Akira Kurosawa, The Emperor of the Jidaigeki

“Cinema resembles so many other arts. If cinema has very literary characteristics, it also has theatrical qualities, a philosophical side, attributes of painting and sculpture and musical elements. But cinema is, in the final analysis, cinema.” – Akira Kurosawa

Few filmmakers have had a career so long, so prolific or so acclaimed as Akira Kurosawa. His films influenced an entire generation of filmmakers. His work has become the subject of study at film schools where they have been dissected and digested and reflected upon time and again. With over five decades of movie making to his credit, Akira Kurosawa has more than earned his place alongside the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman and Martin Scorsese.

Born on March 23rd 1910, in Omori, Tokyo, Akira Kurosawa was the youngest of seven children. He began working in the film industry in his mid-twenties as a screenwriter before becoming an assistant director to Kajiro Yamamoto in 1936. His directorial debut was 1943’s Sugata Sanshiro, about a boy learning the meaning of life through judo.

While several of his films, such as Stray Dogs and Ikiru, dealt with issues in contemporary Japan, Kurosawa is best known for his jidaigeki or period films, like Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Ran, that centred around the Sengoku and Edo periods of Japanese history. He was Japan’s most prolific director of jidaigeki films. Dersu Uzala, the film that garnered him an Oscar in 1976, is the only film not in Japanese and was shot outside Japan (Siberia, to be exact).

Cinematic Expression

It is impossible to pinpoint a consistent stylistic treatment to Kurosawa’s films. He developed his own distinctive technique for filming that evolved throughout his film career. Technique and expression was one and the same to him.

Kurosawa had a penchant for using telephoto lenses and often placed his camera farther away from his actors to shoot a scene from a distance. He believed that giving his actors more space would make them give better performances. He often filmed wideangle sequences and also liked using multiple cameras simultaneously, allowing him to shoot a scene from different angles.

Music, as well as sound, was extensively used to drive the narrative; sound was often a more significant component than music to effectively depict a character’s struggle or happiness. His use of sound and music is reminiscent of Kabuki and Noh theatre influences, occasionally sudden or abrupt and cutting through atmospheric silence.

Another Kurosawa trademark was his cinematic use of weather elements to heighten mood. He used heavy rain in the final battle in Seven Samurai, fog in Throne of Blood and high winds in Ran. The effect was a neo-Byronic exercise of having nature reflecting internal turmoil.

Kurosawa was legendary for his meticulous attention to detail in all of his films. Whether it’s the extensive use of lavish period costumes in Ran or the careful spatial relationships in Dreams, he was always in control of the picture. One could go so far to say that he was an absolutely fanatical perfectionist, spending enormous amounts of time and effort to achieve the desired visual effects for a single scene.

In the final climatic scene in Throne of Blood, Kurosawa had used expert archers shooting real arrows at short range, hitting within centimeters of actor Toshiro Mifune’s body. While filming Rashomon, he had rainwater for a scene dyed black with calligraphy ink in order to recreate the visual effect of a heavy rainstorm – and he ended up using the entire local water supply to achieve it. The lack of CGI effects taken for granted by today’s filmmakers would not stop him from trying to capture the exact visual images that he envisions for his scenes. It was this somewhat dictatorial directing style that earned him the nickname “Tenno”, literally meaning “Emperor”.

Kurosawa believed in realism rather than staged reproductions. His films tried to convey the human condition in a stark raw form. Most of his characters were exceptional and were presented with a compassionate realism, but each and every one of them is flawed in a certain way. Self-deception is a recurring theme in many of his films.

Kurosawa’s style stems from the Japanese style of expression. He does not illustrate his ideas through representations of human behaviour, but rather he displays the mirror image of the story to his audience. Kurosawa presents the components that create the story, allowing the viewer to actively participate in learning the lessons. He was once asked about the meaning of a particular scene, to which he simply smiled and said, “Well, if I could answer that, it wouldn’t have been necessary for me to have filmed the scene would it?”

Rashomon

Rashomon is Kurosawa’s 1950 adaptation of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story, In a Grove. This film brought Kurosawa international recognition; Western audiences came to know of him when Rashomon was featured during the Venice Film Festival the following year, in which he received the prestigious Golden Lion award for the film. It is said that Yimou Zhang’s Hero and Edward Zwick’s Courage under Fire paid homage to Rashomon by employing the same storytelling technique.

The story is both surprisingly simple and deceptively complex. At Kyoto’s crumbling Rashomon gate, several people seek shelter from a pelting rainstorm and discuss the recent crime that has shocked the region. One of them had witnessed a bandit murdering a samurai and raping his wife. The unfortunate event is narrated four different times: by the witness, the bandit, the wife and the deceased samurai (through a medium).

Four different versions of “the truth” described same event. All of the narrators in Rashomon tell compelling and believable stories, but, for a variety of reasons, each of them seems unreliable. Each story betrays the teller as they display their own self-deception and self-importance and diminish their own credibility. Critics have hailed Rashomon as a seminal work on the subjectivity of the truth and the self-centred nature of a human being.

