Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa (黒 澤明, modern spelling ( 新 字体):黒 沢 明Kurosawa Akira , born March 23, 1910 in Ōmori, Ebara district (later: City of Tokyo , today: Ōta ), Tokyo ; † September 6, 1998 in Setagaya , ibid ) was a Japanese film director . With an output of 30 films over a period of 57 years, he is considered one of the most influential directors of all time.
After a short period of service as a painter, Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1938 , where he first worked as a screenwriter and assistant director , before starting his career as a director in 1943 with the action film Judo Saga - The Legend of the Great Judo .
After a few small local successes during the Second World War, Kurosawa published the drama Angel of the Lost together with the Tōhō film studio in 1948 . The film was a huge success both commercially and critically, cementing him in his position as one of Japan's best-known directors. For one of the main roles he hired the then still unknown young actor Toshirō Mifune , who also gained great local fame overnight and subsequently worked with Kurosawa in sixteen other films.
The film Rashomon - Das Lustwäldchen , published in 1950 , surprisingly won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival and made Kurosawa internationally known. The film's critical and commercial success brought western attention to the products of the Japanese film industry for the first time and is considered to be groundbreaking for the increasing international popularity of Japanese film.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Kurosawa released new films almost annually, including a number of classics such as Ikiru (1952), The Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo - The Bodyguard (1961), Between Heaven and Hell (1963), and Red Beard (1965 ). From the 1970s, Kurosawa suffered more and more from depressive attacks, which is why his productivity fell sharply. The popularity of his works remained, however, and many of his later films, such as Uzala, the Kyrgyz (1975), Kagemusha - The Shadow of the Warrior (1980), Ran (1985) and Madadayo (1993), are generally considered classics in film history and have received several awards, including an Oscar .
In 1990 Kurosawa was honored with an honorary Oscar for his life's work and was posthumously named “Asian of the Century” by CNN in the “Art, Literature and Culture” category. Even many years after his death, numerous retrospectives, studies and biographies about him and his career have appeared in visual and auditory form.
biography
Childhood and beginnings in the film industry (1910-1945)
Childhood and Adolescence (1910–1935)
Akira Kurosawa was born on March 23, 1910 in the Ōmori district of Tokyo, the youngest of eight children. His father Isamu (1864–1948), a member of a samurai family from Akita Prefecture , worked as a middle school director, while his mother Shima (1870–1952) was part of a family of merchants based in Osaka . One of his brothers died at a young age, while his two oldest brothers started their own families, leaving him with three sisters and two brothers.
Kurosawa describes his mother as a very gentle person, but his father as very strict. When bringing up his sons, he placed less emphasis on artistic than on traditional, Spartan military training. He was also very fond of Western traditions, especially plays and films from the Western world, which he considered to be of great educational value. Because of this, Kurosawa developed a fascination for Western entertainment at a young age, which would later have a great influence on his films. The young Akira was interested in art and painting, and above all a teacher in elementary school is said to have recognized and encouraged this interest. The athletic-military component of his school education, which largely consisted of kendo training, remained alien to him. His father, "although an inflexible military", according to Kurosawa, supported this artistic streak.
His older brother Heigo also had a major influence on Kurosawa's later work. After the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, he forced Akira, then 13, to accompany him to the disaster area to confront him with his fears and to take a closer look at the devastation. This event formed the basis for Kurosawa's later career, in which he often artistically processed his own fears, trauma and problems in his films.
After middle school, Kurosawa went to the Doshusha School of Western Painting in 1927 . He earned his living with illustrations and painting of all kinds, albeit unsuccessfully. During this time he and his brother Heigo, who was increasingly isolating himself from his family and had a successful career as Benshi in the silent film business, had a close bond. Through Heigo's contacts in the film industry, he inspired the young Akira for all forms of entertainment, including old samurai stories, local literature, circus and the medium of film. Due to the increasing popularity of the sound film , Heigo became unemployed in the early 1930s and then fell into a severe depression, which culminated in his suicide in 1933. Kurosawa said he was never able to get over his brother's suicide completely. The event would later influence many of his works, much of which was dedicated to Heigo.
First steps in the film business (1935–1941)
In 1935, the newly founded film studio Photo Chemical Laboratories (PCL for short), later known under the name Tōhō , was looking for applicants for the position of assistant director . Despite doubts about his own competence, Kurosawa wrote the required essay on the topic “What are the fundamental shortcomings in Japanese film and how can they be overcome”. Demotivated to be on the shortlist, Kurosawa wrote a very cynical essay with the basic statement that deficiencies that are fundamental cannot be overcome by definition. The director and PCL employee Kajirō Yamamoto, who would later become Kurosawa's mentor, was, contrary to expectations, very impressed by his essay and described him as "charismatic". Kurosawa was shortlisted and, with the support of Yamamoto, was allowed to hold the position of assistant director from February 1936.
During his five years as an assistant director, Kurosawa worked with several Japanese film directors, but the most significant remained Yamamoto, with whom he collaborated seventeen times. Despite Kurosawa's lack of experience, Yamamoto promoted him to senior assistant on the film set after just one year, which expanded his responsibilities from stage construction to script revision, lighting , dubbing , sound production, etc. In the retrospective, this development is considered to be decisive for his later mentality of taking over most of his film productions himself, including the script , camera , editing and direction .
On the advice of his mentor, Kurosawa began to write his own scripts and sell them to other Japanese directors in addition to his work as an assistant director. In a very short time he made a name for himself as a screenwriter and was motivated by the positive feedback to write all of his scripts himself in his later career. Even until the 1960s , when he was already internationally successful, Kurosawa still wrote scripts for other directors sporadically.
First films and marriage (1942–1945)
In late 1942, about a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor , the Japanese author Tsuneo Tomita published his novella Sanshiro Sugata , a judo story inspired by the novel Musashi . Kurosawa, who became interested in advertising the book, bought the novel on the day it was published, read it through on the same day and shortly afterwards asked Tomita for a film adaptation, which Tomita approved. His instinct about the emerging popularity of the work turned out to be correct, since a few days later many other Japanese film studios wanted to buy the rights to the novel.
The filming of the adaptation began in Yokohama in December 1942 and went largely smoothly, but the approval of the publication by the Japanese censorship authorities was problematic. They described the film as "uncomfortably British - American " and counterproductive for the Pacific War . Only an intervention by the well-known Japanese director Ozu Yasujirō was the authority able to change its mind. It finally appeared in Japanese cinemas on March 25, 1943 as Judo Saga - The Legend of Great Judo and was a critical and commercial local success. Despite everything, when the film was re-released in 1946, the censorship authorities decided to cut it by 17 minutes in order to prevent “unconstitutional material”. The lost content is still considered lost today.
His next project, the propaganda film Am Allerschönsten , is an exception in terms of content in his filmography. Kurosawa, who, in contrast to many other well-known personalities of his time, appeared politically rather cautious, treated female factory workers in the film during the Second World War and clearly shows patriotic traits. The origin of this is unknown, but the most prominent theory sees Kurosawa's tense relationship with the Japanese censorship authority and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as decisive and interprets the stylistic and substantive upheaval as a soothing gesture. The production process of the film is also a peculiarity, as Kurosawa asked his actors to live in a factory hall during the film production , to only eat from the canteen and to address each other by their fictional names. This unusual production thus contrasts with the usual course of his debut work and marks the beginning of his habit of using similarly drastic means in future films in order to make them appear more authentic.
Many of the actors were enraged by Kurosawa's perfectionist behavior and therefore chose Yōko Yaguchi, the main actress of the film, to discuss with him. Paradoxically, the discussions between the two did not cause conflict, instead they fell in love and got married a year later, on May 21, 1945. The couple had two children, a boy named Hisao and a girl named Kazuko, and stayed until Yaguchi's death 1985 together.
Shortly before his wedding, Kurosawa was pressured by his film studio to make a sequel to his debut film. Kurosawa vehemently rejected the idea of a sequel, but gave up after a long discussion and released the film Sugata Sanshiro sequel in May 1945 . Although the film was successful at the box office, it is considered to be its weakest film by viewers and the director himself.
Due to the controversy surrounding his first film and the, according to his own account, unnecessarily high budget for its sequel, Kurosawa decided to produce a film for his next project that was cheaper and more censorship-friendly than the previous one. The shooting of The Men Who Stepped on the Tiger's Tail , based on the Kakubi drama Kanjinchō and starring the well-known actor Enomoto Ken'ichi, ended in September 1945. At the same time , Japan capitulated and the occupation of Japan began, which is why the film had to be controlled by the new American censorship authorities, which classified it as "too feudal" and put it on the index. Ironically, the film would have suffered the same fate if Japan had not surrendered, as old documents from Japanese authorities show that they wanted to index it for “too western and democratic values”. It wasn't until seven years later, in 1952, that the film was released together with his new work Ikiru - once really living .
