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“You welcomed us as you would a plague! But when you heard the alarm... 'Oh! Samurai!' You turned to worship us. Fools!”
Toshiro Mifune as Kikuchiyo
— Seven Samurai
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Major Works of Akira Kurosawa
Though it's practically a cliche to say so, Akira Kurosawa is the master of Japanese cinema. His influence has been felt far and wide throughout the world of motion pictures, probably even more so among western filmmakers than within his own country. Without Kurosawa, I doubt I would ever have developed my passion for Japanese movies, and they certainly wouldn't be as accomplished or as fascinating.
One impression that non-enthusiasts generally have about Kurosawa is that he's "that samurai movie guy." While he is best renowned for his masterpieces in the jidai-geki genre (the Japanese term for period dramas), Kurosawa also spent much of his career making gendai-geki, or films set in contemporary times. The majority of his films contained not even a single sword or topknot, encompassing a stunning breadth of productions that ranged from crime thrillers and epic adaptations of western literature to quiet human struggles with personal failures and mortality.
Still, it's undeniable that Kurosawa made his most lasting impact as the all-time greatest samurai movie guy. Between his classics Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, Kurosawa invented the template for the entire modern genre of chambara, the action-packed subset of jidai-geki devoted to samurai and swordplay. Before Kurosawa, Japanese historical films tended to be rather formal and austere, borrowing heavily from theatrical traditions and maintaining a staged feel. A perfect example is Kenji Mizoguchi's acclaimed but soporific 1941 classic The 47 Ronin, which basically consists of a bunch of samurai standing around talking quietly for four hours. The gang of ronin spend all this time carefully plotting a clandestine revenge strike against an evil lord, and when the climactic raid finally comes, all the action happens offscreen! Jidai-geki of this early period were also apt to depict samurai as unassailably noble and virtuous, making for boring protagonists.
Kurosawa changed all that. He brought a modern Western sensibility to historical Eastern drama, influenced by the rough-and-tumble cowboy epics of John Ford, and proved that jidai-geki films could incorporate action and adventure without compromising their artistic and cultural value. Kurosawa dared to humanize his samurai characters, showing the conflict between their honorable bushido code and the corrupt lords they were forced to serve, and often making them vulnerable to their own selfish and immoral impulses. For my money, Kurosawa conclusively demonstrated that the best kind of samurai for a chambara story is the ronin, the masterless samurai who finds himself poor and disgraced, fallen from his high position in the social order. The unforgettable characters portrayed by the great Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai and Yojimbo form the archetypal cinematic ronin: scruffy, ill-mannered, self-assured, as witty as he is deadly, and playing by no one's rules but his own. This new brand of leading man would influence not only a thousand chambara that followed, but also served as the basis for the action-film antihero familiar to American moviegoers in incarnations spanning from Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Samuel L. Jackson.
Because Kurosawa introduced Western elements into the previously "pure" world of Japanese cinema, his peers and critics in his own country often held him in contempt, even as he began to draw acclaim worldwide. Kurosawa's detractors were dismayed by his popularity abroad, unprecedented for a Japanese filmmaker, which they took as evidence that his works were debased and overly Americanized. Kurosawa resented this accusation that dogged him throughout his career, and I can see why he felt that way. I'm no authority on what does or does not constitute authentic Japanese culture, but I can say from my perspective as an American observer that Kurosawa's films feel very foreign indeed. I mean, if it were true that Kurosawa was such a huge Hollywood sell-out, then film geeks like me wouldn't be the only Americans who have ever seen his movies or even know who he is. While his work possesses certain elements that Western audiences can relate to, Kurosawa remains an acquired taste, and most of us aren't willing to put in the effort it takes to appreciate his films.
I first learned about Kurosawa when Siskel & Ebert reviewed Ran upon its 1985 release, when I was in high school. They gave the film two big thumbs up and showed clips of the siege on Hidetora's castle, and I was impressed. This was at a time when I was renting lots of obscure, avant-garde movies, and I ended up renting Ran when I found it at the video store. I was captivated and transformed. Even with the subtitles and the strange stylistic flourishes, I immediately felt that this was one of the best movies I'd ever seen, an important and meaningful work of art. I sought out more of Kurosawa, and as I recall, I rented Rashomon, Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress. I thought Rashomon was pretty good, but the whole thing with the spirit of the murdered guy testifying at the trial through a medium didn't work for me. Yojimbo I did not get at all. And The Hidden Fortress was a major disappointment. I'd heard all about it being a major inspiration for Star Wars, but I couldn't see any tangible connection to Jedi Knights and Darth Vader, and it was just kind of boring. I had loved the vivid use of color in Ran, whereas these three older films were in drab black and white. And it didn't help matters that Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress were compositionally butchered in pan and scan, although I would not have realized it back then. In short, I was disappointed with my explorations into Akira Kurosawa. I concluded that Ran was probably his only great film and lost interest for a number of years.
It was the arrival of DVD that brought me back around. After buying my first DVD player in 1998, I was seeking out good old classic movies that would look awesome in this new digital format, and remembered Ran. The original DVD release of that film had horrible picture quality, but by my standards at the time, it was pretty sweet. I thought about giving Kurosawa's back catalog another try. There was a lot of excitement among DVD geeks over Criterion's release of Seven Samurai. I'd never seen this one, probably too intimidated by its 3-hours-plus length to give it a rental back in the day, but everybody said it was the director's masterpiece. So Seven Samurai became the second Kurosawa DVD I bought, and the most important. Suddenly I got it. Seven Samurai opened my eyes to the Kurosawa classics and compelled me to build a DVD library of them. Ironically, and sadly, my 1998 Kurosawa awakening also marked the year of the director's death. But I had a lot of catching up to do.
Revisiting those three vintage Kurosawas I'd rented as a teenager, now older, wiser and with superior video equipment, I felt as if I was seeing them for the first time. The monochromatic cinematography was now bold and striking. Rashomon was now purely magical. The link between The Hidden Fortress and George Lucas was now more readily apparent. Yojimbo still took some work for me to grasp, but I came to appreciate the calculating shrewdness of Mifune's character in ways that had escaped me before. In short, I gradually learned how to tune in to a Kurosawa film, how to adjust my perceptions and preconceptions about the visual language of cinema to achieve the clearest reception of what this unconventional filmmaker from another land was sending out. Kurosawa makes me want to think differently, and it's an amazing thrill when an artist can achieve that effect.
For a long time, Kurosawa was Japan's only filmmaker with whom I was familiar. More recently, I have broadened my appreciation of Japanese cinema, with a special interest in chambara of the 1960s and '70s. This new learning has served to deepen my appreciation for Kurosawa by giving me a larger context in which to understand his works. For instance, I had come to recognize Kurosawa's preference for extended unbroken takes and long shots instead of using quick cuts and closeups, but I couldn't know whether that was a Kurosawa quirk or a style common to Japanese films in general. Now that I've seen that other noted Japanese directors don't favor long shots over closeups so emphatically, I'm developing a more complete picture of what make Kurosawa uniquely Kurosawa. I've also been surprised to see that other directors are often far more "Western" in style than Kurosawa ever was, despite all the critical uproar over Kurosawa's infatuation with foreign techniques. But this is probably only because most of these other directors are following in the master's footsteps.
Major Works of Akira Kurosawa
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They Who Step On The Tiger's Tail (1945)
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The Hidden Fortress (1958)
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The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
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Rhapsody in August (1991)
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(By "Major Works of Akira Kurosawa," I mean all his films I have seen to date.)
