Akira Kurosawa

[A Tribute By
Carletto di San Giovanni:]
(The following essay was written by Dan Harper for Senses of Cinema )Few societies are as well mapped-out on film as Japan. Japanese filmmakers are at least as widely known outside Japan as its authors: just as Tanizaki, Kawabata and Oe have been celebrated abroad for their writing (with each of them winning the Nobel prize), so Ozu, Oshima and Kitano have given Japan’s faces, its landscapes and its history to the rest of the world. And no other Japanese filmmaker did this as well or for as long as Akira Kurosawa. For 40 years, between the awestruck surprise that greeted Rashomon (1950) in the West to the almost accustomed pleasure with which Dreams (1990) was embraced, Kurosawa seemed to move from strength to strength. Nothing could be further from the truth.Thanks to the ever-suspicious bias of Japanese producers (who, after all, deprived us of Ozu’s genius for decades because they believed he was "too Japanese"), Kurosawa’s success in the West was regarded suspiciously as some sort of fluke. Despite his unarguable success, Kurosawa was, in fact, one of the greatest risk-taking filmmakers in the history of international film (many of those risks, I might add, didn’t pay off). Every one of his world-renowned films was either preceded or followed by a film more experimental in form or more difficult. You can even argue that some of his greatest successes (Rashomon, Ikiru [1952], Seven Samurai [1954]) were enormous risks for Kurosawa’s career – the ones that did pay off. This may sound strange, given that Kurosawa is now often remembered as something of a reactionary, rear-guard director (especially in Japan). But aside from the uncanny sense of what audiences wanted, there is a persistent experimental thread running throughout Kurosawa’s work.If one discounts his first films, with which he sought to establish his career, Kurosawa’s first recognizable masterwork, Drunken Angel (1948), was also a daring (for the postwar "Red Scare" era) social document, foreshadowing Ikiru in its portrayal of the often futile efforts of a crusading (dipsomaniac) doctor – played by Takashi Shimura, who also played Watanabe in Ikiru – to get a mosquito-spawning stagnant pool drained in a benighted corner of a Tokyo slum. That was followed by a melodrama, The Quiet Duel (1949). Then Kurosawa made Stray Dog (1949), an edgy, brilliant portrait of a cop’s search for his stolen pistol one hot Tokyo summer. That was followed by a rather mawkish expose of Japanese tabloids, Scandal (1950). But his next film, Rashomon, cemented his reputation, with audiences and critics, if not with producers. And Kurosawa never had to look back.Fifteen years and eleven films later, Kurosawa was both a critical and commercial god, thanks to one or two "greatest films of all time" in the interim (one of which is the quite humbling macho film of all time – and who am I to argue? –, Seven Samurai.) Once ensconced, however, he entered the darkest and most difficult period of his career. Not caring to be categorized as the superannuated director of samurai satires, such as Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962), all of his films from 1965 to 1985 (of which, amazingly, there are only five) were potential career-ending gambles, and the Japanese film industry, which was undergoing the first of several transitional periods, was particularly unforgiving toward them.Red Beard (1965) was a drastic investment of time and money for Kurosawa (the production was such a strain to his customary hero – for 16 films – Toshiro Mifune, that he had a falling out with Kurosawa and would never again appear in one of his films ). Despite the film’s critical acclaim, Kurosawa spent the next five years trying to get a project – any project – off the ground. Dodes’ ka-den (1970) – Kurosawa’s first color film and a daring stylistic reach for the artist – had the unfortunate fate of being jeered at by most Japanese critics. Kurosawa was so shaken by the film’s reception that he attempted suicide.Due to the freshly remembered excesses of Red Beard (like deliberately taking two years to produce so that his actors and sets had the necessary lived-in effect that he wanted) and the off-beat unpleasantness of Dodes’ ka-den (whose eccentric characters inhabit a garbage dump) Kurosawa was considered so "un-bankable" by Japanese producers that he had to go to Soviet Russia to make his next film, Dersu Uzala (1974). Despite more awards and accolades, which were coming so thick and fast to Kurosawa that it must have exasperated producers who saw him only as a spendthrift maverick, Dersu was followed by another six years of drought. Finally, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, longtime Kurosawa fans, approached him with an offer to finance a film. Kurosawa characteristically suggested a long-cherished project – Kagemusha (1980) – and got backing for it. Oddly enough, when the film was finished, Coppola and Lucas asked for cuts from their oft-admired master, thinking the esoteric story, set in pre-Tokugawa Japan, would swamp an American film audience. To appease these quizzical admirers, Kurosawa snipped 20 minutes from the film and it was