INTOTHEIBFILM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Akira Kurosawa:
Son of an army officer, Akira Kurosawa studied art before gravitating to film as a means to support himself. His series of films cut across genres from crime thrillers to period dramas.

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Frequently used the  wipe effect  to fade from one scene to another, a cinematic effect that was popularized by the Star Wars Trilogy. Aside from being a filmmaker. he also had training as a painter, and he usually storyboarded his films as a full scale-painting and uses weather to heighten mood of a specific scene (Brooke , Mini Biography).

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Over the decades, Akira Kurosawa has always maintained his own directing style and approach of a story and characters, for this he got acclaimed mostly throughout his early career. He has his own personal style by focusing on the human traits of the characters, such as their emotions and frailties, as well as on the picturesque landscapes and settings, beautiful visual imagery and could be dark and gloomy  depending on its films theme. 
         
He also has creative control over his work from the script and the actual shooting of the film to the editing. His role encompasses the coaching of the actors, the cinematography, the sound recording, the art direction, the music, the editing and dubbing, and the sound mixing. He does not separate those elements as independent, but sees them as melting together under the heading of direction. These may be small components of facts that define Akira Kurosawa, but after viewing his films, one would see his perfectionist tendencies in each scene.

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There is a substantial amount of literature dedicated to Kurosawa’s career. One of the early writings by a Western critic on Kurosawa is Noël Burch’s To the distant observer (1979). Burch, whilst describing Japanese cinema as presentational (meaning that there is no attempt to disguise the mechanics of the art, in opposition to representational), distinguishes Kurosawa’s filmmaking style from the typical mode of Japanese cinema by claiming that Kurosawa created a personal representational cinema based on the Western tradition of filmmaking. Burch’s reasoning here is that a Kurosawa cinematic text is merely a Western film with a Japanese façade.

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At the level of the auteur’s personal vision, Kurosawa was feted in the 1950s and 1960s as one of the great auteurs of universal and enduring significance because of the humanist and humanitarian themes that pervade his work: a compassion for individual suffering, a quest for justice through personal rebellion against corrupt social structures, a concern for the existential crises of ‘man’ in the face of death, social pressure, and the apparent meaninglessness of life’s struggle.

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These themes, influences and inspirations are not denied by Kurosawa himself, though he insisted that he did not seek to directly copy the directorial style of any director, whether it be John Ford or Sergei Eisenstein (another filmmaker whose work Kurosawa himself cites in his Something Like an Autobiography  as having had a significant impact on him as a young cinephile). But while he had no problem admitting that Western film and art were a significant part of his own cultural development, he insisted that his films were made for Japanese audiences first and foremost, and that he felt he was the most Japanese of Japanese filmmakers. 

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Kurosawa’s films can be thought of as translations, not only of Western forms of filmmaking and storytelling, but also of competing Japanese cultural practices and traditions. Central to Kurosawa’s concerns is the issue of Japanese identity per se, itself a major preoccupation of the Japanese since at least the Meiji restoration of the mid 19th century, which set Japan on a course of active modernisation of its social, political, industrial and economic institutions and practices. The fate of Japanese identity amidst this ‘Western’ style modernisation and industrialisation was of widespread and ongoing concern in Japan right up to the Second World War. 

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If, as so many of his critics and admirers in the West asserted in the 1960s, Kurosawa’s is one of the great humanist film projects, I would say that what is truly significant about its humanism is the way his films engage in a powerful questioning of the problematic but unavoidable humanist assumption that deep down we all share basic traits, social needs and values. The danger that the different, the ‘other’, the ‘untranslatable’ will be annihilated as a consequence of this assumption of sameness is never forgotten in Kurosawa’s films. This is why, as Gilles Deleuze has argued, Kurosawa’s cinema is above all a cinema of the question, of questioning, an action cinema certainly, but a cinema of action in question.

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