Post-war to Rotbart
First post-war works (1946–1950)
Inspired by the democratic values of the western occupation, Kurosawa thought from now on to produce films that are more oriented towards the individualistic worldview . The first of these films was supposed to be No Regrets for My Youth in 1946 , a criticism of the political repression by the Japanese regime during World War II. He was particularly motivated by the "Takigawa incident" and the war spy Hotsumi Ozaki , but also by his own experiences with domestic censorship. Atypical for the director, the protagonist is a woman, Yukie, played by Setsuko Hara , who grows up in a wealthy family and questions her own ideals due to the crises of her fellow men. The original script had to be rewritten several times and was received in two ways by critics of the time due to its controversial subjects and the fact that the protagonist is a woman. Nevertheless, the film was a great success both commercially and with viewers, through which various variations of the film title became established as catchphrases for the post-war period.
The love story A Wonderful Sunday premiered in July 1947 and tells the story of a young couple who want to enjoy their first vacation together in the midst of the devastation of Japan. The film was strongly influenced by David Wark Griffith , Frank Capra and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau affects all three part of Kurosawa's favorite directors, and, with the repeated breaking of the fourth wall a peculiarity in his filmography. In the same year appeared with path of the snow under Directed by Senkichi Taniguchi, another film with Kurosawa's involvement who wrote the script. The film is special in that it represents the debut work of the aspiring young actor Toshirō Mifune , who was so able to convince Kurosawa that this enabled him to sign a contract with Tōhō , despite the skepticism of the other casting jurors. Mifune collaborated with Kurosawa in sixteen of his later films, in most cases starring.
Angel of the Lost is considered by many, including himself, Kurosawa's first great work; it was the beginning of his series of critics and audience favorites, which appear almost every year. Although the script was rewritten several times due to the influence of American censorship, Kurosawa later said the film was the first in which he was allowed to freely develop. The story follows a doctor and alcoholic who wants to savea yakuza with tuberculosis and started the collaboration between Kurosawa and Toshirō Mifune. Although Mifune was not hired as the protagonist, but Takashi Shimura , a long-time colleague of Kurosawa, his performance as a gangster inspired those involved on the film set so much that Kurosawa re-staged the dramaturgy of the film at short notice and shifted the focus from Shimura more to him. Angel of the Lost premieredin Tokyo in April 1948and was received with euphoric feelings by critics and viewers. Among other things, Kinema Junpo , the oldest and best-known film magazine in Japan, awarded him Film of the Year .
Kurosawa founded with producer Sojiro Motoki and directors Kajiro Yamamoto, motivated by the success of the film, Mikio Naruse and Senkichi Taniguchi the film studio Eiga Kyokai Geijutsu (German: film art composite ). For the inauguration of the studio in March 1949, Kurosawa released the film The Silent Duel , his only adaptation of a play. For the lead role, Toshirō Mifune was hired as an aspiring doctor struggling with the consequences of his syphilis disease. Kurosawa's intention was to break through the crisis of Mifune, who was typecast by other directors as a gangster through his portrayal in Angel of the Lost and also wanted to shine in other roles. Despite the very short work on the film - Kurosawa himself saw it as a small side project rather than a really well thought-out work - it received good reviews and was also able to convince at the box office. Even in the retrospective, the film still gets good reviews, even if many critics classify it as one of the less important in Kurosawa's filmography.
His second film of the same year, A Stray Dog , is Kurosawa's first of a total of three film noirs . The detective film describes metaphorically the mood in Japan during the post-war period through the story of a young police officer, played by Mifune, who is in search of his stolen weapon . As in most of his films, the direction, casting and screenplay come from the pen of Kurosawa, who in this case was stylistically based on the crime writer Georges Simenon . In an iconic, wordless, eight-minute sequence, the policeman searches the streets for his weapon. The scene was later imitated by numerous directors, including Francis Ford Coppola and Andrei Tarkovsky . Another special feature of the film are the images of the destroyed Tokyo, which show real material from the director Ishirō Honda , who was later to have his breakthrough with Godzilla . The film was critically and commercially as big as Angel of the Lost and is also considered the founder of the later internationally popular Buddy Cop film and the Japanese detective film in general.
The film Scandal , published in 1950 by Shōchiku , is a criticism of the rising Japanese tabloid press , especially its disregard for privacy, and is heavily inspired by the director's own experiences. Switching from courtroom conversations to lengthy, philosophical monologues on freedom of expression and social responsibility, the end product of the film became highly experimental, much to the displeasure of Kurosawa, who later described it as unfinished and unfocused. Still, like the ones before it, the film achieved local success in every respect. But it was only his second work of the same year, Rashomon - Das Lustwäldchen , that would make him, and thus Japanese cinema in general, an international star.
International success (1950–1958)
After the completion of Scandal , the Japanese film studio Kadokawa successfully asked Daiei Kurosawa for a cooperation. Inspired by the short story Im Gehölz by the well-known author Akutagawa Ryūnosuke , which describes the rape of a samurai woman from different angles, he began work on the corresponding script in the middle of the year, which was completed in June 1950 after being rewritten several times. In contrast to the last Toho- financed films, Kurosawa calculated a relatively small budget for the project. Kadokawa Daiei was therefore enthusiastic and began casting shortly afterwards .
The shooting of Rashomon began on July 7, 1950 and ended on August 17 of the same year. The primary forest in Nara served as the setting . The post-production was done after complications from a studio fire in a week, so that the film could celebrate its premiere on August 25, 1950 in the Imperial Theater in Tokyo; the national major publication took place a day later. Like most of Kurosawa's films to date, the film was a local success critically and commercially, but still unknown internationally.
Due to the commercial success of Rashomon and his artistic freedom not just to be tied to a production studio, Kurosawa fulfilled a wish for his next film and adapted The Idiot , a well-known novel of the same name by his favorite author Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky . Although he changed the point of view of history from Russia to Hokkaidō in Japan; Apart from that, the adaptation is very true to the original, which makes it an exception in the filmography of the director, who usually only adopted the rough premise for adaptations of well-known works. The first version of the film was about four and a half hours, much to the displeasure of the production studio Shōchiku , who classified it as too long for the typical viewer and shortened it from 265 minutes to 166 minutes. The gesture established a long hostility between Shōchiku and Kurosawa, who, according to some sources, even asked not to publish the film in the abridged form, and only approved the publication through the request of the actress Setsuko Hara . The two parties did not reconcile until forty years later, resulting in their third and final collaboration, Rhapsodie, in August . According to the British director and close confidante Alex Cox , Kurosawa used this opportunity to search the studio's archives unsuccessfully for the original version of the film, which is still considered lost.
The edited version was first published on May 23, 1951 with mixed voices and is still rated by critics as one of the director's weakest films, especially the difficult-to-follow plot, which appears incoherent due to Shōchiku's radical cut and has to be explained by title cards . Nevertheless, the film was able to convince at the box office, not least because of Kurosawa's newfound popularity and Setsuko Hara's participation.
At the same time, thanks to the efforts of the Italian film representative Giuliana Stramigioli , Rashmon - Das Lustwäldchen was nominated at the prestigious Venice International Film Festival , which allowed him to be shortlisted. Contrary to all expectations, the film won the top prize with the Golden Lion on September 10, 1951, surprising not only Kurosawa and its studio, but also the international film scene, to which products from Japan had been completely unknown for decades .
After Kadokawa Daiei sold the film with subtitles to various cinemas in the Los Angeles area for a short time , RKO Pictures secured the rights to Rashomon in the USA . The purchase was considered a great risk at the time, as the only Japanese film previously released in the United States, Woman, Be Like a Rose by Mikio Naruse , was a critical and commercial flop. The action paid off in the end. Rashomon was a great success , not least because of the euphoric criticism and advertising from Ed Sullivan , among others , and cemented Kurosawa's name among the most famous directors of the time, alongside big names such as Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder . For example, Rashomon , which only ran as a home production in selected cinemas in Japan in 1950, was the first Asian film ever to be released worldwide in mid-1952.
The success of the film helped the Japanese film industry to gain great attention and popularity in the western market, which continues to this day, replacing Italian neorealism , which has long enjoyed great popularity thanks to directors such as Roberto Rossellini , Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica . Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujirō are some of the Japanese directors who were subsequently awarded film prizes in the western world as a result of the aftershock of Rashomon and were published commercially . Many years later the western market was still open to the new generation of Japanese film-makers such as Kon Ichikawa , Masaki Kobayashi , Nagisa Ōshima , Shōhei Imamura , Jūzō Itami , Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike .
Due to his international breakthrough, Kurosawa felt artistically and financially free, so that he fulfilled his wish to make another drama for his next film. The result later became Ikiru - Once Really Live , a film about a bureaucrat named Watanabe suffering from stomach cancer who searches for meaning before he dies. Despite the gritty subject matter, the script treats both the protagonist's bureaucratic niche and the US's cultural colonization of Japan with a satirical approach that contemporary reviews have often compared to Bertolt Brecht . Ikiru celebrated its opening on October 9, 1952 to euphoric ticket sales and reviews, not least due to the satirical tone that was perceived by the general public as a refreshing overhaul of the otherwise mostly kitsch drama genre. Even today, Ikiru is listed on numerous lists as one of the best films of all time.
