See globally acclaimed directors
Steven Spielberg,
George Lucas and
Martin Scorsese pay tribute to the late
Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. This tribute was organized by the
Anaheim University Akira Kurosawa School of Film and was held at the
Cherry Blossom Gala at the
Beverly Hills Hotel on
March 23th, 2009, on what would have been the
99th birthday of Akira Kurosawa.
Akira Kurosawa (March 23, 1910 -
September 6,
1998)
Akira Kurosawa was the youngest of seven children, born in
Tokyo on 23
March 1910. He has said that the first important influence in his life was a teacher called
Tachikawa, who was progressive in his emphasis on art education for the young. This was how the young
Kurosawa was introduced to art and film. A talented painter, he enrolled in an art school that emphasized
Western styles.
Around this time he also joined an artists' group
with a great enthusiasm for nineteenth-century
Russian literature, with
Dostoevsky a particular favourite. Another influence was Heigo, one of his brothers, who loved film and worked as a benshi, a film narrator/commentator for foreign silent films. His suicide deeply affected the director's sensibilities.
In
1930 he responded to a newspaper advertisement for assistant directors at a film studio and began assisting
Kajiro Yamamoto, who liked the fact he knew 'a lot about things other than movies'.
Within five years he was writing scripts and directing whole sequences for Yamamoto films. In 1943 he made his debut as a director with
Judo Saga (
Sanshiro Sugata), with a magnificent martial-arts sequence in which two masters fight to the death in a wind-swept field, their flying limbs all but obscured by the tall swaying grasses.
Consider the acclaim given to the similar fight sequences in
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and it's obvious why in 1943 people began to talk about a young film-maker with a brilliant future.
His early films were produced during the
Second World War, so had to comply to themes prescribed by official state propaganda policy. It was
Drunken Angel which was Kurosawa's first personally expressive work, made in 1948 and featuring
Toshiro Mifune who became Kurosawa's favourite leading man. The director has noted "In this picture I finally discovered myself".
For those who discover Kurosawa, they will find a master technician and stylist, with a deep humanism and compassion for his characters and an awe of the enormity of nature. He awakened the
West to
Japanese cinema with
Rashomon, which won the top prize in the
Venice Film Festival of 1951, and also a special
Oscar for best foreign film. A golden period followed, with the West enthralled by his work.
Seven Samurai was remade in the US under its alternative title
The Magnificent Seven and the lone samurai hero
Yojimbo was the inspiration for
Clint Eastwood's man with no name persona, most obviously in
A Fistful of Dollars. The intercultural influence was reciprocal. Kurosawa's fondness for
Hollywood westerns in the
John Ford tradition is seen in the epic sweep of
Hidden Fortress, an award-winning film that inspired George Lucas to lift the plot for
Star Wars. His love of literature also surfaced in two superb interpretations of
Shakespeare (
Macbeth in
Throne of Blood and
King Lear in Ran) and versions of
Gorky's The Lower Depths and
The Idiot by Dostoevsky.
Following Red Beard (
Akahige) in
1965 he entered a frustrating period of aborted projects and forced inactivity and when in
1970 his first film in five years (Dodeska-den) failed at the box office, he attempted suicide. Directing a Soviet-Japanese production,
Dersu Uzala helped him to recover and took four years to make. It won the
Oscar for Best Foreign Film in
1975 and a gold medal at the
Moscow Film Festival.
Kurosawa won multiple awards for many of his films, notably
Kagemusha (
1980), a deeply humanistic historical epic, and for the blockbusting Ran (
1985). A true auteur, he supervised the editing of nearly all his films and wrote or collaborated on the scripts of most. His memoirs were published in
1982, titled
Something like an
Autobiography.
In
1989 he won an Oscar for
Lifetime Achievement. At the age of 72 he said "I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get,
I am still unformed myself." Kurosawa died in 1998.
- published: 22 Jul 2011
- views: 52567