released in the West to more fanfare than had accompanied any Kurosawa film since the early ‘60s.Nevertheless, the cost of the production was so withering to Japanese producers that Kurosawa had to resort to further foreign investment – this time from France’s Serge Silberman – for what is certainly his ultimate statement as an artist, the dauntingly grave transposition of Shakespeare’s King Lear to medieval Japan, Ran (1985). This film stands in Kurosawa’s work as Otello stands in Verdi’s – a final, magnificent statement of his philosophy and one of the most stirringly grand films in recent memory.Once Kurosawa earned his Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1989 (another back-handed award from the "Academy" – they had never awarded a Kurosawa film one of their golden bowling trophies), the Japanese realized that he was, indeed, a National Living Treasure (an honor bestowed by the Japanese government on certain [elderly] artists whose work is thereafter subsidized but whose earnings are also the sole property of the government). He managed to make three more films before old age and ill health forced him into grudging retirement. Dreams, Rhapsody in August (1991), and Madadayo (1993) – the last having never been released theatrically in the U.S. – were personal, meditative films, artistically free but controlled, somehow chastened.One Kurosawa film, The Lower Depths (1957) is by far the most consistently underrated. (Some of the more obtuse film reference guides have even labelled Kurosawa’s film a "remake" of Jean Renoir’s Les Bas-fonds [1936].) (6) After his first Shakespeare adaptation, Throne of Blood (1957), Kurosawa felt emboldened to attempt an adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s play, and it is a major achievement.Of all Kurosawa’s "transpositions" (which include The Idiot [1951], Throne of Blood, High and Low [1963] and Ran), The Lower Depths is the most effective. The reason for this is simple: it is not nearly as ambitious in scope.. The Idiot is misguidedly over-literal; High and Low ultimately (but brilliantly) fails to turn a potboiler into an apocalyptic modern parable; the Shakespeare adaptations (Throne of Blood and Ran) – though strikingly grand – sometimes teeter from the daunting effort of replacing the missing poetry with suitably vivid imagery.With The Lower Depths, Kurosawa found a way to accomplish what had defeated many distinguished filmmakers – namely, how to transpose a stage play to film without betraying either medium. Set entirely within the narrow precincts of a hovel at the bottom of a ravine, with only fleeting glimpses of the world of light above (from the opening shots, he seems determined to illustrate the title literally), Kurosawa fearlessly confounds the charge of "staginess" by constantly shifting perspectives, by exploiting his customary use of multiple cameras with a seamless encirclement of the action, subtly intercutting alternating views of a clearly continuous dramatic tableau. Shooting in just three days after 40 days of rehearsals, Kurosawa challenged his splendid ensemble of actors not only with prolonged takes but with an engagement of the action, an unpredictable shuttling between camera angles, which kept them all off balance as to exactly where to focus their performance.Gorky’s play presents a Dostoevskian milieu of downtrodden humanity in a deceptive Chekhovian style. The characters spend all their time either longing for escape – for an undefined, far away "better life" – or else deriding such longing as futile and illusory. Alcohol, which the Actor admits has "poisoned" him, is the only escape for them, and the last scene, in which the remaining tenants (denizens) drink sake and perform an exhuberant musical number without instruments – only their voices –, ends abruptly with the news of the Actor’s suicide. "Idiot!" the gambler grumbles. "He did it to spoil the fun!"Not surprisingly, the film’s general reception was nearly unanimously one of incomprehension. And although its reputation has improved through the decades, thanks largely to Donald Richie, (8) it remains underappreciated. Critics who are anxious to pigeonhole a filmmaker’s work have a hard time finding the right slot for The Lower Depths. Like its maker, it defies categorization.
Kurosawa has had a greater influence on world cinema than any other Japanese director, ranging from the works of Steven Spielberg to the 'spaghetti westerns' of Clint Eastwood. He started out as a painter, trained in the Western school, but gave it up to become an assistant director at the age of 26. He also became an accomplished scriptwriter before making his directorial debut in 1943 with the entertaining Sugata Sanshiro, full of exciting martial arts fight scenes. After World War II, he made several films dealing with the war and its aftermath which enhanced his reputation. In 1950, Kurosawa used medieval Japan as the setting for the first of his great works, Rashomon (the title refers to one of the city gates of Kyoto and was the title of one of two short stories on which the movie was based). It centers around four characters different 'true' accounts of a rape and murder and examines the nature of truth (poster).
