Initial Thoughts on Kurosawa

I remember first hearing the name Akira Kurosawa when I was very young and I bought a special edition of Time Magazine which listed the 50 greatest directors of all time. I had just become fascinated with film and learning what a director was so I really wanted this magazine to further my education. Kurosawa interested me right away after reading about how he influenced so many famous films of the west. I wonder how many "Star Wars" fans there were who had to own a copy of Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress" because two of its characters were the main inspiration for C3P0 and R2D2. Then of course there are the samurai films which were Americanized into now classic westerns such as "The Magnificent Seven" (Seven Samurai) and "A Fistful of Dollars" (Yojimbo).

Kurosawa's impact on western cinema was probably greater than it was in his own country. I just found out recently that Kurosawa's films were often looked down upon as popular entertainment and were never taken seriously in Japan. Being a popular filmmaker, that being someone who makes films for a mass audience usually becomes a hindrance if you want to be taken seriously. You could say North Americans were the ones to regard Kurosawa as an artist first the same way the Europeans were the first ones to really regard Hitchcock and Welles the same way. Perhaps it takes an outside party to fully realize a popular artist's worth.

Perhaps it was the heavy influence American films had on Kurosawa's work that soured him with Japanese critics. Like Welles, Kurosawa was a student of John Ford which might account for his impeccable composition and poetic imagery. Like Ford who very often told the history of America through his westerns, Kurosawa would attempt to the same thing for Japan with his Samurai sagas. His historical dramas such as "The Seven Samurai", "Throne of Blood", and "Yojimbo" are often sited to be his most famous films, and even though I think they are all great, they somewhat overshadow his films which are set in modern times. After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for "Rashomon", Kurosawa even said he wished he would've won it for a modern Japanese story. Films such as "Ikiru" (Which I confess I haven't seen), "The Bad Sleep Well", "High and Low" and a personal favorite of mine "I Live in Fear" deal with more complex issues that Japan was going through at the time. Kurosawa was a very contemporary filmmaker and his ability to tackle large scale issues in an intimate setting was something very difficult to accomplish, perhaps Spielberg is the closest one we have today who could even attempt to do that.

I get a very satisfying feeling when I watch a Kurosawa film, he was a man who understood drama and knew how to pull the audience in. When I think of the other important filmmakers from Japan such as Mizoguchi and Ozu I am in awe at how different each of their work is. I don't think they ever tried to copy eachother and each had their own different style. Ozu has been called the most Japanese of Japanese filmmakers, and in contrast Kurosawa could probably be called the least Japanese, even though his heart and his stories remained centered on Japanese lifestyle. Kurosawa probably could've gone off to Hollywood if he wanted to, but he stayed in Japan but in the world of cinema he is a national treasure.