In December of the same year, Kurosawa booked a room in a remote inn for 45 days to work in isolation on the script of a new film: The Seven Samurai . The ensemble was his first samurai film , the genre he was to revolutionize with this and some of his later films. The story about a poor village in the Sengoku period that hired a group of samurai to protect itself from bandits was presented in an epic style : with a large number of actors, meticulously detailed action sequences and a running time of around three and a half Hours.
The pre-production lasted around three months, the rehearsals a further one. However, the shooting, which took around 148 days (almost five months) over a period of around a year, is considered particularly excessive. The shooting was accompanied by numerous complications, including Kurosawa miscalculating the budget of the film and had to raise money over several corners in order to be able to pay the immense costs. This stress also caused health problems for the director, which also had a counterproductive effect on the production. The film finally started in April 1954, six months after its planned release and with a budget three times as high, making it the most expensive Japanese film of all time to date. Like his two previous works, the epic was highly praised by critics and quickly became an international box office hit. The film's reputation has grown even further over time and is now widely recognized as one of the best films of all time. In 1979, for example, various Japanese directors voted it the best Japanese film of all time in a survey, the British film magazine Sight & Sound from the British Film Institute put the film in 17th place of the best films of all time and in the Internet Movie Database it is currently ranked 15th Space.
In 1945, nuclear tests caused radioactive showers over large parts of Japan, and one particular incident of radioactive fallout in particular caused headlines and unrest among the Japanese population. Plagued by panic attacks and paranoia , Kurosawa published his contribution in November 1955 through the film Bilanz einer Leben , a semi- autobiographical story about an old factory owner who, for fear of a nuclear attack, decided to move each of his family members (blood relatives and illegitimate) to a supposedly safe farm in Brazil wants to relocate. For a long time, the production was much more conflict-free than that of his last films, until the death of his composer and close friend Fumio Hayasaka from tuberculosis a few days before the end of shooting. The film soundtrack was finished by Masaru Satō , who should also compose the music for Kurosawa's next eight films. Balance of a lifetime was a critical and financial success, but fell far short of the reputation of its predecessor. Over the years, however, the film gained increasing popularity and is now considered by many well-known reviewers to be one of the best psychoanalytic representations of human fears in film format.
Kurosawa's next project, The Castle in the Spiderweb Forest , a rough adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth , presented an ambitious transformation of the English work into a Japanese context. For example, the director instructed his leading actress Yamada Isuzu to view the work as a cinematic representation of Japanese literature rather than European. In order to give the film the unique atmosphere of ancient Japanese literature, as well as a tribute to Japanese theater arts in general, Kurosawa challenged his actors to learn and apply gesticulation and intonation from traditional Nō theater. The final product appeared on January 15, 1957 in Japan and on the following day internationally to very good reviews and renewed financial success. To this day, The Castle in the Spider Web Forest is listed as one of Kurosawa's best films and, despite the creative freedom compared to the original, is considered one of the most popular Shakespeare adaptations.
Another loose adaptation of a classic European play followed with Nachtasyl , based on the play of the same name by Maxim Gorki . The story of a married couple who rented beds to strangers during the Edo period and then got involved in unexpected situations takes place in May and June 1957, correlating with the time of the shooting. In contrast to Das Schloss im Spinnwebwald , an expensive and very ambitious film, Nachtasyl was only shot on two narrow film sets, with the intention of being able to emphasize the emotional limitations of the characters. Contrary to Kurosawa's other interpretation of Russian literature, in the form of The Idiot , the attempt was perceived by viewers and reviewers as successful and in general Nachtasyl is still often heard as one of the director's most underrated works.
The atmosphere of the three consecutive films based on The Seven Samurai became increasingly pessimistic and gloomy, in particular through the critical examination of the question of whether salvation can really be achieved through personal responsibility. Even if the balance sheet of a life was very gloomy, the two subsequent films in particular were dominated by that nihilistic philosophy. Kurosawa noticed this himself and therefore consciously decided to make his next film shallower and more entertaining, while at the same time trying out the new widescreen format , which was attracting increasing attention, especially in Japan. The result, The Hidden Fortress , is a comedic adventure film about a medieval princess, her loyal general, and two farmers who expose themselves to dangerous situations in order to reach their home region. Released in December 1958, The Hidden Fortress was a huge commercial success and was also able to delight the critics, both locally and internationally. Nowadays the work is considered to be one of the lightest Kurosawas, but it is still very popular and is regularly included in various best lists of the director. The American film director George Lucas later named the film as the greatest inspiration for his space opera Star Wars and sometimes took entire scenes as an homage to Kurosawa's work.
Founding of Kurosawa Productions and the end of an era with Red Beard (1959–1965)
Starting with Rashomon , Kurosawa's works began to become more and more ambitious, so the budget rose steadily. Out of caution, after The Hidden Fortress was published , Toho suggested sponsoring a new company run by Kurosawa. This would have the advantage for Toho that a commercial failure would not result in such high potential losses, while Kurosawa could control the production and publication of his works more freely than ever. Kurosawa was impressed by the idea and founded the Kurosawa Production Company in April 1959 , with Toho as an investor .
Despite the high risk of loss, Kurosawa chose to inaugurate his studio, his clearest criticism to date of the economic and political elite of Japan. The Bad Sleep Well is a film noir about a man who infiltrates the hierarchy of a corrupt Japanese company to find those responsible for his father's death. The topic turned out to be ironically topical: parallel to the film production, crowds of people demonstrated on the streets of Japan against the treaty on mutual cooperation and security between Japan and the United States , an agreement that many young Japanese perceived as a massive threat to the country's democratic constitution . especially through the clear shift of power to large companies and politicians. Contrary to Kurosawa's pessimistic expectations, the film was released in September 1960 to positive audiences and critics. The 25-minute opening sequence in particular is often cited as one of the strongest in the history of the film.
Yojimbo - The Bodyguard , Kurosawa Production's second film, deals with the masterless samurai Sanjuro, whogetsinto a city in the 19th century and incites the two ruling factions against each other. Due to his international success, Kurosawa showed himself to be more and more willing to experiment over the years, which was alsothe casewith Yojimbo . Not only is the film a mix of many different genres, especially the western , the violence shown in the film was also considered unprecedented and controversial for its time, especially in Japan. The second largest role, after Toshirō Mifune as Sanjuro, got the previously unknown actor Tatsuya Nakadai , who had beenhired as an extrain The Seven Samurai afew years earlier. Despite initial skepticism from Toho , who wanted to market the film with several big names, Kurosawa's flair proved right, and Nakadai became an international celebrity overnight. The film premiered on April 25, 1961 and was a major international success in every respect. He made more financially than any other Kurosawa film before and is stillimitated and adaptedto this day, especially in its black-humored tone . The most famous example is the Italian director Sergio Leone , who in 1963publishedan unauthorized remake of yojimbo with his spaghetti western for a handful of dollars . Since no one from Leone's staff had taken care of the copyrights in advance, a legal dispute arose, which was finally settled out of court: Kurosawa received the exploitation rights for the Far East and a worldwide profit share of 15%.
Due to Yojimbo's success , Kurosawa was asked by Toho to develop a sequel . Impressed by the idea, he searched his archives for his discarded scripts, found what he was looking for and rewrote one of them for the promised sequel. Sanjuro , named after the title character, is much lighter in tone than its predecessor, despite the serious story of a samurai clan with internal conflicts and power struggles. In addition, he is unusually humorous and questions the rules and values that are conveyed in traditional Jidai-geki by ironizing and unsuccessful of the respective protagonists. The film was released on New Year's 1962 and was an even bigger success than its already critically and financially euphoric predecessor. Even today, like Yojimbo , the film is regularly listed as one of Kurosawa's best.
Despite the huge success of his last two samurai films, Kurosawa was thrilled to produce another film noir that would deal with the subject of kidnapping : the crime Kurosawa was most afraid of. The film Between Heaven and Hell was shot in the second half of 1962 and published internationally in March 1963. As the third film in a row, it broke Kurosawa's box-office success and became the most successful film of the year. The film also achieved huge success with critics, which paradoxically paused for a short time after the film was blamed for a wave of mass kidnappings in Japan. Even Kurosawa received threats directed at his daughter Kazuko. The scandal subsided after a while, and nowadays the film is consistently listed as one of Kurosawa's best productions. It was to be the last of a total of three films noirs in the director's repertoire.
Not long later he started his new project, Rotbart . Influenced in places by Dostoyevsky's novel Humiliated and Offended , the period film is set in a clinic of the 19th century and is considered to be the clearest setting of Kurosawa's humanistic image of man . A selfish and materialistic young doctor named Yasumoto feels compelled to work as an intern in a clinic under the strict tutelage of Doctor Niide, known as Red Beard. After initially resisting Rotbart, he soon began to admire his courage and then questioned his opinion of the clinic's patients, whom he previously loathed.
