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Akira Kurosawa (黒澤 明 Kurosawa Akira, also 黒沢 明 in Shinjitai, 23 March, 1910 – 6 September, 1998) was a prominent Japanese film director, film producer, and screenwriter.

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.

Early career

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 dealing 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 Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Directorial approach

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.

His perfectionism also showed in his approach to costumes: he felt that giving an actor a brand new costume made the character look less than authentic. To resolve this, he often gave his cast their costumes weeks before shooting was to begin and required them to wear them on a daily basis and “bond with them.” In some cases, such as with Seven Samurai, where most of the cast portrayed poor farmers, the actors were told to make sure the costumes were worn down and tattered.

Kurosawa did not believe that “finished” music went well with film. When choosing a musical piece to accompany his scenes, he usually had it stripped down to one element (e.g., trumpets only). Only towards the end of his films do we hear more finished pieces.

Influences

A notable feature of Kurosawa's films is the breadth of his artistic influences. Some of his plots are adaptations of William Shakespeare's works: Ran is based on King Lear and Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth, while The Bad Sleep Well parallels Hamlet, but is not affirmed to be based on it. Kurosawa also directed film adaptations of Russian literary works, including The Idiot by Dostoevsky and The Lower Depths, a play 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, Yojimbo was based on Dashiell Hammett's The Red Harvest and also borrows from American Westerns, and 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.

His influence

Kurosawa's films had a huge influence on world cinema. Most notably, 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 Calla.

The Tamil film titled Virumandi directed by Kamal Hassan also uses Kurosawa's method of storytelling similar to that in Rashomon. Rashomon was also remade by Martin Ritt in 1964 as The Outrage.

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 Star Wars films, in particular Episodes I and IV. And most notably 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.

Collaboration

During his most productive period, from the late 40s to the mid-60s, Kurosawa often worked with the same group of collaborators. Fumio Hayasaka composed music for seven of his films; notably Rashomon, Ikiru and Seven Samurai. Many of Kurosawa's scripts, including Throne of Blood, Seven Samurai and Ran were co-written with Hideo Oguni. Yoshiro Muraki was Kurosawa's production designer or art director for most of his films after Stray Dog in 1949 and Asakazu Naki was his cinematographer on 11 films including Ikiru, Seven Samurai and Ran. Kurosawa also liked working with the same group of actors, especially Takashi Shimura, Tatsuya Nakadai and Toshiro Mifune. His collaboration with the latter, which began with 1948's Drunken Angel and ended with 1965's Red Beard, is one of the most famous director-actor combinations in cinema history.

Later films

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. Kurosawa was signed to direct a Hollywood project, Tora! Tora! Tora!; but 20th Century Fox replaced him with Kinji Fukasaku before it was completed. His next few films were a lot harder to finance and were made at intervals of five years. The first, Dodesukaden, about a group of poor people living around a rubbish dump, was not a success.

After an attempted suicide, Kurosawa went on to make several more films although arranging domestic financing was highly difficult 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 Japan and not in Japanese. It is about the friendship of a Russian explorer and a nomadic hunter. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Kagemusha, 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 King Lear, set in medieval Japan. It was by far the greatest 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 a phenomenal international success and is generally considered Kurosawa's last masterpiece.

Kurosawa made three more films during the 1990s which were more personal than his earlier works. Dreams is a series of vignettes based on his own dreams. Rhapsody in August is about memories of the Nagasaki atom bomb and his final film: Madadayo is about a retired teacher and his former students. Kurosawa died in Setagaya, Tokyo, at age 88.

Trivia

Kurosawa was a notoriously lavish gourmet, and spent huge quantities of money on film sets providing an uneatably large quantity and quality of delicacies, especially meat, for the cast and crew.

Awards

  • 1951- Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Rashomon
  • 1955- Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Seven Samurai
  • 1976- Academy Award: Best Foreign Language Film for Dersu Uzala
  • 1980- Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival for Kagemusha
  • 1982- Career Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival
  • 1984- Legion d'Honneur
  • 1990- Honorary Academy Award

Filmography

Further reading

  • Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema ISBN 0822325195
  • Akira Kurosawa. Something Like An Autobiography. Vintage Books USA, 1983. ISBN 0394714393
  • Stephen Prince. The Warrior's Camera. Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 0691010463
  • Donald Richie, Joan Mellen. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0520220374
  • Stuart Galbraith IV. The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. Faber & Faber, 2002. ISBN 0571199828

See also

External links

1910 births | 1998 deaths | Japanese film directors | People from Tokyo

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