Six decades separate Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019). Yet each film sent shockwaves through Hollywood in demonstrating that the world's self-proclaimed screen capital didn't and still doesn't have the monopoly on cinematic innovation and ingenuity. Bong's furious Oscar-winning satire seems set to introduce a new generation to subtitled cinema. But Kurosawa's achievement was even more momentous, as his victory at the Venice Film Festival alerted Western audiences to the rich tradition of Japanese cinema. Consequently, he is the natural selection for Cinema Paradiso's latest Instant Expert's Guide.
While he continues to be feted globally as one of cinema's most influential talents, Akira Kurosawa is currently considered an old-fashioned elitist in his native Japan. Part of the problem lies in the fact that his visual style owes more to Western art and classical film-makers from Europe and the United States than it does to such traditional theatrical forms as Kabuki and Noh. Moreover, Kurosawa often took his cues from Shakespeare, Russian literature and American hard-boiled pulp, while his fascination with the nation's samurai past struck the angry young men of 1960s Japanese cinema as a throwback to the reactionary tendencies of the detested militarist era. Whether Nagisa Oshima and his ilk liked it or not, however, Kurosawa's breakthrough with Rashomon had transformed world cinema by introducing Western artists and audiences alike to such peers as Mikio Naruse, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, whose work now awaits (re) discovery by Cinema Paradiso users.
Chosen From Five Hundred
The youngest of eight, Akira Kurosawa was born on 23 March 1910 in Oimachi in the Omori district of Tokyo. Father Isamu was the director of a secondary school and hailed from an old samurai family, while his wife, Shima, came from Osaka merchant stock. Something of a slow starter, Akira revealed a talent for drawing and a love of baseball that was matched only by the growing interest in cinema that was encouraged by his progressive father. Older brother Heigo also played a key role in Akira's development. most notably when he forced the 13 year-old to survey the aftermath of the Great Kanto earthquake that claimed over 140,000 lives in 1923.
Akira was crestfallen when Heigo left home and dismayed his parents by moving in with a woman in a bohemian part of the capital. He landed a job as a benshi at a silent movie theatre, where he provided a running commentary on the action for audiences still coming to terms with the conventions of narrative cinema. Akira regularly snuck out to watch Heigo perform and, eventually, left home to move in with his brother and pursue his own ambitions as a painter. Drawn to left-wing politics, he joined the Proletarian Artists' League and began exhibiting his work. But he sold few pictures and, with his parents unable to afford his materials after falling on hard times during the Depression, Akira started searching for a new career. However, he was forced to return home after Heigo committed suicide in 1933 after benshis were replaced by the newfangled talking pictures.
After two years of frustration, Kurosawa saw an advertisement for assistant directors at Photo Chemical Laboratories, the newly formed company that would gradually evolve into the legendary Toho studio. As the Japanese film industry favoured an apprenticeship system, this was the only way to become a director and Kurosawa was one of the seven candidates chosen from over 500 applications to submit an essay on the flaws with Japanese cinema and the best ways to resolve them. Studio stalwart Kajiro Yamamoto was hugely impressed with Kurosawa's ideas and took him under his wing, as he learned every aspect of film-making from scriptwriting. lighting and editing to production design, location scouting and dialogue dubbing. He also served as Yamamoto's assistant on 17 features, several of which starred comedian Kenichi Enomoto, who used the stage name, Enoken.
Moreover, Kurosawa began to write screenplays and even won awards for his work. He also got his first chance to direct when Yamamoto asked him to complete Horse (1941) so that he could start another project. Hoping to make his full debut, Kurosawa asked Toho to acquire the rights to a novel about the origins of judo by Tsuneo Tomita. Much to his delight, the studio agreed and the camera began rolling on Sanshiro Sugata in Yokohama in December 1942.
