AKIRA KUROSAWA

was a prominent Japanese film director, film producer, and screenwriter. His first credited film (''Sanshiro Sugata'') was released in 1943; his last (''Madadayo'') in 1993. His many awards include the Légion d'Honneur and an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement.

Early life

Akira Kurosawa was born to Isamu and Shima Kurosawa on March 23, 1910. He was the youngest of eight children born to the Kurosawas in a suburb of Tokyo. Shima Kurosawa was forty years old at the time of Akira's birth and his father Isamu was forty-five. Akira Kurosawa grew up in a household with three older brothers and four older sisters. Of his three older brothers, one died before Akira was born and one was already grown and out of the household. One of his four older sisters had also left the home to begin her own family before Kurosawa was born.
Kurosawa's father worked as the director of a junior high school operated by the Japanese military and the Kurosawas descended from a line of former samurai. Financially, the family was above average. Isamu Kurosawa embraced western culture both in the athletic programs that he directed and by taking the family to see films, which were then just beginning to appear in Japanese theaters. Later when Japanese culture turned away from western films, Isamu Kurosawa continued to believe that films were a positive educational experience.
In primary school Akira Kurosawa was encouraged to draw by a teacher who took an interest in mentoring his talents. His older brother, Heigo, had a profound impact on him. Heigo was very intelligent and won several academic competitions, but also had what was later called a cynical or dark side. In 1923, the Great Kantō earthquake destroyed Tokyo and left 100,000 people dead. In the wake of this event, Heigo, 17, and Akira, 13, 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.
Heigo eventually began a career as a benshi in Tokyo film theaters. Benshi narrated silent films for the audience and were a uniquely Japanese addition to the theater experience. However with the impact of talking pictures on the rise, benshi were losing work all over Japan. Heigo organized a benshi strike that failed. Akira was likewise involved in labor-management struggles, writing several articles for a radical newspaper while improving and expanding his skills as a painter and reading literature. Akira never considered himself a Communist despite his activities that he later would describe as reckless.
When Akira Kurosawa was in his early 20s, his older brother Heigo committed suicide. Four months later, the oldest of Kurosawa's brothers also died, leaving Akira as the only surviving son of an original four at age 23. Kurosawa's next-oldest sibling, a sister he called "Little Big Sister," had also died suddenly after a short illness when he was ten.

Early career

In 1936, Kurosawa learned of an apprenticeship program for directors through a major film studio, PCL (which later became Toho).He was hired and worked as an assistant director to Kajiro Yamamoto . After his directorial debut with ''Sanshiro Sugata'', his next 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 a military optics 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 his period film ''Rashomon'' that 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 opening scene of ''Rashomon'', and the final battle in ''Seven Samurai'', the intense heat in ''Stray Dog,'' the cold wind in ''Yojimbo'', the snow in ''Ikiru'', and the fog in ''Throne of Blood''. Kurosawa also liked using frame wipes, sometimes cleverly hidden by motion within the frame, 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. 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.
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 by the time shooting started.
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'' may have been based on Dashiell Hammett's ''Red Harvest'' and also borrows from American Westerns, and ''Stray Dog'' was inspired by the detective novels of Georges Simenon. Story lines in ''Red Beard'' can be found in ''The Insulted and Humiliated'' by Dostoevsky. 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.
When Kurosawa got to meet John Ford, a director commonly said to be the most influential to Kurosawa, Ford simply said, "You really like rain." Kurosawa responded, "You've really been paying attention to my films."^[1]

His influence

Kurosawa's films have had a major influence on world cinema and continue to inspire filmmakers, and others, around the globe.

''Seven Samurai''

Western Film

''Seven Samurai'' has been remade several times in assorted cinema genres, including Westerns, Science Fiction, and Chinese Martial Arts. The main versions, all of which directly use the same plot structure, comprise:

★ ''The Magnificent Seven'' (1960, Dir. John Sturges)[1]

★ ''Beach of the War Gods'' (1973, Prod. Run Run Shaw)

★ ''Battle Beyond the Stars'' (1980, Prod. Roger Corman)

★ ''World Gone Wild'' (1988, Dir. Lee Katzin)

★ ''Sholay'' (1975, Dir. Ramesh Sippy. ).
There are several other versions which are more loosely based on the motif, including: ''Three Amigos'' and ''A Bug's Life''[2].

Bollywood

The film has inspired three Bollywood films which feature similar plots:

★ ''Khotay Sikkay''

★ Ramesh Sippy's ''Sholay''

★ Rajkumar Santoshi's ''China Gate''

Novels

The story was also used as inspiration in numerous novels, among them Stephen King's 5th ''Dark Tower'' novel, ''Wolves of the Calla''.

''Rashomon''

''Rashomon'' was also remade by Martin Ritt in 1964's ''The Outrage''. The Tamil films ''Andha Naal'' (1954) and ''Virumaandi'' (2004), starring Kamal Hassan, employ a storytelling method similar to that Kurosawa uses in ''Rashomon''. In a more recent incarnation, the film "Hero" starring Jet Li, Ziyi Zhang, Tony Leung, and Maggie Cheung also features a 'Rashomon' style story.
''Rashomon'' not only helped open Japanese cinema to the world but entered the English language as a term for fractured, inconsistent narratives (see rashomon effect).

