Jump to content

Akira Kurosawa

Edit links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 59.183.50.99 (talk) at 14:14, 17 October 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

"Kurosawa" redirects here. For other uses, see Kurosawa (disambiguation).
File:Kurosawa-akira.jpg
Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa (黒澤 明 Kurosawa Akira, also 黒沢 明) (March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a prominent Japanese director, producer, and screenwriter of films, many of which are considered highly influential worldwide classics.

Kurosawa is perhaps Japan's best-known filmmaker. His films have greatly influenced a whole generation of filmmakers worldwide. Few filmmakers have had a career so long or so acclaimed. 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 March 23, 1910, in Omori, Tokyo, the youngest of seven children. He trained as a painter and began work in the film industry as an assistant director 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 is explicitly anti-American and depicts the superiority of Japanese judo over 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.

Characteristics

Kurosawa is best-known for his period pieces (called jidaigeki 時代劇 "period play" in Japanese) 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 1950's, 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 further 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 also known as 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. In another case, he demanded a stream be made to run in the opposite direction in order to get a better visual effect. In another film, he had 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.


Influences

A notable feature of Kurosawa's films is the breadth of his influences. Some of his plots are adaptations of William Shakespeare's works: The Bad Sleep Well, based on Hamlet; Ran, based on King Lear; and Throne of Blood, 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 a novel 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 jidai-geki (period drama) genre of Japanese cinema.

Legacy

In turn Kurosawa's films had a huge influence on world cinema. Most explicitly Seven Samurai was later 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 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.

The film 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 40's to the mid- 60's, 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 recycling the same group of actors, especially Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune. His collaboration with the latter is one of the greatest director-actor combinations in cinema history. It began with 1948's Drunken Angel and ended with 1964's Red Beard.

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 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 USSR and set in Siberia in the early 20th century, was the only Kurosawa film made outside Japan and not in Japanese. It's 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 double of a medieval Japanese lord and takes over his identity. Most important was Ran: Kurosawa's version of King Lear set in medieval Japan. It was the great 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 September 6, 1998, in Setagaya, Tokyo.

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.

Kurosawa was known as "Tenno", literally "Emperor", for his dictatorial directing style.


Awards

  • 1951- Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Rashomon
  • 1954- 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

  • 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

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Akira_Kurosawa&oldid=25740844"