Set in 1883, the story centres on Susumu Fujita, an aspiring jujitsu student who finds romance and a new purpose on discovering the art of judo. But, while the plot reinforced the wartime government's notions of dedication and martial excellence, the censor accused Kurosawa of showing Anglo-American sympathies and the picture was only passed for exhibition after the intervention of Yasujiro Ozu. Such was its popularity with the public that Kurosawa was forced against his better judgement to make a sequel, Sanshiro Sugata Part II (1945), which joins Fujita in his efforts to establish himself as a judo master.
Apprentice Turned Auteur
Although he was reluctant to make the propaganda film, The Most Beautiful (1944), Kurosawa recognised that it would go some way to patching up his relationship with the censor. But this semi-documentary account of the imposition of quotas on the female workforce at a lens factory proved problematic in its own right, as the cast objected to living in a real factory for the duration of the shoot. Kurosawa was often berated by Yoko Yaguchi, who had been delegated to speak for her fellow actresses. However, their frequent meetings led to the pair falling in love and they remained together until Yoko's death in 1985.
Once again conscious of the need to appease the censor, Kurosawa opted to rework the celebrated Kabuki play, Kanjuncho, as They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail. Opening in 1185, the action centres on a porter (played by Kurosawa's old friend, Enoken) who discovers that the monks he is escorting through a forest are really a defeated warlord and his loyal samurai. Once again, the military took a dim view of Kurosawa's interpretation of the past and he was ordered to rein in the pro-Western sentiments. But, by the time the production wrapped, the war had come to an end and the censor imposed by the occupying American forces banned the picture for promoting an undemocratic feudal ideology and it remained on the prohibited list until 1952.
Grateful to have avoided investigation for promoting pernicious wartime ideals, Kurosawa decided to pander to his new bosses by producing a film that was critical of the defeated regime. Drawing on a clutch of events that had shaken the country in the 1930s, No Regrets For Our Youth (1946) was one of the few Kurosawa narratives with a female protagonist, as academic's daughter Setsuko Hara finds herself being courted by two of father Denjiro Okochi's most promising students: the malleably moderate Akitake Kono and the committedly radical, Susumu Fujita. Hara would later become Ozu's muse, but she delivers a more pugnacious performance here, as she battles against prejudice and division.
Despite not having scored a major box-office success, Kurosawa was slowly starting to attract critical attention, as he edged towards an individual style. He made frequent use of wipes between scenes and revealed the influence of directors like John Ford and Jean Renoir in his positioning and movement of the camera. The influence of DW Griffith, FW Murnau and Frank Capra was also readily evident on One Wonderful Sunday (1947), which follows Chieko Nakakita and Isao Numasaki as they attempt to have fun on just 35 yen during a day out in Tokyo. Exploring the impact of the Allied occupation and the black market on postwar life, this underdog story broached several themes to which Kurosawa would return throughout his career. But a more significant occurrence in 1947 was his first meeting with actor Toshiro Mifune, who had been cast in a minor role in Snow Trail, an outdoor adventure that Kurosawa had scripted for director Senkichi Taniguchi. Over the next two decades, Mifune would appear in 15 Kurosawa pictures, as they became the Japanese equivalent of John Ford and John Wayne.
They first collaborated on Drunken Angel (1948), a noirish slice of social realism, in which Mifune plays a combustible yakuza in a slum district of Tokyo, who is diagnosed with tuberculosis by alcoholic doctor Takashi Shimura. As they edge towards an uneasy understanding, Mifune's ex-boss, Reisaburo Yamamoto, is released from prison and vows to reclaim his status as the leader of the gang. Although Mifune's firebrand performance caught the imagination of audiences, the critics hailed Kurosawa's stylistic coming of age, as he explored the perennial master-disciple theme for the first time and experimented with the kind of audiovisual counterpoints that would become his trademark. He was awarded the prestigious Kinema Junpo award for the Japanese film of the year.
Buoyed by his success, Kurosawa joined forces with fellow directors Kajiro Yamamoto, Mikio Naruse and Senkichi Taniguchi to form the Film Art Association. He launched the new production company with The Silent Duel (1949), an adaptation of a play by Kazuo Kikuta that cast Mifune against type as an army doctor who becomes accidentally infected with syphilis after cutting himself during an operation. Appalled by the reckless manner in which the man who had contaminated him behaves, Mifune selflessly breaks up with fiancée Miki Samjo in order to spare her the shame and pain of his almost certainly fatal condition.