Yūzō Kayama, the actor in Yasumoto, was an extremely popular musician in Japan, so Toho and Kurosawa found his appearance as a safeguard for the hoped-for financial success of the film. The shooting was the longest in the exceptional director's career and spanned over a year of intensive work, despite five months of preproduction. In the spring of 1965 the film was officially declared complete, but the stress turned out to be bad for the already ailing health of Kurosawa and some of the actors. Rotbart started worldwide in April 1965 and became one of the most successful films of the year. It remains to this day as one of Kurosawa's most highly acclaimed productions, even if a few voices, especially in the West, missed Kurosawa's commitment to a political and social change.
In a way, the film marks the end of an era. Kurosawa even noted this himself; In an interview with film critic Donald Richie , for example, he said that with Rotbart , a cycle had come to an end and that his future films and production methods will be different from those before. His prognosis turned out to be correct. From the beginning of the 1960s, TV programs increasingly replaced cinema productions and the more the film studios' revenues fell, the more their willingness to take risks. More specifically, the financial risk that Kurosawa repeatedly exploited with expensive productions and daring ideas.
Rotbart also marked about half of his career chronologically. In the previous 29 years in the film industry (including the five as an assistant director) he made 23 films, while there would only be seven more in the next 28 years. Rotbart also marked the last collaboration with Toshiro Mifune. The reasons for this never became publicly known, even after repeated inquiries.
The Second Era (1966-1998)
Detour to Hollywood (1966–1968)
After Kurosawa's contract with Toho expired in 1966, the then 56-year-old director considered a drastic change. Due to the ever increasing dominance of television, as well as numerous contract offers from abroad, he increasingly sympathized with the idea of working outside of Japan.
For his first overseas project, Kurosawa chose a story based on an article from Life magazine. The action thriller , which was to be filmed in English as Runaway Train , would have been his first color film . The language barrier turned out to be a major problem, however, and the English version of the script wasn't even ready when shooting started in the fall of 1966. The shoot, which required snow, was finally postponed for a year and completely canceled in 1968. Andrei Konchalovsky only filmed the film two decades later as Runaway Train , loosely based on Kurosawa's script.
The director has since been involved in a much more ambitious Hollywood project. Torah! Torah! Torah! , produced by 20th Century Fox and Kurosawa Productions , was planned to portray the attack on Pearl Harbor from the United States and Japan . Kurosawa was supposed to shoot the Japanese half and a hitherto unknown English-speaking director was to shoot the American side. After months of intense work and ambition on the part of Kurosawa, the project began to fall apart. For the English-language half of the film, the prestigious David Lean was not hired, as Kurosawa was conveyed, but the much less well-known Richard Fleischer . In addition, the budget was cut briefly and the Japanese part of the film should not be longer than 90 minutes - a big problem, since Kurosawa had been commissioned to write an epic and had put several months of work into a four and a half hour long script. After several discussions and a brief intervention by the film producer Darryl F. Zanuck , an agreement was finally reached in May 1968 on a more or less finished end product.
Filming began in early December, but Kurosawa only worked on location for just under three weeks. He had problems working with a film crew that was completely strange to him, and his working methods irritated the American producers, who ultimately came to the conclusion that Kurosawa was mentally ill . After a short discussion, he decided to work at the University of Kyoto by the neuropsychologist Dr. Murakami, who diagnosed him with neurasthenia , on the grounds: “He suffers from sleep disorders that are disturbed by fears and manic excitement caused by the above-mentioned disease. It is necessary that he rest for the next two months and receive medical treatment. ”Around Christmas 1968, the producers of the film announced that Kurosawa had left the production of the film because of fatigue , even though he was in fact fired without notice. He was eventually replaced by the two Japanese directors Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda.
Torah! Torah! Torah! finally appeared in September 1970 to muted reviews. A result that, according to Donald Richie , represented an "almost unmitigated tragedy" in Kurosawa's career. "He (Kurosawa) wasted years of his life on a logistically sketchy project that he ultimately wasn't supposed to contribute to." The incident led to a number of negative events: Kurosawa's name was removed from the credits, despite the script for the Japanese sequences His was and he got into an argument with his longtime collaborator and friend Ryuzo Kikushima, which was not to be settled until his death. According to Kurosawa, the project inadvertently exposed the corruption in his own company, something he ironically addressed well in The Bad Sleepers . In addition, for the first time he felt compelled to question his own health. As Kurosawa later announced in an interview, at this point he was certain that he no longer wanted to make a film, let alone contribute to the film business in any other way.
A Decade of Conflicts (1969–1977)
Through the Torah! Torah! Torah! -Debacle Kurosawa was aware that his reputation would be at stake if he didn't pull himself up again. Therefore came to support Keisuke Kinoshita , Masaki Kobayashi and Kon Ichikawa : himself directors and longtime friends Kurosawa, who founded with him in July 1969 a new production company Yonki no kai ( The club's four knights ). Even if the official plan was that every director should use the platform for their own publication, many retrospectives agree that the real motivation was to support Kurosawa in completing his work in order to reintegrate him into the film business.
After working briefly on a period film called Dora-heita , which turned out to be too expensive, Kurosawa decided on the experimental film Dodeskaden about the poor and the destitute. For Kurosawa's standards, the film was shot very quickly in just nine weeks, not least because he wanted to prove how he could produce great films on a budget even after a long absence. For his first color film , Kurosawa renounced his old focus of dynamic processing and complex picture compositions and concentrated more on creating striking, already surreal-looking color palettes with the aim of exposing the toxic environment of his characters. The film debuted in Japan in October 1970 to cautious audience reactions who found the film too pessimistic and surreal. The film was financially in the red and caused the breakup of Yonki no kai . After a certain time the reception of the film became much more positive, among other things it was nominated for “Best Foreign Language Film” at the Academy Awards in 1972 , but this did not change the mental state of the director, who fell into a deep depression after his failure .
Unable to produce further films due to excessive spending and suffering from severe health problems, Kurosawa hit rock bottom on December 22, 1971, when he increasingly slashed his wrists and throat. The suicide attempt proved unsuccessful and the director recovered from him relatively quickly, even if for the second time his decision was made that he no longer wanted to contribute to the film business.
In early 1973, the most famous Russian film studio, Mosfilm, turned to Kurosawa and asked for a collaboration. Despite initial skepticism, the latter accepted the offer in order to fulfill his old dream of filming the life of the hunter Dersu Usala . The foundation was laid by the writings of the Russian explorer Vladimir Klawdijewitsch Arsenjew . Kurosawa had owned the plan since the mid-1930s, but to date has not found anyone interested in the project. In December 1973, the 63-year-old director settled in the Soviet Union , where he would live for another year and a half. Filming began in Siberia in May 1974 and proved to be demanding due to the strict natural conditions, which is why the film was only shot in April 1975. Uzala the Kyrgyz , as the film was to be called in the end, celebrated its world premiere on August 2, 1975 as a huge success with critics and viewers. Not only did the film become one of the most successful films of the year alongside names like Jaws and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , it also proved successful at various award ceremonies. Among other things, he was awarded the Oscar in 1976 . To this day, Uzala of Kyrgyzstan is considered one of Kurosawa's best films.
Although he was churning out offers for television, Kurosawa never showed any serious interest in operating outside of the film world. Until his death, the avowed whiskey lover only made an exception for a series of Suntory commercials in the spring of 1976. Even if the mentally ill director had been plagued by the fear of never being able to make films again since his suicide attempt, he wrote more scripts, paintings and sketches that he wanted to keep for posterity, even if they would never be made into a film.
Two epics (1978–1986)
In 1977, the American director George Lucas released the film Star Wars , an adaptation of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress , with great success. Lucas, like many other New Hollywood directors, adored Kurosawa and was shocked to learn that the Japanese filmmaker was unable to fund his films. The two met in July 1978 in San Francisco to discuss the financing of a new Kurosawa film: Kagemusha - The Shadow of the Warrior , the epic story of a thief who is hired as the doppelganger of a Japanese warlord . Lucas was so enthusiastic about the script and paintings that he used his new contacts to persuade 20th Century Fox to produce the film. Despite the turbulent past, the studio agreed with the Japanese director and recruited Francis Ford Coppola , another Kurosawa's fan, as co-producer.
Production began the following April, shooting ranged from June 1979 to March 1980 and was temporarily interrupted by various complications, including a spontaneous second casting after the original protagonist Shintarō Katsu was replaced by Tatsuya Nakadai due to differences of opinion . The film was completed a few weeks behind schedule, but was still able to premiere in Tokyo on the scheduled date in April 1980. It quickly became an international hit - among other things, it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1980 - and, to Kurosawa's delight, was also successful in Japan. Kurosawa used the rest of the year intensively to promote his own film in Europe and America , as well as for award ceremonies and an art exhibition with concept drawings of the epic.
The huge success of Kagemusha enabled Kurosawa to finance his dream project Ran , a period film of unimagined size. The film describes the fall of Hidetora Ichimonji, a daimyo of the Sengoku period who decides to step down in favor of his sons. His kingdom is falling apart under the intrigues and battles of his sons; in the course of this Hidetora falls into madness. With a budget of 12 million dollars, Ran was the most expensive Japanese film to date, which is why Kurosawa received further funding, this time from French producer Serge Silberman, who was best known for his collaboration with Luis Buñuel . Filming began in December 1983 and dragged on for just over a year.
