Seven Samurai and Ran, but several of his films dealt with contemporary Japan: for example Stray Dog, which looks at the criminal underworld just after the end of the war, and Ikiru, which deals with a Japanese bureaucrat who discovers that he is suffering from cancer but eventually steps out of depression and struggles against bureacratic inertia to leave his small contribution to the world in the form of a small community park before he dies.
Kurosawa had a distinctive cinematic technique, which he had developed by the 1950s, and which gave his films a unique look. He liked using telephoto lenses for the way they flattened the frame and also because he believed that placing cameras farther away from his actors produced better performances. He also liked using multiple cameras, which allowed him to shoot an action from different angles. Another Kurosawa trademark was the use of weather elements to heighten mood: for example the heavy rain in the final battle in Seven Samurai and the fog in Throne of Blood. Kurosawa also liked using left-to-right frame wipes as a transition device.
He was known as “Tenno”, literally “Emperor”, for his dictatorial directing style. He was a perfectionist who spent enormous amounts of time and effort to achieve the desired visual effects. In Rashomon, he dyed the rain water black with calligraphy ink in order to achieve the effect of heavy rain, and ended up using up the entire local water supply of the location area in creating the rainstorm. In Throne of Blood, in the final scene in which Mifune is shot by arrows, Kurosawa used real arrows shot by expert archers from a short range, landing within centimetres of Mifune’s body.
Other stories include demanding a stream be made to run in the opposite direction in order to get a better visual effect, and having the roof of a house removed, later to be replaced, because he felt the roof’s presence to be unattractive in a short sequence filmed from a train.\r\n<p>\r\nA notable feature of Kurosawa’s films is the breadth of his artistic influences. Some of his plots are adaptations of William Shakespeare’s works. The Bad Sleep Well is based on Hamlet, Ran is based on King Lear and Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth. Kurosawa also directed film adaptations of Russian novels, including The Idiot by Dostoevsky and The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky. Ikiru was based on Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. High and Low was based on King’s Ransom by American crime writer Ed McBain. Stray Dog was inspired by the detective novels of Georges Simenon. The American film director John Ford also had a large influence on his work.
Despite criticism by some Japanese critics that Kurosawa was “too Western”, he was deeply influenced by Japanese culture as well, including the Kabuki and Noh theaters and the jidaigeki (period drama) genre of Japanese cinema.
Kurosawa’s films had a huge influence on world cinema. Most explicitly, Seven Samurai was remade as the western The Magnificent Seven, science fiction movie Battle Beyond the Stars, and Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. It also inspired two Hindi films, Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay and Rajkumar Santhoshi’s China Gate, with similar plots. The story has also inspired novels, among them Stephen King’s fifth Dark Tower novel, Wolves of the Calla.
Yojimbo was the basis for the Sergio Leone western A Fistful of Dollars, the Coen Brothers film Miller’s Crossing, and the Bruce Willis prohibition-era Last Man Standing.
The Hidden Fortress had an influence on George Lucas’s earliest Star Wars film, especially in the characters of R2-D2 and C3PO.
Rashomon not only helped open Japanese cinema to the world but virtually entered the English language as a term for fractured, inconsistent narratives as well as influencing other works, including episodes of television series and many motion pictures.
Kurosawa died in Setagaya, Tokyo, at age 88.
Tags: Akira Kurosawa, filmmaker, Oscar, Tokyo
(4.5 out of 5)