Rashomon was the first Japanese movie to win an international award, taking first prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. It also launched the career of actor Mifune Toshiro (1920-98), who appeared in 16 of Kurosawa's 29 films. To Live (Ikiru, 1952) dealt with the question of how we can live a meaningful life through the story of a bureaucrat who has cancer and only six months to live. Kurosawa's next film, the epic Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai, 1954), hardly needs an introduction. It always ranks as one of the greatest films ever made and even inspired a classic western, The Magnificent Seven. An unemployed samurai is asked to help a farm village under attack from bandits. He recruits six others and together they defeat the bandits but not without losing four of their own. A film of heroism, humor and humanity, it affirms the need to fight for a good cause but asks "At what price?"
Other Kurosawa classics include Yojimbo (1961) (poster) and The Shadow Warrior (Kagemusha, 1980). The former was remade as the classic Clint Eastwood western A Fistful of Dollars while the the latter won the Grand Prix at Cannes. In 1990, he made Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (Yume, poster) and was awarded a lifetime achievement Academy Award in Hollywood. His last film, No, Not Yet! (Mada Dayo, poster) was released in 1993.
Kurosawa readily acknowledged the great director Mizoguchi Kenji as his master. But it was his relationship with the West that most easily seen in his work. While his films influenced many foreign filmmakers, he was in turn influenced by the great American director John Ford and the works of foreign writers. The Idiot (Hakuchi, 1951) was based on the Dostoevsky novel, The Lower Depths (Donzoko, 1957) on the Gorky play, while Throne of Blood (Kumonosujo, 1957) and Ran (1985) (poster) were versions of Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear. Within the Japanese film world, Kurosawa was both praised and vilified for being such a 'Western' director, as if his films were seen as somehow not quite Japanese. The criticism and difficulties he encountered as a result led him to attempt suicide in 1971.
Kurosawa passed away in September 1998, less than a year after the death of his favorite leading man, Mifune. In 1999, a script which he completed just before his death was turned into the film When the Rain Lifts (Ame Agaru). A period piece with a fine cast, the film was warmly received but clearly lacked one thing - the magic of one of the world's visionary directors.
QUOTES:"For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.""People often ask me how I felt directing my maiden work, but, as I have said, I simply enjoyed it."
"Human beings share the same common problems. A film can only be understood if it depicts these properly.""The characters in my films try to live honestly and make the most of the lives they've been given. I believe you must live honestly and develop your abilities to the fullest. People who do this are the real heros.""With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can't possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. The script must be something that has the power to do this.""In all my films, there's three or maybe four minutes of real cinema.""So long as my pictures are hits I can afford to be unreasonable. Of course, if they start losing money then I've made some enemies.""It is quite enough if a human being has but one field where he is strong. If a human being were strong in every field it wouldn't be nice for other people, would it?""Good Westerns are liked by everyone. Since humans are weak, they want to see good people and great heroes. Westerns have been done over and over again, and in the process a kind of grammar has evolved. I have learned much from this grammar of the Western.""I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself.""When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this which I take and work with. My films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time. The beginning of any film for me is this need to express something. It is to make it nurture and grow that I write my script- it is directing it that makes my tree blossom and bear fruit.""Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing.""To have not seen the films of Ray is to have lived in the world without ever having seen the moon and the sun.""Being an artist means not having to avert one's eyes."