In January 1985, the post-production of Ran was paused by the illness of his wife Yōko, who died on February 1 of the same year. In the midst of his grief, Kurosawa worked meticulously to finish the film, so that Ran could celebrate its premiere at the Tokyo Film Festival on May 31, 1985. The film was released worldwide the following day. The film achieved moderate success in Japan and huge success abroad, particularly in America and Europe . In September and October of that year, Kurosawa traveled around the world , as he did for Kagemusha , to post-promote his film.
Ran has won a variety of awards around the world, including Japan. The film world was therefore surprised when Japan did not submit Ran in favor of another film for the category “Best Foreign Language Film” at the 1986 Academy Awards . Shortly afterwards, the Academy announced that Ran was officially excluded from the competition, as it was not clear whether it was considered a Japanese film, a French film, or both at the same time. Many colorful personalities in the Hollywood industry, especially the influential director Sidney Lumet , were angry about the questionable decision. Lumet then successfully launched a campaign with the aim of instead awarding Kurosawa in the “Best Director” category. Ran also won an Oscar for “Best Costume Design” .
Kagemusha and Ran are usually counted among Kurosawa's most important works. The Japanese filmmaker himself described Ran as his best film after its release and broke his attitude not to prefer any of his films.
Final works and final years of life (1987–1998)
For his next film, Kurosawa chose a very specific theme that is different from any of his previously published works. Even if some of his films already contained short dream sequences (for example Angels of the Lost and Kagemusha ), Akira Kurosawa's dreams are based entirely on the director's actual dreams from different stages of his life. The film is very colorful and contains hardly any dialogue, instead it tells its stories mostly through images. Although the budget of the film was much lower than that of Ran , Japanese film studios refused to take over the financing in full, so Steven Spielberg , another well-known Kurosawa admirer, asked Warner Bros. Entertainment for help, which shortly afterwards acquired the international rights Film secured. This made it easier for Kurosawa's son Hisao, the film's co-producer, to find a compromise with Japanese film studios. The shooting of the film lasted about eight months until Akira Kurosawa's dreams premiered in Cannes in May 1990. The film was favorably received by critics and was a financial success, if not on the order of Ran or Kagemusha . Even if Akira Kurosawa's dreams are not regarded as one of the director's greatest achievements, he still has a certain cult status among viewers to this day. At the end of 1990 Kurosawa accepted the honorary Oscar for his life's work.
His next work became a conventional story again with Rhapsody in August . The film deals with the consequences of the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War . For the first time since the Dodeskaden, the film was produced entirely in Japan, and Richard Gere, the nephew of the protagonist, is also the first American film star to appear. Shooting started in January 1991 and the film opened internationally in cinemas on May 25th. Even though it was financially successful, the film was largely received negatively, especially in the USA , which accused the Japanese director of representing anti-American opinions. Kurosawa himself denied the said allegations.
Madadayo was to become the aging director's last film. It follows the life of the Japanese German teacher Uchida Hyakken through World War II and beyond. The film's narrative is largely limited to a birthday party with his students, to whom he explains his reluctance to die - a topic that became increasingly relevant for the 81-year-old director. The shooting lasted from February to September 1992; it was released on April 17, 1993. Madadayo proved to be a great success and was able to win various prizes both internationally and in Japan, including four categories of the Japanese Academy Awards , the most important film prize in Japan. In 1994 he received the Kyoto Prize .
Kurosawa did not become less productive after Madadayo either, he wrote the scripts for The Sea Comes (1993) and After the Rain (1995) , among others . Just before finishing the last script, he slipped and broke his back. The incident left the director paraplegic and robbed him of the possibility of ever making another film. His wish to die on the set of his film shoot never came true.
After the accident, Kurosawa's health deteriorated immensely. Though his mind was still untouched, his body was gradually giving up, and most of the last six months of his life he was bedridden. Kurosawa finally died on September 6, 1998 at the age of 88 from complications from a stroke . His resting place is in the cemetery of the An'yō-in Buddhist temple in Kamakura . Both his posthumous screenplays was filmed in his honor, 1999 The sea comes by Takashi Koizumi and 2002. After the Rain by Kei Kumai . His grandson, Takayuki Kato, was hired as a supporting actor in both of the films.
Cinematic approaches
Akira Kurosawa left a diverse and internationally influential legacy behind subsequent generations of directors. This ranged from his working methods, his style, to his selective selection of certain topics and the philosophies dealt with therein. Kurosawa's working methods were based on extensive involvement in numerous aspects of film production. Among other things, he was also known as a gifted, but also perfectionist screenwriter, who redesigned or even completely overhauled his script several times.
As a trained painter, Kurosawa also attached great importance to the aesthetics of his films. For this purpose, he also checked the camera and was notorious for changing certain settings just for the cinematography or for replacing them at short notice. Kurosawa also did post-production , including film and sound editing, in most of his films. Performing his work as a film editor in parallel to directing is still unusual today.
Kurosawa worked with the same actors in most of the films. His group of trust later got the nickname "Kurosawa-gumi" (translated: "Kurosawa troop").
Working methods
script
Kurosawa passionately emphasized that the script is the foundation of a good film for him. His thesis went so far as to claim that a mediocre director can sometimes make a decent movie out of a good script, but no good director can ever make a decent movie out of a bad script. Kurosawa therefore largely took care of his scripts himself and then gave them to a trusted group of friends for improvement suggestions, mostly the five professional screenwriters Eijirō Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni, and Masato Ide. The director himself always kept the last word on the final version.
In addition to the script, Kurosawa often wrote detailed notes, sketches, and conceptual drawings. This served the elaboration of his vision and last but not least the authenticity, which was always a priority for the director. As an example: For The Seven Samurai he wrote seven notebooks with meticulous information about their backgrounds, what they eat and wear, how they run, how they talk and behave towards other people and even how they tie their shoes. For the 101 farmers in the film, he created a register consisting of over 23 meticulously planned family trees and instructed his actors to fictitiously “live” in their families during their stay on the set, even outside of filming. He used similarly drastic methods in a large number of his works.
Camera and effects while shooting
Although they were consistently well filmed, Kurosawa used regular camera lenses and deep focus cinematography in his early films . Starting with The Seven Samurai , his technique changed drastically with long focus lenses and the simultaneous use of multiple cameras . The filmmaker himself said that this shooting technique ensures more authenticity and better performances for his actors, as they never know which of the cameras will ultimately be used in the film, let alone where they are placed. The convulsive focus on the camera shifts to the actors or scenes with and in which the characters are. The experimental approach clearly worked, among others one of the cast, Tatsuya Nakadai, said in an interview that Kurosawa's way of shooting contributed significantly to his performance. But this shooting style also had a visual effect on the film, especially the action sequences.
"He can use the telephoto lenses to get under the horses, between their hooves, to push us into battle in a visual way [...] unprecedented for the samurai genre as a whole."
With The Hidden Fortress , Kurosawa began using an anamorphic method . These three techniques - telephoto lens, multiple cameras, and widescreen format - were used excessively in his later work, even in scenes with little to no action. One example are the opening scenes in Between Heaven and Hell in the protagonists' house. There the means are used to dramatize the tension within a very limited space and to strengthen the relationships between the characters.
In a scene from The Castle in the Cobweb Forest , in which Washizu is attacked with arrows by his own men, the director had real archers shoot hollowed-out arrows at Washizu's actor Toshiro Mifune. This carefully followed chalk marks on the floor to avoid getting hit. Even though Mifune was not injured, he later said that some arrows only narrowly missed. Many months later he carried trauma from the experience . Kurosawa's eccentric intention to make Mifune's fear more authentic, however, worked perfectly, so that the scene only had to be shot once.
In order to make the clinic set in red beard more nutty, Kurosawa had his assistants dismantle rotten wood from old furniture and reassemble it for the props. He also hired his film crew to pour gallons of old tea over all the teacups to create the effect that they were stale.
For the design of the third castle in Ran , the art director and set designer Muraki Yoshirō was ordered to photograph the stones of a real castle and to precisely reproduce them using styrofoam blocks. Then he glued the Styrofoam blocks together piece by piece to simulate the look of the final castle. The whole process was carried out under the strict instructions of Kurosawa and took several months. In one famous scene in the film, the castle is attacked and set on fire, which is why parts of the team were afraid that the heat could melt the styrofoam blocks. At Kurosawa's order, four layers of cement were poured over the blocks and then painted over in the color of the old blocks.
