This is an article I originally wrote for the 'Director's Cut' series of UCL's 'Pi' magazine, in which each issue features an appraisal of a particular film director. I went with seminal Japanese badass Akira Kurosawa, but the article that went to print in Pi was edited from what I originally submitted, and in addition I have since gone back and redrafted it. Here it is in its better form.
Kurosawa was one of the first
Japanese filmmakers to gain serious attention from Western critics. It began
in, 1950 when ‘Rashomon’ won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and introduced
art-house admirers to the thrilling exoticism of the land of the rising sun. It is a film which encapsulates his
signature: a simple story often derived from folk tale or tradition, usually in
a period setting, told as much as possible through lighting, composition and
sound. He may never have been able to draw serious money from Anglophone
audiences, but filmmakers obsessed with the search for a ‘pure’ cinema adored
him, with many of whom going on to become directors of far more successful
films that were heavily influenced by his style.
Akira Kurosawa, or 黒澤 明 to his friends, was born in 1910 in the Oumari district
of Tokyo, his early life besot by tragedies both public and private; the
youngest of eight children, he bore witness to the Great Kanto earthquake of
1923, which took nearly 150,000 lives. His older brother Heigo committed suicide ten years later. A decade after that, Hiroshima was destroyed. It would be no stretch to say that these
early horrors brought a dark current of nihilism to Kurosawa’s artistic
expression. All the same, the thematic
nastiness of banditry, betrayal, death, madness, corruption, death and death by
serious amounts of arrows (note the unforgettable climax to ‘Kumonosu-jō’)
was always contrasted with the riveting beauty of the camera work that frames
these descents into destruction. Unsurprisingly,
he began his career as an artist, and often chose to frame his shots as if they
were paintings.
The importance of Kurosawa’s
impact on cinema, aside from the universal truth that samurais are awesome,
lies in his emphasis on telling as much of the story as possible through
picture and sound alone. He would use
minimal dialogue, preferring to show fear through a sudden jolt of percussion,
to show the way characters relate to each other through the way they are placed
within the frame. He also liked using
the weather to reflect characters’ emotions - as perhaps expected, several of
his films climax in a violent storm. This
style of ‘pure’ reticent film can seem rather tedious at first. With perseverance, however, there is much to
be gained, as his are works that build up gradually to an often incendiary
conclusion, like a fallen candle leading to a city-consuming inferno.
The slow-burning style of
Kurosawa is a common trait of eastern and particularly Japanese cinema, but
what is also interesting is the extent of Western influence on his work. From Shakespeare, he borrowed from King Lear to make 1985’s Ran, and adapted Macbeth into the aforementioned
‘Kumonosu-jō’ (a.k.a
‘Throne of Blood’, but translated titles are for sissies); from Dostoevsky, he interpreted ‘The Idiot’ in
1951’s Hakuchi . His stories also
borrow a lot from the Western tradition of John Ford. This influence from Westerns was
reciprocated; it is often repeated that hit 60’s Western ‘The
Magnificent Seven’ was a remake of Kurosawa’s 1954 magnum opus ‘Shichinin No
Samurai’ (The Seven Samurai). Similarly, Sergio Leone’s seminal brute
western ‘A Fistful of Dollars’
borrowed/stole heavily from Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’,
this time unofficially. Not that it
matters much in hindsight, because creative stealing is always better than dull
originality, but it is interesting to note the ease with which one can adapt
Samurai films into Westerns just by swopping swords for Stetsons and Kabuki
flutes for Spanish guitars. The basic appeal
is the same: skilled warriors/gunmen from a bygone era for whom the law is
subjective, who can either help fight evil to uphold the common good, or help
themselves to what they want and move on.
Kurosawa’s more famous fan base
may not have always been kind in stealing his ideas, but it certainly helped
him in his later career to have such devoted admirers in high places; his
producers ran out of money in 1980 filming his epic ‘Kagemusha’ and the project
was doomed until George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola agreed to pick up the
cheque. Steven Spielberg had to
similarly step in to rescue 1990’s ‘Dreams’ when studios fled in fear following
the lukewarm box-office reaction to Ran
(1985), at the time the most expensive Japanese film ever made.
Nevertheless,
the high cost of Kurosawa’s latter-era epics is understood when they are
seen on the big screen in all their majestic glory. The cast of ‘Ran’, whose 12 million dollar
price tag could have barely paid for twenty minutes of one ‘Lord of the Rings’
film, features 1,400 extras all wearing hand-crafted suits of armour created
over a period of two years, with 200 of them on horseback. Colour-film was also a gift to Kurosawa’s
aesthetic, with the added emphasis he placed on the symbolism of differently
coloured costumes enhanced by his revolutionary lighting techniques.
However,
films like ‘Ran’ are not just a tedious index of different apertures, lens
filters, foley artistry and advanced mise-en-scène to be mulled over by
cinephile anoraks. Kurosawa himself
always talked about his films in very simple terms of the beauty of nature
versus the folly of man, and the thrilling appeal of justice, greed, vengeance
and retribution in the tales he tells, together with the spectacular way in
which they are captured, is universal.
Key films to watch:
Rashoumon – His first big hit, a simple tale of a murdered
Samurai told three times from different perspectives. At only 95 minutes, a good light starter.
Shichinin No Samurai – His most famous and best
middle-period work, in which seven Samurai mercenaries are hired by a town to
kick seven shades of shit out of the local marauding bandits. At three and a half hours, a fattening main
course.
Ran – His best film from his later colour-era, in which a
warlord decides to divide his kingdom among his three sons so that they may
unite their strengths. Instead, this
leads to jealousy, betrayal, and one of the best battle scenes ever filmed this
side of Middle Earth. In true mad-genius
tradition, Kurosawa storyboarded the entire thing with full-scale colour
paintings.
Also worth a look – Chris Marker’s ‘A.K’ – Not actually one
of his, but rather a fascinating and enlightening documentary on his life and
the filming of ‘Ran’.