Although the picture performed well at the box office, it was dismissed by many critics as a potboiler. However, Kurosawa was widely acclaimed for Stray Dog (1949), an uncompromising treatise on Japan's postwar mindset that starred Mifune as a rookie cop who seeks the help of experienced colleague Takashi Shimura when his stolen gun is used in a murder. Scripted in association with Ryuzo Kikushima (who would become a Kurosawa regular, as would cinematographer Asakazu Nakai and composer Fumio Hayasaka), this was a conscious attempt to emulate the noir style of Belgian novelist Georges Simenon. But the use of documentary footage of the war-scarred parts of Tokyo (which had been photographed by Ishiro Honda prior to making his name with Godzilla, 1954) also revealed the influence of neo-realism on Kurosawa's burgeoning style.
He would remain low key for Scandal (1950), which reflected Kurosawa's own experiences at the hands of Japan's newly emerging tabloid press. Mifune was interestingly cast as a painter whose chance holiday meeting with singer Shirley Yamaguchi is turned into a sordid sensation by the editor of Amour magazine and the couple turn to morally compromised lawyer Takashi Shimura to defend their honour in court. Seventy years on, the theme of press intrusion remains keenly relevant. But it was Kurosawa's other 1950 release that was to take world cinema by storm.
Changing the Rules of the Game
On being offered a one-picture deal by the Daiei studio, Kurosawa finally felt able to flex his creative muscles and he teamed with screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto (who would become another trusted collaborator) to turn Ryunosuke Akutagawa's short story, 'In a Grove', into the structurally daring Rashomon (1950). By presenting four conflicting accounts of the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife, Kurosawa demonstrated that the camera could lie and this break with narrative convention enabled film-makers to coax complacent spectators into becoming active participants in the viewing process rather than passive consumers of undemanding entertainment.
Intriguingly, the Japanese press was hardly enamoured of the film and it made only a modest impact at the box office. However, an Italian distributor persuaded Daiei to screen it at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, where it was hailed as a masterpiece after winning the Golden Lion. On the back of its success, RKO sponsored a limited release in the United States, where it would eventually be remade by Martin Ritt as The Outrage (1964), with a stellar cast led by Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson and William Shatner. But, for all its aesthetic significance, Rashomon remains crucial for having opened the window on Asian cinema in all its various forms.
The picture's success had little immediate impact upon Kurosawa, however, as he had already started work on an updating of Fedor Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1951), which relocated the story to postwar Hokkaido to focus on the complex relationships that form between the volatile Toshiro Mifune, his emotionally abused sweetheart, Setsuko Hara, and Masayuki Mori, a psychologically scarred combat veteran who has recently been released from an asylum after being spared execution for war crimes. Kurosawa's first cut ran to 265 minutes, but the Shochiko front office forced him to shed 99 minutes, which have subsequently been lost forever.
Frustrated by the experience, Kurosawa returned to Toho to make one of his most enduringly moving features, Ikiru (1952), which began a run of 12 titles with screenwriter Hideo Oguni. Loosely based on Leo Tolstoy's novella, 'The Death of Ivan Ilych', the action follows jobsworthy civil servant Takashi Shimura, who is so shaken by a diagnosis of terminal stomach cancer that he tries to drink away his sorrows. However, his barroom rendition of 'Life Is Brief' persuades him to devote his remaining time to building a children's playground in a rundown Tokyo neighbourhood. Echoing Ozu in his questioning of the 'salaryman' mentality that had enervated postwar Japan, Kurosawa called upon his fellow countrymen to seize control of their destiny, a sentiment that contributed to the film being withheld from US distribution for eight years.