Film editing
Kurosawa noted on several occasions that he made a film only to have material that he could later edit. The process of creating an end product from raw material has always been the most important and exciting part for him. Hiroshi Nezu, a longtime production supervisor , once said, “We believe that he [Kurosawa] is Toho's best director, Japan's best scriptwriter and the best film editor in the world. [...] A Kurosawa film is made through the editing process, so to speak. "
Teruyo Nogami, who served Kurosawa as assistant editor in several films, confirmed this view: “Akira Kurosawa's editing was extraordinary, the inimitable work of a genius. [...] Nobody was his equal ”. She claimed that Kurosawa had every information about every shot shot in his head: “If he asked about a shot in the editorial room and I gave him the wrong one, he noticed the mistake immediately. I took notes on every scene, he just had them in his head. ”She compared his thoughts with a computer that can do with cut film segments what technology does these days.
Kurosawa's habitual method was to edit the film piece by piece in parallel with production, usually on a daily basis. This proved particularly useful when he switched to multiple cameras.
“I always edit in the evening when we have a lot of material in the can. After seeing the rushes, I usually go into the processing room and work. "
The intensive work on editing made the process routine over the course of his career. Accordingly, the post-production of a typical Kurosawa film could be extremely short. For example, Yojimbo premiered on April 20, 1961, just four days after filming was completed.
Stylistic means
Virtually all commentators noticed Kurosawa had a bold, dynamic style that is not unusual in Hollywood at first. However, they also pointed out that the director showed a technique from the start that was clearly different from the seamless style of classic Hollywood. This technique includes, among other things, a distorted image of the screen through the use of numerous, non-repeated camera positions, a disregard for the traditional 180-degree axis of action around which Hollywood scenes are normally constructed, and fluid camera movements, which often occur instead of conventional editing to make the narrative more spatial. Kurosawa made use of many stylistic means ascribed to him in his career, although some of them appeared more frequently.
Jump
Kurosawa frequently used in his films of the 1940s and 1950s, the so-called axial cut , a kind of film editing, in which the camera not fade or a tracking shot graded ran- or out zooms , but to each other through a series of coordinated jump cuts . An example from the film Sanshiro Sugata sequel is illustrated by the film scholar David Bordwell on his blog. There Sanshiro, the hero of the film, leaves his lover Sayo and repetitively carries out the same action: He walks a few meters away from her, turns around and she leans forward. This happens three times without the camera following the hero, instead each shot is a separate, juxtaposed scene. Due to the unnatural and ever increasing distance, which is cut in rapid succession, the film emphasizes the duration of Sanshiro's absence.
In the opening sequence of The Seven Samurai , the jump is used twice. When the villagers have gathered in a circle, they are seen from above in an extremely distant view, then there is a cut and the camera is closer and then another cut at floor level where the dialogue can begin. When the villagers go into the mill a few minutes later to get the advice of the village elder, you see a long shot of the mill with a slowly turning wheel, then after a cut an even closer view of the turning wheel and finally a close-up . Since it was previously established that the village elder lived in the mill, these images create an important connection between the village elder and the mill.
Cutting while moving
A number of analysts pointed to Kurosawa's tendency to cut in one move. That means: To subdivide a flowing scene between two moving characters into two or more separate portions, instead of an undisturbed shot. An example can be found again in The Seven Samurai , when the standing samurai Shichirōji wants to comfort the farmer Manzo, who is sitting on the ground, and kneels down to talk to him. Kurosawa filmed this simple act of kneeling in two shots, instead of one, to convey Shichirōji's humility more vigorously. There are innumerable examples of these in the same film alone. Joan Mellen said on the Criterion Collection Special-Edition of the epic, "Kurosawa interrupts [in many ways] the action and fragments it to create an emotional effect."
"Wipe"
A form of kinematic punctuation that is particularly often associated with Kurosawa is the so-called "wipe" transition. The effect is created by using an optical printer . When a scene ends, a line or bar appears to move across the screen, “wiping away” the image while revealing the first image of the subsequent scene. This technique used Kurosawa often in place of the usual transition or a normal average. In his later works in particular, the director used the transition method as a trademark; in the film Angel of the Lost, for example, it is used twelve times.
There are tons of theories as to why Kurosawa was so fond of this specific method of transition. Since the "wiping" was mainly used in silent films , but became increasingly rare with the sound film, film scholar James Goodwin suspected a homage to Kurosawa's deceased brother Heigo, who was active as Benshi in silent film and because of the popularity of the sound film and its resulting Unemployment suicided. There are also stylistic reasons for “wiping”. Goodwin claims that the "wiping" in Rashomon always serves one of three purposes: to highlight the movement of a traveling character, to mark narrative shifts in the courtyard sequences and to create temporal ellipses between actions (for example between the statements of two characters) . He also points out that Kurosawa does not use the "wipe" method in the night asylum , but instead stages his actors and props in such a way that the "wipe" is simulated from picture to picture.
An example of a satirical use of this method can be found in Ikiru - Living Once . A group of women visit the local government office to petition the bureaucrats to turn a trash area into a children's playground. The viewer is then shown a series of point-of-view shots of various bureaucrats using the "wipe" method , all of which transfer the group to another department. The film analyst Nora Tennessen described the effect of the method as follows: “The wiping makes the scene funnier. The attitudes of the bureaucrats are stacked like cards, each one more pedantic than the one before. "
Scene sound counterpoint
As can be seen in Teruyo Nogami's memoir, Kurosawa always paid close attention to the soundtrack of his film. He first made use of his habit of using music as a counterpoint to the emotional content of a scene in the late 1940s ; in traditional Hollywood the music was and is usually adapted to the atmosphere of a scene, if a scene is supposed to be sad, a sad piece of music is playing. Kurosawa's penchant for doing the opposite of that stems from a family tragedy. When Kurosawa learned of his father's death in 1948, he wandered aimlessly through the streets of Tokyo. His grief was exaggerated rather than diminished when he heard the hilarious song The Cuckoo Waltz on the radio. The artist then commissioned his film composer Fumio Hasayaka, with whom he was working on Angel of the Lost , to record the same song as an ironic accompaniment in Matsunaga's death scene, the saddest scene in the entire film.
Another example is the movie A Stray Dog . In the culminating scene in which Murakami is fighting with Yusa in a field of mud, a piece by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart suddenly plays , played on the piano by a woman in the neighboring house. One commentator noted: “In contrast to the scene of primitive violence, Mozart's serenity literally looks“ extraterrestrial ”. […] The power of this primeval encounter is exacerbated by the music. ”Kurosawa's revolutionary use of sound was not limited to music, however. In his review of The Seven Samurai , one critic pointed out: "When there is a setting of murder and chaos, birds chirp in the background, as in the first scene when the peasants lament their seemingly hopeless fate."
Recurring themes
Master-student ratio
Many commentators noted in Kurosawa's films the regular occurrence of a complex relationship between an older and a younger man, or between a master and a student. This theme was no doubt an expression of his own life. Joan Mellen said in a retrospective: “Kurosawa adored his teachers, especially Kajiro Yamamoto, his mentor in Toho . […] The instructive image of an elderly person teaching an inexperienced person always evokes moments of pathos in Kurosawa's films. ”The critic Tadao Sato regards the recurring figure of the“ master ”as a kind of surrogate father whose role it is to witness and approve of the young protagonist's moral growth.
In his very first film, Judo Sage , the narrative form changes after Judo master Yano becomes the teacher and spiritual guide of the title character, "in the form of a chronicle [...] examining the stages of the hero's growing mastery and maturity." Master-student relationship in his post-war films - such as Angel of the Lost , A Stray Dog , The Seven Samurai , Red Beard, and Uzala the Kyrgyz - involves very little direct instruction, instead the student learns through personal experience. Stephen Prince relates this tendency to the private and non-verbal nature of the concept of Zen enlightenment .
With Kagemusha , however, according to Prince, the meaning of this relationship changed into a pessimistic one. A thief who was chosen as a daimyō's doppelganger continues his identity even after his death: “The relationship has become spectral and is generated from the beyond, with the master as a ghostly presence. Its end is death, not the renewal of the obligation to the living, as in his previous films. ”However, according to a biographer, a more optimistic vision of this topic emerged in Madadayo :“ The students hold an annual celebration for their professor at the Dozens of alumni attend, now of different ages. This extended sequence expresses, as only Kurosawa can, the simple joys of student-teacher relationships, kinship, and life itself. "
Heroic character
Kurosawa's films often deal with the fate and deeds of heroic personalities. The typical Kurosawa hero was the result of the post-war period, during which the occupation of Japan replaced feudal values with individualistic values . Kurosawa, who was more oriented towards Western values from a young age, welcomed this change and adopted it as an artistic and social agenda. Described by Stephen Prince: “Kurosawa embraced the changing political climate and strove to shape it in his own cinematic voice.” Japanese film critic Tadao Sato agreed: “The defeat of Japan in World War II left many Japanese citizens in the making that the government lied to her for years and was neither fair nor trustworthy. During this time Akira Kurosawa gave the irritated population on the way that the meaning of life is not directed by a nation, but must be found by each individual through his or her suffering. "The filmmaker himself said on the subject:" [During this period ] I always thought that without the establishment of the self as a positive ideal there could be no freedom and no democracy. "
The first of these heroic characters was a woman, atypical of the director: Yukie, played by Setsuko Hara in No Regrets for My Youth . According to Prince, her “desertion from her family, her background in helping out a poor village, her perseverance despite enormous obstacles, her acceptance of personal responsibility and altruism, and her existential loneliness” are essential parts of a Kurosawa hero. This existential loneliness is also due to Dr. Sanada, played by Takashi Shimura, featured in Angel of the Lost : “Kurosawa insists that his heroes stay true to themselves and fight alone against traditions and obstacles for a better world, even if the result is not completely clear to them. The separation from a corrupt, socially labeled system to alleviate a person's suffering, as Dr. Sanada does it is the honorable course. "
Many commentators see The Seven Samurai as the artist's ultimate expression of heroic ideals. Joan Mellen describes this view as follows: “ The Seven Samurai is above all a tribute to the samurai class from its noble side. For Kurosawa, the samurai represents the best of Japanese tradition and integrity. ”It is because of the chaotic times of the civil war, not in spite of the war, that the seven rise to unimaginable size. “Kurosawa seeks the unexpected advantages no further than in the tragedy of this historic moment. The upheaval is forcing the samurai to demonstrate the selflessness of their creed of loyal service by working for the lower folk, the peasants. "This heroism, however, is in vain because" there was already an emerging class, the aristocracy the warrior would replace ”. So their courage is completely selfless, since they cannot stop the internal annihilation of their class anyway.