The Seven Samurai

Seven Samurai is regarded by many as one of Akira Kurosawa’s greatest achievements. Various organizations and polls on both national and international level have declared Seven Samurai as the best Japanese movie ever made. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, than very few films should feel as flattered as Seven Samurai. From John Sturges’ cowboy adaptation, The Magnificent Seven, to Lewis Milestones’ Ocean’s Eleven to Michael Bay’s Armageddon to Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, Hollywood have been borrowing elements from Seven Samurai since it first came out.

The film takes place in the war-ridden Japan of the seventeenth century, where a village of farmers looks for ways to ward off a band of marauding bandits that threaten to attack the village once harvest time comes. Since they do not know how to fight, they hire seven ronin (masterless samurai) to fight for them. The ronin took up the job offer, not so much for the pay but for their own personal sense of honour and the chance to actually “matter” once more.

Seven Samurai is credited for creating a whole film genre where “social misfits get together to save the day.” Film critic Roger Ebert mentioned in his review of the film that the sequence introducing the leader Kambei (the samurai shaves off his symbolic hairstyle in order to pose as a priest to rescue a girl from a kidnapper) could be the origin of the plot device, now common in action movies, of introducing the main hero when he is involved in something unrelated to the main plot. Other plot devices popularized by the film are the reluctant hero, romance between a local girl and youngest hero, and the nervousness of the common citizenry in times of trouble. Other films may have used those devices before but Seven Samurai was the first to meld them together impressively. Kurosawa’s use of such cinematographic elements as slow motion and panning battle shots helped to create a movie that would influence cinema worldwide.

Ran

Right after filming Dersu Uzala, Kurosawa had the idea of the story of Ran. He was inspired by the Sengoku-era daimyo Mori Motonari, who was famed for having three loyal sons. Kurosawa toyed with the idea what would have happened if his had not been loyal to him. It was only in 1985 later that Kurosawa was able to secure funding for his project. By then the similarities of Ran with Shakespeare’s King Lear became apparent, and it was widely thought that the film was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play.

At its core, Ran is about envy, deception and loss. It follows the fall of Hidetora Ichimonji, an aging warlord who decides to abdicate as ruler in favor of his three sons. Hidetora deluded himself into believing that his sons work together for the betterment of their kingdom, refusing to see the ambition and envy in their hearts. Slowly, his kingdom disintegrates, as each son jockeys for power, murdering their rivals and laying waste to the land. Betrayed by his own sons, Hidetora eventually goes insane after watching his retainers slaughtered and his kingdom crumble. The Ichimonji clan collapses in a culmination of revenge and betrayal as rival warlords move in for the kill.

Literally, Ran means ‘chaos’. Kurosawa magnificently captures that chaos as it slowly builds up in the story and then unleashed it in a maelstrom of betrayal and death. His use of colour and weather effects paints an atmosphere of upheaval, where insanity is the only refuge. Ran is that rare epic picture, at once enormous and intimate, simultaneously melodramatic and nuanced. We can’t help but watch with horrid fascination as the tragedy unfolds and what little redemption that can be is crushed.

While Ran may not be Kurosawa’s last work, it is his last jidaigeki film, so it does feel as though Ran is a culmination of his film career. Kurosawa would make three more films before his death, but none on the scale and scope of Ran, which, full of pity and terror, is an apt and beautiful capstone to the career of perhaps the greatest film director of the twentieth century.

“There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be expressed in a film, and it must be present for that film to be a moving work. When it is very expressed, one experiences a particularly deep emotion while watching that film. I believe that it is this quality that draws people to come and see a film, and that it is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the director to make the film in the first place.”

– Akira Kurosawa

Filmography

• Sanshiro Sugata (1943)
• The Most Beautiful (1944)
• Sanshiro Sugata Part II a.k.a. Judo Saga 2 (1945)
• They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail (1945)
• No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)
• One Wonderful Sunday (1946)
• Drunken Angel (1948)
• The Quiet Duel (1949)
• Stray Dog (1949)
• Scandal (1950)
• Rashomon (1950)
• The Idiot (1951)
• Ikiru a.k.a. To Live (1952)
• Seven Samurai a.k.a. Shichinin no Samurai (1954)
• I Live in Fear a.k.a. Record of a Living Being (1955)
• The Throne of Blood a.k.a. Spider Web Castle (1957)
• The Lower Depths (1957)
• The Hidden Fortress (1958)
• The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
• Yojimbo a.k.a. The Bodyguard (1961)
• Sanjuro (1962)
• High and Low a.k.a. Heaven and Hell (1963)
• Red Beard (1965)
• Dodesukaden (1970)
• Dersu Uzala (1975)
• Kagemusha a.k.a. Shadow Warrior (1980)
• Ran (1985)
• Dreams a.k.a. Konna yume wo mita (1990)
• Rhapsody in August (1991)
• Madadayo (1993)