Kurosawa, about 1952
Source: wikimedia, http://www.brokenprojector.com/wordpress/?p=51
Kurosawa is probably the most famous director in the history of Japanese filmmaking. His life spans eighty-eight years during a time when Japan changed from a slow-paced non-urbanized country little affected by the West (and, actually, more steeped in a19th-century way of life than the 20th) to the crowded, bustling, urban-centered island it has become. Kurosawa was working as a filmmaker during WWII, when the Japanese government extended tight control on artists through aggressive censorship. He lived until 1998, worked internationally, saw the development of technologies responsible for rapid travel and communication that we now take for granted, and was friends with John Ford, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola among many others. For this, and his vivid descriptions of amazingly detailed recollections of pre-war Osaka--including surviving the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the Great Depression, viewing silent films as a child, discovering Shakespeare through Japanese translations--his biography is fascinating. You might be interested in reading Something Like an Autobiography, call number PN 1998 .A3 K789413.
Kurosawa's first successful "breakout" film is now thought, by some critics, to be his best and most classic: Rashomon, 1950, based on two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927). Emphasizing image over dialog, Kurosawa employs many techniques of earlier silent movie-era films. In Something Like an Autobiography, he says:
Since the advent of the talkies in the 1920's, I felt we had misplaced and forgotten what was so
wonderful about the old silent moveis. I was aware of the esthetic loss as a constant irritation.
I sensed a need to go back to the origins of the motion picture to find this peculiar beauty again. . .
Rashomon would be my testing ground, the place where I could apply the ideas and wishes
growing out of the silent-film research.(1)
Rashomon lobby card reproduction
from Rashomon: a film by Akira Kurosawa. 1969, Grove Press, Inc. Page 256.
Trained as a painter, Kurosawa's storyboards are often full-fledged works of art. Here are three examples from the DVD insert brochure of Kagemusha (1980).
The list of Kurosawa's films on IMDB.com includes sixty-eight films for which he was principle writer, director, or both. [See www.imdb.com] Eight of these are in the Fogelson Library collection on DVD or VHS. We also have the scripts for The Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Throne of Blood, and Rashomon, as well as the original Akutagawa stories for the Rashomon film. [These stories are in the collection Rashomon and Other Stories, call number PL 801 .K8 R3.]
Kurosawa's influence is evidenced by his enduring popularity as well as Western remakes of several of his films. For example Seven Samuai (1954) was remade in 1960 as The Magnificent Seven; Rashomon in 1964 as The Outrage; Yojimbo (1961) in 1964 as A Fistful of Dollars, the "spaghetti western" by Sergio Leone . While not a remake, George Lucas gives credit to Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress for influencing the Star Wars films. [See http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=5355837 .] Martin Scorsese is producing an adaptation of Kurosawa's High and Low for release in....well, some day (it was first commissioned in 1999).
Check out one of Kurosawa's movies, read one of the books, or at least visit one of these web sites to discover more about Akira Kurosawa and his films.
- www.filmref.com
- brokenprojector.com
- www.greencine.com
- Article from The Guardian, 3/23/2010
- Entertainment Weekly article 3/23/2010
- Criterion Collection's release of Rashomon
- Rashomon online
(1) Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. 1982, Vintage Books. Page 182.
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