CULTJAPAN!

Akira Kurosawa (1910–98) was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. In a career that spanned 50 years, Kurosawa directed 30 films, and is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers since the conception of cinema.

Descended from a line of samurai, Kuroasawa was  introduced to cinema by his father when films were then just beginning to appear in Japanese theaters. In the wake of the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake Akira and his older brother Heigo made a walking tour of the devastation. Corpses of humans and animals were piled everywhere. When Akira would attempt to turn his head away, Heigo urged him not to. According to Akira, this experience would later instruct him that to look at a frightening thing head-on is to defeat its ability to cause fear. [Kurosawa, Akira; Something Like An Autobiography]

In 1936, Kurosawa joined an apprenticeship program for directors with a major film studio. Kurosawa’s directorial debut was Sanshiro Sugata (1943). His first post-war film No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) is critical of the old Japanese regime and is about the wife of a left-wing dissident who is arrested for his political leanings. Kurosawa made several more films dealing with contemporary Japan, most notably Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog (1949). In 1950 he made the internationally acclaimed Rashomon.

Kurosawa had a distinctive cinematic technique, which he had developed by the 1950s. He liked using telephoto lenses for the way they flattened the frame and because he believed that placing cameras farther from his actors produced better performances as they would not be conscious of the camera. He also used multiple cameras, allowing him to shoot from different angles. Another Kurosawa trademark was the use of weather elements to heighten mood; for example, the heavy rain in the opening scene of Rashomon and the final battle in Seven Samurai (1954); the intense heat in Stray Dog; the cold wind in Yojimbo (1961); the snow in Ikiru (1952); and the fog in Throne of Blood (1957).

Kurosawa 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 to achieve the effect of heavy rain. In Ran an entire castle set was constructed on the slopes of Mt. Fuji only to be burned to the ground in a climactic scene. [Nogami, Teruyo; Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa]

The film Red Beard marked a turning point in Kurosawa’s career in more ways than one. In addition to being his last film with Mifune, it was his last in black-and-white. It was also his last as a major director within the Japanese studio system making roughly a film a year.

His next few films were to be significantly more difficult to finance and were made at intervals of five years. The first, Dodesukaden (1970), about a group of poor people living around a rubbish dump, was not a commercial or financial success.

After an attempted suicide, Kurosawa went on to make several more films, although he had great difficulty in obtaining domestic financing despite his international reputation. Dersu Uzala, made in the Soviet Union and set in Siberia in the early 20th century, was the only Kurosawa film made outside of Japan and not in the Japanese language. It is about the friendship of a Russian explorer and a nomadic hunter, and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Kagemusha (1980), financed with the help of the director’s most famous admirers, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, is the story of a man who is the body double of a medieval Japanese lord and takes over his identity after the lord’s death.

Ran was the director’s version of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set in medieval Japan (and the only film of Kurosawa’s career that he received a “Best Director” Academy Award nomination for). It was by far the largest project of Kurosawa’s late career, and he spent a decade planning it and trying to obtain funding, which he was finally able to do with the help of the French producer Serge Silberman. The film was an international success and is generally considered Kurosawa’s last masterpiece. In an interview, Kurosawa said that he considered it to be the best film he ever made.

Kurosawa made three more films during the 1990s which were more personal than his earlier works. Dreams (1990) is a series of vignettes based on his own dreams. Rhapsody in August (1991) is about memories of the Nagasaki atomic bomb and his final film, Madadayo (1993), is about a retired teacher and his former students.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Akira Kurosawa“.