As his career progressed, it seemed increasingly difficult for the director to maintain the heroic ideal. Prince states, “Kurosawa's vision is essentially a tragic vision of life. So his sensitivity hinders his efforts. ”In addition, he undermines the heroic ideal itself with the narrative of his later films:“ When history is portrayed as a blind force, as in The Castle in the Cobweb Forest , heroism ceases to be reality. ”According to Prince the filmmaker's vision eventually became so bleak and nihilistic that he saw history merely as an eternally recurring pattern of violence within which the individual was portrayed not only as unheroic but as completely helpless. (see below: "The cycle of violence")
Nature and weather
Nature is an important element in Kurosawa's films. According to Prince, "Kurosawa's sensitivity [...] is heavily focused on the intricacies and beauties of seasons and landscapes." The director never hesitated to use climate and weather as significant elements of the plot, to the point that they were "active participants in the work." “Were. "The oppressive heat in A Stray Dog and Balance Sheet of a Life is omnipresent and underlines the theme of a world that is being torn apart by an economic collapse or a nuclear threat." Kurosawa himself once said: "I like hot summers, cold winters, heavy rain and a lot of snow and I think most of my films show that. I like the extremes, because they feel the most alive. "
Wind is also a significant symbol: “A persistent metaphor in Kurosawa's work is that of the wind, the winds of change, happiness and unhappiness. […] The visually colorful [final] battle in Yojimbo takes place on the main street, while large clouds of dust surround the fighters. The winds that churn the dust have brought firearms to the city along with Western culture. The things that will end the warrior tradition. "
Rain is also used separately in Kurosawa's films: “Rain is never treated neutrally in Kurosawa's films. When it appears, it is never in the form of a small drizzle, but always in a raging downpour. The final battle in The Seven Samurai is an extreme spiritual and physical battle and is accompanied by a raging rainstorm that allows Kurosawa to visualize an ultimate amalgamation of social groups. But with Kurosawa's typical ambivalence, this climatic vision of classlessness turns into a horror-like one. The battle is a vortex of swirling rain and mud. [...] The amalgamation of social identity emerges as an expression of hellish chaos. "
Cycle of violence
Starting with The Castle in the Cobweb Forest , Kurosawa developed an obsession with historical circles relentlessly savage violence, which Stephen Prince describes as a "countermovement to the heroic tone of his films." According to Donald Richie, “cause and effect is the only law in the film. Freedom does not exist. "Prince claims that the events are" inscribed in a temporal cycle that repeats itself over and over again. "He takes as the basis for his thesis that Washizu's master, contrary to the original Shakespeare play, had previously killed his own master for reasons of power. before he finally dies by Washizu himself. "The development of the events of Macbeth was conveyed by Kurosawa with a sharper emphasis on predetermined events and human unimportance through the laws of karma ."
Kurosawa's epics Kagemusha and Ran mark a drastic turning point in the director's worldview. When in Kagemusha “the individual could grasp and demand the events precisely so that they correspond to his impulses, the so-called“ I ”is only the epiphenomenon of a ruthless temporal process that is suppressed by the weight of history.”
His subsequent epic Ran is "an unrelenting chronicle of the fundamental thirst for power, the betrayal of a father by his sons, and the resulting wars and murders." The film's historical setting is only used as a commentary on Kurosawa's view of the "timeless human impulse to violence and self-destruction" used. "History created a perception of life as a wheel of endless suffering, constantly turning and repeating"; that process is usually characterized as hell in conventional Hollywood scripts. Yet "Kurosawa found that Hell is both the inevitable result of human behavior and the appropriate visualization of one's own bitterness and disappointment."
legacy
Reputation among directors
A large number of well-known directors were inspired and revered by Kurosawa. The directors listed below represent a selection and can be roughly divided into four categories: 1. Those who, like Kurosawa himself, became famous in the 1950s and 1960s, 2. The so-called New Hollywood directors, around the turn of the 1970s , 3rd other Asian directors and 4th modern directors.
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman called his own film The Virgin Spring a “lousy imitation of Kurosawa” and added, “At that time, my admiration for Japanese cinema was at its peak. I was almost a samurai myself. ”In Italy, Federico Fellini declared Kurosawa the“ best example of what a filmmaker should be. ”In France in 1965, Roman Polanski counted the Japanese artist among his three favorite directors, along with Fellini and Orson Welles , and named The Seven Samurai , The Castle in the Cobweb Forest and The Hidden Fortress as reference stations to understand his euphoria. Film pioneer Bernardo Bertolucci said in an interview about him: “Kurosawa's films are the things that have inspired me. They pulled me in the desire inside to be even a director. "The New German film director Werner Herzog listed Kurosawa among his biggest idols:" When I think about my favorite directors, come to me Griffith , Buñuel , Kurosawa and Eistenstein , alone Ivan the Terrible , in mind. ”When asked to list his favorite directors, Russian film pioneer Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky named Kurosava as the best and The Seven Samurai as one of his ten favorite films. For US film visionary Stanley Kubrick , Kurosawa was “one of the greatest film directors of all time.” Kubrick's closest friend Anthony Frewin added: “I can't remember a director he talked about so often and so admiringly. If Stanley were on a desert island and could only take a limited number of films with him, I would bet on Battle for Algiers , Danton , Rashomon , The Seven Samurai and The Castle in the Cobweb Forest . "
Kurosawa's New Hollywood admirers include Robert Altman , Francis Ford Coppola , Steven Spielberg , Martin Scorsese , George Lucas, and John Milius . In his early years as a television producer, Robert Altman shared the anecdote that at Rashomon he was so intrigued by the way Kurosawa could take various beautiful shots with the camera pointed straight at the sun - Rashomon is believed to be the first to do so successfully - that he tried it out the next day for his own television show, albeit unsuccessfully. Coppola said of Kurosawa, “One of the things that sets him apart from any other director is that he didn't just create one, two or three masterpieces. Well, he created eight masterpieces. ”Both Spielberg and Scorsese praised Kurosawa as their teacher and great role model. Scorsese called him " Sensei ", the Japanese form of address for a teacher. Spielberg explained on the subject: “I learned more from him than from almost anyone else in the film business,” while Scorsese commented, “Let me put it simply: Akira Kurosawa was my master and […] the master of so many other directors the whole world."
As the first world-famous film director from Asia , Akira Kurosawa served as an inspiration for many other Asian automakers . About Rashomon , Satyajit Ray , the most famous Indian director, said: “The effect the film had on me after I saw it for the first time in Calcutta in 1952 was electrifying. I saw it three times over the next three days, each time wondering if there was a movie like this in the world that showed such persistent evidence of a director's total control on set. ”Other well-known Asian admirers are this Japanese anime director Hayao Miyazaki , actor and director Takeshi Kitano , Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo, and mainland China director Zhang Yimou , who described Kurosawa as "the quintessential Asian film".
Even today, Kurosawa's productions continue to inspire filmmakers around the world. Alexander Payne spent the first few years of his career watching and scrutinizing Kurosawa films, especially Ikiru - Once Really Live . Guillermo del Toro called Kurosawa one of his "fundamental masters" and listed The Castle in the Spider Web Forest , Between Heaven and Hell and Ran among what he saw as the best films of all time. Kathryn Bigelow praised Kurosawa as one of the "most influential directors" who manages to create the most emotionally profound characters. JJ Abrams said he was largely inspired by Kurosawa when he directed the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Alejandro González Iñárritu told in an interview how he was emotionally taken away by Ikiru - Once Really Living at 19 , and praised Kurosawa as one of the “first storytelling geniuses who could turn the conventional narrative of films on its head . ” Spike Lee published a list of 87 films every movie fanatic should see, including three Kurosawa films: Rashomon , Yojimbo, and Ran . Wes Anderson's film Isle of Dogs - Atari's Journey was heavily inspired by Kurosawa and his extravagant film techniques.