Despite Ikiru's domestic success, Kurosawa decided against making another film with a contemporary theme and immersed himself and co-writers Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Ogun in the history of the 16th-century Sengoku period. The result was Seven Samurai (1954), which sees the residents of a remote village hire a band of wandering ronin to protect them from the 13 mounted bandits planning an attack. Working with three cameras and making innovative use of telephoto lenses, Kurosawa changed the dramatic focus part-way through the protracted shoot to enable Toshiro Mifune's maverick Kikuchiyo to challenge the authority of Takashi Shimura's honourable, but disillusioned leader, Kambei.
Overcoming health problems, as well as cash flow issues, Kurosawa spent months editing the footage to bring a new dynamism to the jidai-geki or historical genre. In the process, he seized the imagination of such future filmmakers as George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, as well as the makers of Westerns in both Hollywood and Europe, where the film also helped shape the sword-and-sandal epics that were so popular in Italy. Indeed, John Sturges reworked the story as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and sharp-eyed cineastes will also notice the storyline's similarities with that of John Lasseter's Pixar classic, A Bug's Life (1998).
Tragedy struck during the making of Kurosawa's next feature, as composer Fumio Hayasaka died of tuberculosis at the age of 41. The score for I Live in Fear (1954) was completed by Masaru Sato, who would become a key member of the director's creative entourage over the next decade. Tapping into the same Cold War terror of nuclear annihilation that had informed Godzilla, the drama centres on elderly foundry owner Toshiro Mifune's efforts to relocate his family to the relative safety of Brazil. However, they resist and seek to have him certified by a three-man panel that includes doctor Takashi Shimura.
Having experienced the rainstorms caused by weapon testing in the Pacific Ocean, audiences stayed away from a picture that brought back unwelcome memories of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and Kurosawa made only three more pictures with a contemporary setting over the next decade. He returned to the Sengoku era for Throne of Blood, which ingeniously reworks William Shakespeare's Macbeth as a Noh saga that follows the scheming Taketoki (Toshiro Mifune) and his wife, Asaji (Isuzu Yamada), in their bid to usurp power at the Spider's Web Castle. Takashi Shimura co-starred as the Macduff character, but there was no room for him in Kurosawa's adaptation of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths (both 1957), which centred on thief Toshiro Mifune and his fellow tenants at the Edo boarding house run by the elderly Ganjiro Nakamura and his adulterous wife, Isuzu Yamada.
The growing pessimism of Kurosawa's cinema had been noted by the critics and he sought to end the decade on an upswing with The Hidden Fortress (1958), a widescreen comedy-adventure set at a time of civil unrest that sees General Makabe Rokurota (Toshiro Mifune) enlist the help of a couple of opportunistic peasants, Tahei (Minoru Chiaki), and Matashichi (Kamatari Fujiwara), to smuggle Princess Yuki (Misa Uehara), across enemy territory to safety. If you think the plot sounds a little familiar, George Lucas borrowed it for Star Wars (1977), although he turned the shifty gold-diggers into those loveable droids, C-3PO and R2-D2.
Peaks and Troughs
At the start of the 1960s, Kurosawa was one of the most respected directors in the world. The formation of the Kurosawa Production Company gave him increased creative freedom under the Toho umbrella and he exploited this to hire writer nephew Mike Inoue to concoct the 1960 noir, The Bad Sleep Well, from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Anticipating Aki Kaurismäki's Hamlet Goes Business (1987), the story moves the action from the Danish court at Elsinore into a corporate boardroom, as Toshiro Mifune assumes a disguise in order to climb the ladder at the Public Corporation and avenge himself on president Masayuki Mori and administrative officer Takashi Shimura, whose corrupt machinations had driven his father to suicide.
