Highlights on the film career of Kurosawa

Inspiring at 100 - ScreenIndia.Com

Inspiring at 100
Posted: Apr 03, 2009 at 1504 hrs IST

Legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa would have turned 99 on March 23 this year. His centennial year marks the AK 100 project that acquaints young viewers with the magical world of Kurosawa. His cinema inspired generations of filmmakers like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and many in Bollywood as well. A tribute to the genius

Life and times
What Satyajit Ray is to India, Akira Kurosawa is to Japan. Both filmmakers introduced the cinemas of their respective countries to the world. A prominent Japanese filmmaker, screenwriter and editor, Kurosawa’s first film as director Sanshiro Sugata was released in 1943, his last, Madadayo, in 1993. His many awards include the Légion d’Honneur and an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Born the youngest of eight children, 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. A reasonably affluent family that embraced Western culture.

Rashomon’s international take-off
In 1936, Kurosawa worked as an assistant director to Kajiro Yamamoto. After his directorial debut with Sanshiro Sugata, his next few films were Government propaganda films - The Most Beautiful is about Japanese women working in a military optics factory. Judo Saga is about Japanese judo being superior to American boxing.
His post-war film, No Regrets For Our Youth, however criticises 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 and Stray Dog. It was his period film Rashomon that made him internationally-famous and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Emperor on the sets
Celebrated for his distinctive cinematic technique, which he had developed by the 1950s, and which gave his films a unique look, he used telephoto lenses, multiple cameras, which allowed him to shoot an action scene from different angles. Another Kurosawa trademark was the use of weather elements to heighten mood, like the heavy rain, heat, cold wind, snow and fog. Kurosawa also liked using frame wipes as a transition device.

Hailed as the Emperor owing to his dictatorial style of functioning, he was a perfectionist who spent all the time and effort in order to achieve desired visual effects. In Rashomon, he dyed the rain-water black with calligraphy ink for heavy rain effect and ended up using the entire local water supply in creating the rainstorm! In the final scene of Throne Of Blood, in which his favourite actor Mifune is shot by arrows, Kurosawa used real arrows shot by expert archers from a short range, landing within centimetres of the actor’s body. In Ran, an entire castle set was constructed on the slopes of Mount Fuji only to be burned to the ground in a climactic scene.

His quest for perfectionism is evident even in the costume department - he would often give 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 costumes were worn down and tattered by the time shooting started.

Artistic influences
Kurosawa based his films on plots that are based on William Shakespeare’s works, adaptations of Russian literary works American writer Ed McBain and he also borrowed from American Westerns, while Stray Dog was inspired by the detective novels of Georges Simenon. Although he was criticised by a few Japanese critics that Kurosawa was “too Western”, he was really influenced by Japanese culture as well, including the Kabuki and Noh theaters and the Jidaigeki genre of Japanese cinema.

Inspiring filmmakers
Films by Kurosawa inspired an entire generation of filmmakers - Seven Samurai was remade as The Magnificent Seven, and the animation film A Bug’s Life is also said to be Pixar’s inspiration.
Rashomon was remade by Martin Ritt in 1964 as The Outrage. The 2005 animated film Hoodwinked applies the narrative structure of Rashomon to the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

Yojimbo was the basis for the Sergio Leone western A Fistful Of Dollars and two Bruce Willis films. The Hidden Fortress is an acknowledged influence on George Lucas ‘s Star Wars films, in particular Episodes IV and VI 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.

Suicide attempt
Red Beard was a turning point in Kurosawa’s career - it was his last film with Mifune and his last in black-and-white. 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 found it hard to raise funds and were made intermittently over a trying period 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,but 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 that was 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.

Award gallery
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. The film was awarded the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival (shared with Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz). Ran, set in medieval Japan, the only film of Kurosawa’s career that received a Best Director Academy Award nomination. It was by far the largest project of Kurosawa’s late career, and he spent a decade planning it and getting it funded.

Kurosawa made three more films during the 1990s that 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 atomic bomb and his final film, Madadayo, is about a retired teacher and his former students.
Kurosawa died of a stroke in Setagaya, Tokyo,when he was 88.