Crouching Ginger, Hidden Nathan: Why Kurosawa Kicks Ass

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.