TRIVIA:His films are frequently copied and remade by American and European filmmakers.In December 1971, after a period of suffering from mental fatigue and frustrated with a run of unsatisfying and sub par directing work, Kurosawa attempted suicide by slashing his wrist thirty times with a razor. Fortunately, the wounds were not fatal and he made a full recovery.Because he could not get film financing for a period of time in his career, he directed and even appeared in Japanese television commercials.At over 6' feet tall, he was extremely large by Japanese standards, having stood a head taller than any of his colleagues.Although the Japanese press tried to paint him as a tyrant, almost all of his casts and crews agreed he was a much more cool and detached presence on sets. Many also described him as "intense".He was voted the 6th greatest director of all time by Entertainment Weekly, making him the only Asian on a list of 50 directors and the highest ranking non-American.Kurosawa worshiped legendary American director John Ford, his primary influence as a filmmaker. When the two met, Ford was uncommonly pleasant to the younger Japanese filmmaker and afterwards Kurosawa dressed in a similar fashion to Ford when on film sets.Unbeknownst to many people, Kurosawa had always wanted to make a Godzilla film of his own, but the executives at Toho Co., Ltd. (the Japanese studio that produces all the Godzilla films) wouldn't let him because they feared it would cost too much.According to his family, he rarely thought about anything other than films. Even when at home, he would sit around silently, apparently composing shots in his head.Although he received an Honorary Award in 1990 "For cinematic accomplishments that have inspired, delighted, enriched and entertained worldwide audiences and influenced filmmakers throughout the world," Akira Kurosawa was only nominated once for a Best Director Oscar for Ran (1985). Also, his only film to have ever received the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar was for Dersu Uzala (1975)... his only film not done in Japanese (it was in Russian).He had a son Hisao, and a daughter, Kazuko.His movie Dodesukaden (1970), Dersu Uzala (1975) and Kagemusha (1980) were Oscar-nominated for "Best Foreign Language Film". Dersu Uzala (1975) won. Rashômon (1950) won an Honorary Award as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States during 1951.Ranked #6 in Empire (UK) magazine's "The Greatest directors ever!" [2005]In the 1990s, he referred to the 'Kagemusha' (1980), which some have considered a great film on its own, as a mere "dress rehearsal" for 'Ran' (1985) (both are epics about failing emperors set roughly in the same historical era), with the latter film having been his passion for roughly a decade before he made it.His two favorite actors to work with were apparently Takashi Shimura and, more famously, Toshirô Mifune. Kurosawa made 16 films with Mifune (almost always in a leading role) and 19 films with Shimura (in either a leading or supporting role).He worked with most of his cast and crew members repeatedly, similarly to the way his idol John Ford used the same people again and again. When Kurosawa was at his working peak, it was widely thought that if he didn't work with an actor or crew member again, the implication was that he did not like them.He was born the youngest of four children for Isamu and Shima Kurosawa. As a child, he revered his elder brother Heigo. While young Akira was mainly into painting, Heigo was a film-lover and worked as a "benshi", a narrator/ commentator for foreign silent films. Akira's love for film was handed down from his brother. Unfortunately, Heigo suffered from depression and committed suicide. Shortly thereafter, both Akira's eldest brother and only sister died from illnesses, leaving Akira the only remaining child. His siblings' deaths (particularly that of Heigo) was a traumatic experience for Akira and is thought to have considerably darkened his world view.He was a fan of the films of Satyajit Ray.Several of his films have been remade in America as westerns. Shichinin no samurai (1954)(The Seven Samurai) was remade as The Magnificent Seven (1960), and Yojimbo (1961) (The Bodyguard) was remade as Per un pugno di dollari (1964). In addition, Kakushi-toride no san-akunin (1958) (The Hidden Fortress) was a major inspiration for the Star Wars saga, which takes many inspirations from westerns and is often referred to as a space western. Common story elements include General Makabe, who became Obi-Wan Kenobi; Princess Yuki, who became Princess Leia, and whose trick of disguising herself as a handmaiden would later be used by Queen Amidala; and the farmers from whose viewpoint the film is told, Matashichi and Tahei, whose constant bickering inspired C-3PO and R2-D2.One his closest friend was Ishirô Honda, the writer-director behind Gojira (1954).He was infamous for his perfectionism. Among the related tales are his insisting 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. He also required that all the actors in his period films had to wear their costumes for several weeks, daily, before filming so that they would look lived in.Although his "samurai" films are considered the archetypal samurai films over the rest of the world, they were actually considered atypical in Japan. Most Japanese samurai films had been set in the 18th & 19th centuries, when a peaceful Japan was at the peak of its nationalism, with the largest number of bushido code-adhering samurai. Kurosawa's films typically feature individualistic "ronin" (masterless samurai) rather true "samurai" and a majority are set in the far more chaotic feudal periods (16th-17th centuries) when the Japanese were engaged in civil war.His favorite Japanese director was Kenji Mizoguchi.He named the film that made him want to work in cinema as Abel Gance's film La Roue (1923), particularly certain kinetic shots of trains.He was a fan of the work of Sergei M. Eisenstein, who, like Kurosawa, edited his own films.He believed his years as an assistant director were invaluable. In Japanese cinema at that time, assistant directors dabbled in virtually every aspect of film production and Kurosawa, among other things, learned all about editing, set-decorating, costume-design and working with actors. Almost all of the assistant directors in Kurosawa's day were aspiring to become full-fledged directors. He felt that it was a shame that, in more modern Japanese cinema and in America, the assistant director doesn't accrue as much experience and usually permanently stays in the assistant director role throughout their career and that there would be a great number of excellent directors had they had his training.