Table Of ContentAkira Kurosawa
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Akira Kurosawa
Peter Wild
reaktion books
For Martha Wild, the best proofreader in the world
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33
Great Sutton Street
ec1v 0dx, uk
London
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
2014
First published
2014
Copyright © Peter Wild
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78023 343 7
Contents
Introduction 7
1910 1942:
1 – Early Years 11
2 1943 1947:
– Early Works 24
1947 1949:
3 – Modern Ills 46
1950:
4 World Cinema 63
1951 1954:
5 – Success 81
1955 1957:
6 – Darkness and Disappointment 96
1958 1960:
7 – Defying Convention 113
1961 1963:
8 – No Rest 123
1964 1973:
9 – Endings 138
1975 1985:
10 – Majestic Pageantry 154
1986 1998:
11 – Echoes 173
References 191
Select Bibliography 205
Acknowledgements 207
Kurosawa’s achievements remain unparalleled.
Introduction
Akira Kurosawa’s legacy continues to assert itself. Since his death
1998 88
in at the age of , there have been over a dozen remakes and
reinterpretations of his films, ranging from animated reimaginings
like A Bug’s Lifeand Hoodwinked!, which took Seven Samuraiand
Rashomonas their respective inspirations, to actual remakes such
as At the Gate of the Ghostand The Last Princess, the former revisiting
Rashomon, the latter another take on The Hidden Fortress. And
that’s only the films that have surfaced. Martin Scorsese, the
legendary director of films including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull,
Goodfellas, Gangs of New Yorkand The Departed, and a notable
and highly vocal fan of Kurosawa himself, continues to kick
around the idea of a remake of High and Low, probably still the
least-known film of Kurosawa’s golden age. To this day, his films
continue to be critically lauded; Seven Samurai, for instance, is
the highest reviewed movie at review aggregation website Rotten
Tomatoes, regularly appearing in the upper echelons of Sight &
Soundmagazine’s critic polls and ranking number one on Empire
100
magazine’s list of the best films of world cinema. However
you measure the critical acceptance of a body of work, Kurosawa’s
achievements remain unparalleled.
Working his way up through a studio system that allowed
him to gain ‘a thorough mastery of every field necessary in the
production of a film’, and surrounded for most of his films by
a band of regular collaborators, Kurosawa was a director with
7
a keen vision, straining at both the limits of storytelling and
1
also the limits of what was technically possible. His technical
innovations – using three cameras to shoot a scene, employing
telephoto lenses, filming action scenes in slow motion – are all
widely considered to have been tremendously influential. Certainly
both Sam Peckinpah, and Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn, were
indebted to Kurosawa when they came to create The Wild Bunch
and Bonnie and Clyderespectively. You could even argue that the
1962
spume of blood with which Kurosawa’s film Sanjuroclimaxed
can be seen in the grotesque and comic carnival that is Quentin
Tarantino’s Django Unchained.
But there is more to Akira Kurosawa than his being simply a
progenitor of cinematic violence. He is as famous for his profoundly
1952
humanist works, such as his film Ikiru, as he is for his awe-
inspiring visual style, best seen in two of his later works, Kagemusha
1980 1985
( ) and, particularly, Ran( ). His contrapuntal pairing of
1949
visuals and sound, such as that seen in his film Stray Dog,
and his close collaborations with composers like Masaru Sato,
1961
whose work on Yojimbo( ) was taken up by Ennio Morricone
on Sergio Leone’s infamous remake A Fistful of Dollars, emphasized
the importance of music in film in a way that had not been done
before – and in a way that continues to influence generations of
film directors.
As a young man, Kurosawa had flirted with the idea of
becoming a painter and his painterly eye can be seen framing
scenes that remain a marvel to this day. One thinks of the way in
which Toshiro Mifune’s jaded ronin views the action from a seat
high above the street in Yojimbo, the way in which a vast array of
characters are introduced during the opening of The Bad Sleep Well
(a masterclass in film-making that is reputed to have influenced the
opening of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather), the tumultuous
scenes filmed upon the stone steps at the opening of The Hidden
Fortress(themselves influenced by Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship
8