''Yojimbo''

''Yojimbo'' was the basis for the Sergio Leone western ''A Fistful of Dollars'' and two Bruce Willis films, prohibition-era ''Last Man Standing'', and modern day Lucky Number Slevin

''The Hidden Fortress''

''The Hidden Fortress'' is an acknowledged influence on George Lucas's ''Star Wars'' films, in particular Episodes and and most notably in the characters of R2-D2 and C-3PO. Lucas also used a modified version of Kurosawa's wipe transition effect throughout the ''Star Wars'' saga.

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 Nakai 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 Toshio Masuda and 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 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 Japan and not in Japanese. It is about the friendship of a Russian explorer and a nomadic hunter, and 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 Shakespeare's King Lear, set in medieval Japan. 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.[3]
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 of stroke in Setagaya, Tokyo, at age 88.
''After the Rain'' (雨あがる, ''Ame Agaru'') is a 1998 posthumous film directed by Kurosawa's closest collaborator, Takashi Koizumi, co-produced by Kurosawa Production (Hisao Kurosawa) and starring Tatsuda Nakadai and Shiro Mifune, son of Toshiro Mifune. Screenplay, script and dialogues were both written by Kurosawa himself. The story is based on a short novel by Shugoro Yamamoto, ''Ame Agaru''.

Personal life

Kurosawa's wife was Yoko Yaguchi. He had two children with her: a son named Hisao and a daughter named Kazuko.
Kurosawa was a notoriously lavish gourmet, and spent huge quantities of money on film sets providing an uneatably large quantity of fine delicacies, especially meat, for the cast and crew, although the meat was sometimes left over from recording sound effects of the sound of blades cutting flesh in the many swordfight scenes.[4]
He was a close friend of director Ishiro Honda, who directed the Kaiju masterpiece "Gojira."

Awards

★ 1951 – Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for ''Rashomon''

★ 1951 – Honorary Academy Award: Best Foreign Language Film for ''Rashomon''

★ 1955 – Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for ''Seven Samurai''

★ 1975 – 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 - Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize

★ 1990 – Honorary Academy Award

★ 2006 – 10th Iran Cinema Celebration, Special honor

Filmography

Year	Title	Japanese	Romanization
1943	''Sanshiro Sugata'' aka ''Judo Saga''	姿三四郎	''Sugata Sanshirō''
1944	''The Most Beautiful''	一番美しく	''Ichiban utsukushiku''
1945	''Sanshiro Sugata Part II'' aka ''Judo Saga 2''	續姿三四郎	''Zoku Sugata Sanshirô''
1945	''The Men Who Tread On the Tiger's Tail''	虎の尾を踏む男達	''Tora no o wo fumu otokotachi''
1946	''No Regrets for Our Youth''	わが青春に悔なし	''Waga seishun ni kuinashi''
1946	''One Wonderful Sunday''	素晴らしき日曜日	''Subarashiki nichiyôbi''
1948	''Drunken Angel''	酔いどれ天使	''Yoidore Tenshi''
1949	''The Quiet Duel''	静かなる決闘	''Shizukanaru ketto''
1949	''Stray Dog''	野良犬	''Nora inu''
1950	''Scandal''	醜聞	''Shubun''
1950	''Rashomon''	羅生門	''Rashōmon''
1951	''The Idiot''	白痴	''Hakuchi''
1952	''Ikiru'' aka ''To Live''	生きる	''Ikiru''
1954	''Seven Samurai''	七人の侍	''Shichinin no samurai''
1955	''Record of a Living Being'' aka ''I Live in Fear''	生きものの記録	''Ikimono no kiroku''
1957	''Throne of Blood'' aka ''Spider Web Castle''	蜘蛛巣城	''Kumonosu-jō''
1957	''The Lower Depths''	どん底	''Donzoko''
1958	''The Hidden Fortress''	隠し砦の三悪人	''Kakushi toride no san akunin''
1960	''The Bad Sleep Well''	悪い奴ほどよく眠る	''Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru''
1961	''Yojimbo'' aka ''The Bodyguard''	用心棒	''Yōjinbō''
1962	''Sanjuro''	椿三十郎	''Tsubaki Sanjūrō''
1963	''High and Low'' aka ''Heaven and Hell''	天国と地獄	''Tengoku to jigoku''
1965	''Red Beard''	赤ひげ	''Akahige''
1970	''Dodesukaden''	どですかでん	''Dodesukaden''
1975	''Dersu Uzala''	Дерсу Узала	''Dersu Uzala''
1980	''Kagemusha''	影武者	''Kagemusha''
1985	''Ran''	乱	''Ran''
1990	''Dreams'' aka ''Akira Kurosawa's Dreams''	夢	''Yume''
1991	''Rhapsody in August''	八月の狂詩曲	''Hachigatsu no kyōshikyoku''
1993	''Madadayo'' aka ''Not Yet''	まあだだよ	''Mādadayo''

Footnotes

1. A.K., Chris Marker, 1985

External links

★

★

★ Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database

★ Great Performances: Kurosawa (PBS)

★ Kurosawa project

★ Akira Kurosawa News and Information

★

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