AKIRA KUROSAWA: A Celebration of a Filmmaking Icon

TOHO

On the 23rd of March 1910, exactly 110 years ago, a great man was born. The youngest of eight children, Akira Kurosawa very quickly found his trajectory in life that would later lead him to embrace the life of a filmmaker. He was introduced to movies by his father who was very fond of Western culture, and additionally he was nurtured and encouraged by his school teacher. His brother Heigo — to whom young Akira looked up to — worked as a translator of silent films and thus exposed him to cinema as an artform. After Heigo’s untimely demise at his own hand, Akira abandoned his ambition to become a painter and made it his mission to become a film director, as though to fulfil his late brother’s own dreams. And fulfil them he did...

Spanning six decades and totalling at thirty directorial efforts, Akira Kurosawa’s filmmaking career is very well known to cineastes across the world. Many film fans are able to rattle off a list of his greatest achievements, like Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne Of Blood or High And Low, with stunning ease and a rapid precision of a British Expeditionary Force fusilier. Some are intimately aware of the nuance of his career, which included various ups and downs, a failed romance with Hollywood and a stunning late resurgence thanks to Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola’s pivotal involvement; one can easily find stacks of reading material on this subject. It is almost axiomatic to consider Akira Kurosawa one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Strangely enough, Kurosawa’s self-evident status of a cinematic deity has developed a side-effect over time: the reason why he was such an important figure and why his movies are celebrated have been somehow taken for granted.

Kurosawa’s style, thematic proclivities, inspirations and intricacies of his craft have been discussed in a multitude of articles, essays, books and documentaries. His work is like the concept of gravity – described in complete analytical detail and known to everyone. However, just as a question regarding the reason why gravity exists is almost never asked or comprehensively answered, it is extremely rare to stumble upon an explanation why Kurosawa is widely seen as one of the most important filmmakers in the history of the medium. Understanding this requires one to assume a much wider, more holistic perspective of his work and its influence upon the world of film.

Two major thematic strands are often pointed to as a connective tissue underpinning many Kurosawa films: the idea of transposing Shakespeare’s works into the Far-Eastern cultural template and saturating his movies with decidedly Western influences drawn from Hollywood. Both were potent signifiers that Kurosawa’s filmmaking sensibilities were situated at the grinding interface between The East and The West. Consequently, his work became a window for Western filmmakers to peer into the exotic universe of Asian cinema. Thus, many drivers of the New Hollywood movement like Scorsese and Coppola, as well as European auteurs like Bertolucci and Bergman, would often cite Kurosawa as a key inspiration that drove them towards a career in filmmaking. But windows work both ways and hence, many of the heavyweights of world cinema would also trace their love of movies to Akira Kurosawa’s direct influence. Abbas Kiarostami, Satyajit Ray and Andrei Tarkovsky are but a few such people to have openly expressed such sentiments.

This is the fundamental reason behind Kurosawa’s god-like stature – he was a linchpin between a number of stylistically distinct cultures of moviemaking. His greatness managed to touch the entire world of cinema and continues to influence its shape and flavour to this day, both directly by having vastly expanded the directorial toolbox and implicitly by guiding and inspiring entire generations of auteurs. Thus, the moniker of ‘Shakespeare Of Cinema’ he has been adorned with was not an unnecessarily grandiose epithet, but an honest acknowledgement of fact.

To celebrate Akira Kurosawa’s tremendous legacy CLAPPER will run a curated retrospective of his works with an aim to underscore the enduring relevance of his immense filmmaking output. While some of the titles are more well-known than others, they are all equally important monuments of Kurosawa’s unparalleled grasp of the medium of cinema.