Kurosawa continued the theme of playing factions off against each other in Yojimbo (1961), which harked back to the dwindling days of the Tokugawa shogunate towards the end of the 19th-century Edo period to show how itinerant samurai, KuwabatakeSanjuro (Toshiro Mifune), arrives in a divided town and proceeds to exploit the fears of both sides to suit his own ends. Once again, Takashi Shimura featured among the ensemble as a sake brewer with ambitions to become mayor. But Mifune steals the show with a blend of cynical cunning and stylised displays of swordsmanship that contrasts with Clint Eastwood's taciturn anti-heroics as the Man With No Name in Sergio Leone's unauthorised Spaghetti Western remake, A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
Mifune also found himself taking the title role in Sanjuro (1962) which Kurosawa had originally scripted from a story by Shugoro Yamamoto for Hiromichi Horikawa to direct. Such had been the success of Yojimbo, however, that the Toho bosses insisted on Kurosawa calling the shots on a largely comic caper that sees Sanjuro (whose name translates as 'Thirty Years Old') exposing the flaws of a town's corrupt administration while also trying to turn a ragtag band of hopefuls into ruthless warriors.
The mood is markedly more sombre in High and Low (1963), which was adapted from King's Ransom, an entry in the 87th Precinct series penned by the American writer Evan Hunter under his pulp alias, Ed McBain. The initial focus falls on industrialist Toshiro Mifune, as he ponders how to proceed after his chauffeur's son is mistakenly kidnapped in place of his heir. However, the second half is more akin to a police procedural, as chief Takashi Shimura assigns the case to an unconventional detective, Tatsuya Nakadai.
A short story by Shugoro Yamamoto would also provide the impetus for Kurosawa's next feature, Red Beard (1965), which proved to be his last outing in black and white. However, this melodrama set in a 19th-century rural clinic also bears the influence of Fedor Dostoevsky's novel, Humiliated and Insulted, as it centres on the relationship between gruffly compassionate doctor Toshiro Mifune and his new intern, Yuzo Kayama. As the latter had become popular with younger audiences through a string of musical comedies, Kurosawa found himself having to appeal to a new constituency. But the extended two-year shooting schedule placed undue strain on the director's relationship with Mifune and they never worked together again.
They went out on a high, as Red Beard became one of Kurosawa's biggest commercial successes. It also earned him a third and final Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film. But, with his contract with Toho about to expire, and television changing the expectations of Japanese movie-goers, Kurosawa decided to spread his wings and try his luck in Hollywood. Unfortunately, he spoke no English and delays with translating the screenplay led to Runaway Train missing its start date in the autumn of 1966 and it was abandoned altogether after a lack of snow hampered the production the following winter. Eventually, Russian Andrei Konchalovsky would complete the picture in 1985, with Kurosawa having to settle for a secondary scripting credit.
Undaunted, Kurosawa moved on to 20th Century-Fox to team with David Lean on the Pearl Harbor blockbuster, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). The plan was for Lean to handle the American perspective, while Kurosawa and screenwriters Ryuzo Kikushima and Hideo Oguni examined the Japanese battle plan. However, things got off to a bad start when Lean was replaced by Richard Fleischer. Studio chief Darry F. Zanuck then slashed the budget and informed Kurosawa that his four-hour scenario would have to be compressed into 90 minutes. This decision provoked an unresolvable rift with Kikushima. But the situation deteriorated further during the shoot when the American crew became so confused by Kurosawa's filming methods that he was replaced after just three weeks by Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda. Moreover, Fox subjected Kurosawa to a series of medical tests that proved so humiliating that he insisted on having his name removed from the final credits.
Determined to support their colleague, Keisuke Kinoshita, Masaki Kobayashi and Kon Ichikawa invited Kurosawa to join them in a production company named the Club of the Four Knights. The idea was for each member to make a film with the backing of the others and Kurosawa was slated to adapt Shugoro Yamamoto's novel, Dodeskaden, after plans to make the period saga, Dora-heita, had to be shelved on the grounds of expense. But, while he made a bold transition to colour, Kurosawa struggled to rein in the more melodramatic aspects of Yamamoto's story, which centred on the residents of a Tokyo rubbish dump and Kurosawa was so dismayed by the commercial and critical response that he attempted to take his own life on 22 December 1971.