Posthumous scripts
After Kurosawa's death, some of his unrealized scripts were filmed. After the Rain , shot by Takashi Koizumi, was released in 1999 as a posthumous thanksgiving to the director, with whom Koizumi had a close friendship. The Sea Comes from Kei Kumai celebrated its premiere in 2002. A script that was written in the time of the Yonki no kai and never realized for the purpose of Dodeskaden was realized in 2000 by the only living member Kon Ichikawa under the name Dora-heita . In 2017, Huayi Brothers announced the film adaptation of Kurosawa's adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's story The Mask of the Red Death . The end product should appear internationally in 2020. Patrick Frater, editor of the magazine Variety , wrote in Selbiger in 2017 that two more discarded scripts were found in Toho's archives that are still being filmed. Shooting of the first film started in 2018 under the name of the project Silvering Spear .
Kurosawa Production Company
In September 2011 it was reported that the rights to all Akira Kurosawa remakes and / or film adaptations of his unrealized scripts had been transferred to the Los Angeles- based company Splendent. Splendent's press secretary stated that his aim was to help other directors introduce a new generation of viewers to these "unforgettable stories".
Kurosawa Production Co. , founded in 1959, remains in control of all projects made in Akira Kurosawa's name. The director's son, Hisao Kurosawa, is the current head of the company and its US-based subsidiary Kurosawa Enterprises . To date, the rights to Kurosawa have been solely in the hands of Kurosawa Production Company and the film studios he has worked under, mostly Toho . These rights were finally transferred to the Akira Kurosawa 100 project and are currently with Splendent. Kurosawa Production Co. works closely with the Akira Kurosawa Foundation , founded in 2003. The organization holds an annual short film competition and regulates Kurosawa-based projects, such as the construction of a memorial museum, which is to be realized sometime after 2020.
Documentaries about Kurosawa
A large number of feature-length and short-length documentaries dealt with the life and work of Akira Kurosawa. AK was released in 1985 while the director was still alive. French documentary filmmaker Chris Marker directed it . Even if the documentary appeared while working on Ran , he is less concerned with the making of the film than with Kurosawa's personality. Marker named this film later as the reason for his obsession with the culture of Japan and the inspiration for his most famous film Sans Soleil - Invisible sun . The film first screened at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival . A small selection of other critically acclaimed documentaries about Akira Kurosawa are:
- Kurosawa: The Last Emperor (Alex Cox, 1999)
- A message from Akira Kurosawa
- Kurosawa
- Akira Kurosawa: It's nice to create something (Toho Masterworks, 2002)
- Akira Kurosawa: The Epic and the Intimate (2010)
- Kurosawa's way
Filmography
- 1943: Judo Saga - The Legend of the Great Judo (Sugata Sanshirō)
- 1944: Most Beautiful (Ichiban Utsukushiku)
- 1945: Sugata Sanshiro sequel (Zoku Sugata Sanshirō)
- 1945: The men who stepped on the tiger's tail (Tora no O o Fumu Otoko-tachi)
- 1946: No Regrets for My Youth (Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi)
- 1947: A Wonderful Sunday (Subarashiki Nichiyobi)
- 1948: Angel of the Lost (Yoidore Tenshi)
- 1949: The silent duel (Shizukanaru Ketto)
- 1949: A Stray Dog (Nora Inu)
- 1950: Scandal (Sukyandaru)
- 1950: Rashomon - The Pleasure Grove (Rashōmon)
- 1951: The Idiot (Hakuchi)
- 1952: Really living once (Ikiru)
- 1954: The Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai)
- 1955: Balance of a life / Alternative title: A life in fear (Ikimono no Kiroku)
- 1957: The castle in the cobweb forest (Kumonosu-jō)
- 1957: night asylum (Donzoko)
- 1958: The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi Toride no San-Akunin)
- 1960: The Bad Sleep Well (Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru)
- 1961: Yojimbo - The Bodyguard (Yōjimbō)
- 1962: Sanjuro (Tsubaki Sanjūrō)
- 1963: Between Heaven and Hell (Tengoku to Jigoku)
- 1965: Rotbart (Akahige)
- 1970: Dodeskaden - people on the sidelines (Dodeskaden)
- 1975: Uzala, the Kyrgyz (Dersu Uzala)
- 1980: Kagemusha - The Warrior's Shadow (Kagemusha)
- 1985: Ran (Ran)
- 1990: Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (Yume)
- 1991: Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no Rapusodī)
- 1993: Madadayo (Mādadayo)
Scripts
- 1999: After the Rain (Ame agaru) - Director: Takashi Koizumi
- 2002: The Sea is Coming (Umi wa miteita) - Director: Kei Kumai
Further awards
| space | Movie |
|---|---|
| 19th | The seven samurai |
| 82 | Between heaven and hell |
| 112 | Ikiru - really living once |
| 124 | Rashomon - The Pleasure Grove |
| 126 | Yojimbo - The bodyguard |
| 135 | Ran |
| 250 | The castle in the cobweb forest |
In 1965 Kurosawa was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
In 1976 he was honored as a person with special cultural merits , in 1985 with the Order of Culture .
On February 18, 2011, an asteroid was named after Akira Kurosawa: (254749) Kurosawa .
In June 2013, Kurosawa's film Once Really was listed in the Internet Movie Database 's Top 250 . Kurosawa had ten other directors and more than four films in the top 250 of the IMDb. This makes him one of the IMDb's most highly rated directors. In June 2015, Das Schloss im Spinnwebwald was added, followed a little later between Heaven and Hell and Uzala, the Kyrgyzstan . He holds the record of eight films in the Top 250 IMDb list along with Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick . Other of his films, including The Hidden Fortress , Red Beard , Sanjuro , The Warrior's Sleep Well, and Kagemusha - The Warrior's Shadow , all have high ratings on the platform and may be included in the list in the future.
Fonts
- Akira Kurosawa: Something like an autobiography . Diogenes, Zurich 1991.
literature
- Peter W. Jansen , Wolfram Schütte (Ed.): Akira Kurosawa . Hanser, Munich 1988.
- Donald Richie , with additional material by Joan Mellen: The Films of Akira Kurosawa . 3. Edition. University of California Press, Berkeley 1999, ISBN 0-520-22037-4 .
- Stuart Galbraith IV: The Emperor and the Wolf. The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshirō Mifune . Faber and Faber, London 2001, ISBN 0-571-20452-X .
- Nicola Glaubitz, Andreas Käuser, Hyunseon Lee (eds.): Akira Kurosawa and his time . Transcript, Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 3-89942-341-0 .
- Thomas Koebner : Akira Kurosawa. In the S. (Ed.): Film directors. Biographies, descriptions of works, filmographies. 3rd, updated and expanded edition. Reclam, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-15-010662-4 , pp. 403-411 [with references].
- Marcus Stiglegger : Kurosawa. The aesthetics of the long farewell . Edition Text + Criticism, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-86916-335-2 .
- Gerhard Schneider, Peter Bär, Andreas Hamburger, Karin Nitzschmann, Timo Storck (Eds.): Akira Kurosawa. The confrontation of the own with the foreign. (= In dialogue. Psychoanalysis and film theory. Volume 14). Psychosocial, Giessen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8379-2715-3 .
Web links
- Akira Kurosawa in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Literature by and about Akira Kurosawa in the catalog of the German National Library
- Akira Kurosawa Foundation (English / Japanese)
- Dan Harper: Akira Kurosawa at www.sensesofcinema.com (English)
- Kurosawa. The Aesthetics of the Long Farewell Annotated filmography and bibliography by Marcus Stiglegger
- Klaus Kreimeier : Fleeing Life, Extreme Death - Akira Kurosawa's Films. in Filmzentrale (courtesy of Carl Hanser Verlag )
- The warrior and the camera . Essay about Akira Kurosawa at www.japankino.de
- David Walsh : The Work of Akira Kurosawas
- Akira Kurosawa News and Information (English)
- The cinematic work at trigon-film (German)
Individual evidence
- ↑ unless otherwise stated: Richie : 1998, pp. 10-13.
- ↑ Akira Kurosawa: Something like an autobiography, Diogenes, 1991, ISBN 3-257-21993-8 , p. 67.
- ↑ Died: Akira Kurosawa. September 14, 1998. (spiegel.de)
- ↑ The grave of Akira Kurosawa. (knerger.de)
- ↑ Quoting Stephen Prince: Film Commentary (2006); check it out on The Criterion Collection DVD Bonus Feature: Seven Samurai: Origins and Influences (2006)
- ↑ Quote from Akira Kurosawa: Interview (1972); see the republication of the Yoshi Shirai interview (2008)
- ↑ The Top 250 of the IMDb (as of April 26, 2020)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kurosawa, Akira |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | 黒 澤 明 (Japanese) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Japanese director |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 23, 1910 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Ōmori , Ebara , Tokyo , Japan |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 6, 1998 |
| Place of death | Setagaya , Tokyo , Japan |