An Epic Comeback
While some in Japan feared that the 63 year-old Kurosawa might not make another film, devotees in the Soviet Union invited him to realise an ambition he had harboured for some four decades. In 1973, Mosfilm offered Kurosawa the funds to adapt Dersu Uzala, explorer Vladimir Arsenyev's account of his turn-of-the-century encounter with a Goldi fur trapper in the remote Ussuri region of Siberia. Spending a year in the USSR to acclimatise and enduring great physical and mental strain during the 11-month shoot, Kurosawa drew affectingly natural performances out of Yuri Solomin and Maxim Munzuk, as Arsenyev and Uzala, and he was rewarded with the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
The Oscar success prompted George Lucas to contact Kurosawa and offer to produce any project he might have in the pipeline. Bowled over by the screenplay and storyboards for Kagemusha (1980), Lucas persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to co-produce. However, a clash on the first day of shooting resulted in Shintaro Katsu being fired from the dual role of the thief who is hired to pose as a double for a Sengoku period daimyo warlord. By all accounts, Katsu (a major star in Japan after headlining the long-running series about Zatoichi the blind swordsman - several of which are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso) arrived on set with his own camera crew to film the great Kurosawa at work. He was swiftly replaced by Tatsuya Nakadai, a longtime member of the Kurosawa stock company, who was feted worldwide after the picture took the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
Indeed, Nakadai was rewarded with the lead in Ran (1985), a loose reworking of Shakespeare's King Lear that sees ageing daimyo Hidetora Ichimonji (Nakada) disinherit and banish the one son he can trust, Saburo (Daisuke Ryu), before dividing his realm between his graspingly ungrateful siblings, Taro (Akira Terao) and Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu). Despite some critics echoing their contention with Kagemusha that Kurosawa's epic lacked the character depth to match its visual beauty, Ran proved a triumph outside its native Japan, where it was snubbed as the country's official Oscar selection in favour of Shunya Ito's Gray Sunset. This failed to land a nomination for Best Foreign Film, but Emi Wada did take home the statuette for her stunning costume design.
Kurosawa had been widowed during the shoot and five years passed before he returned with Dreams (1990). Steven Spielberg helps cajole Warner Bros into contributing to the budget for this portmanteau of personal visions, which includes special effects provided by George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic company and a cameo performance as Vincent Van Gogh by Martin Scorsese. Yet, despite the Academy bestowing a Lifetime Achievement Award around the time of its release, the film met with a lukewarm reception and Kurosawa's adaptation of Kiyoko Murata's novel, Rhapsody in August (1991), fared little better. Centring on the tales that Sachiko Murase tells her grandchildren about the bombing of Nagasaki and featuring an awkward subplot involving Richard Gere as Murase's Japanese-American nephew, the picture was accused of peddling sentimental humanism and anti-American bias.
Now in his 80s, Kurosawa embarked upon what turned out to be his final feature. Inspired by a collection of autobiographical essays by Hyakken Uchida, Madadayo (1993) stars Tatsuo Matsumura as a German professor who gives up his academic post at the height of the Second World War and emerges only from his hermitic existence in order to celebrate his birthday with his former students. Defiantly positing that Kurosawa was 'not yet' ready for death, this deeply personal project was met with a chorus of disapproval from callously smug critics refusing to indulge an old man at the end of his life.
In fact, Kurosawa lived another six years before succumbing to a stroke on 6 September 1998 at the age of 88. Among the unrealised screenplays he left behind, After the Rain (1999) was directed by Takashi Koizumi and turned on the impact that a married couple have on the residents of a country inn, while 2000 saw Kon Ichikawa revisit the Dora-heita project that had been abandoned in 1970. Rumours abound that films based on Silvering Spear and The Masque of the Black Death are in the works. But, to date the most recent Kurosawa relict to reach the screen is Kei Kumai's The Sea Is Watching (2002), which centres on the relationship between Oshin (Nagiko Tohno), a geisha at a 19th-century brothel, and Fusanosuke (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a fugitive samurai who is confronted with a rival for Oshin's affections when a stranger (Masatoshi Nagase) seeks sanctuary from a thunderstorm.
How many of Kurosawa's filmography have you seen? Find more about other iconic filmmakers in our The Instant Expert's Guide series!
