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"Kurosawa" redirects here. For other uses, see Kurosawa (disambiguation).In this Japanese name, the family name is Kurosawa.

Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa on set

Born23 March 1910Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan

Died6 September 1998 (aged 88)Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan

Occupation director, producer & screenwriter

Spouse(s) Yôko Yaguchi (1921-1985)

Awards wonAcademy Awards

Best Foreign Language Film1951 Rashōmon1975 Dersu UzalaAcademy Honorary Award

1989 Lifetime AchievementBAFTA Awards

Best Direction1980 KagemushaBest Foreign Film1987 Ran

César AwardsBest Foreign Film1981 Kagemusha

Other awardsGolden Lion - Venice Film Festival1951 RashōmonNBR Award for Best Director1951 Rashomon1985 RanGolden Palm - Cannes Film Festival1980 KagemushaAmanda Awards - Best Foreign Feature Film1986 Ran

Akira Kurosawa (Kyūjitai: 黒澤 明, Shinjitai: 黒沢 明 Kurosawa Akira?, 23 March 1910 – 6 September 1998) was a prominent Japanese filmmaker, producer, screenwriter and editor. His first credited film as director, (Sanshiro Sugata), was released in 1943, his last as director, (Madadayo), in 1993. His many awards include the Légion d'honneur and an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Contents

1 Life 2 Early career 3 Directorial approach 4 Influences 5 Influence 6 Collaboration 7 Later films 8 Awards 9 Filmography 10 See also 11 Notes 12 Further reading 13 External links

[edit] Life

Akira Kurosawa was born to Isamu and Shima Kurosawa on 23 March 1910. He was the youngest of eight children born to the Kurosawas in a suburb of Tokyo. Shima Kurosawa was forty years old at the time of Akira's birth and his father Isamu was forty-five. Akira Kurosawa grew up in a household with three older brothers and four older sisters. Of his three older brothers, one died before Akira was born and one was already grown and out of the household. One of his four older sisters had also left the home to begin her own family before Kurosawa was born. Kurosawa's next-oldest sibling, a sister he called "Little Big Sister," also died suddenly after a short illness when he was ten years old.

Kurosawa's father worked as the director of a junior high school operated by the Japanese military and the Kurosawas descended from a line of former samurai. Financially, the family was above average. Isamu Kurosawa embraced western culture both in the athletic programs that he directed and by taking the family to see films, which were then just beginning to appear in Japanese theaters. Later, when Japanese culture turned away from western films, Isamu Kurosawa continued to believe that films were a positive educational experience.

In primary school, Akira Kurosawa was encouraged to draw by a teacher who took an interest in mentoring his talents. His older brother, Heigo, had a profound impact on him. Heigo was very intelligent and won several academic competitions, but also had what was later called a cynical or dark side. In 1923, the Great Kantō earthquake destroyed Tokyo and left 100,000 people dead. In the wake of this event, Heigo, 17, and Akira, 13, made a walking tour of the devastation. Corpses of humans and animals were piled everywhere. When Akira would attempt to turn his head away, Heigo urged him not to. According to Akira, this experience would later instruct him that to look at a frightening thing head-on is to defeat its ability to cause fear.

Heigo eventually began a career as a benshi in Tokyo film theaters. Benshi narrated silent films for the audience and were a uniquely Japanese addition to the theater experience. However, with the impact of talking pictures on the rise, benshi were losing work all over Japan. Heigo organized a benshi strike that failed. Akira was likewise involved in labor-management struggles, writing several articles for a radical newspaper while improving and expanding his skills as a painter and reading literature.

When Akira Kurosawa was in his early 20s, his older brother Heigo committed suicide. Four months later, the oldest of Kurosawa's brothers also died, leaving Akira as the only surviving son of an original four at age 23.

Kurosawa's wife was actress Yoko Yaguchi. He had two children with her: a son named Hisao and a daughter named Kazuko.

Kurosawa was a notoriously lavish gourmet, and spent huge quantities of money on film sets providing an incredibly large quantity of fine delicacies, especially meat, for the cast and crew, although the meat was sometimes left over from recording sound effects of the sound of blades cutting flesh in the many swordfight scenes.[1]

Kurosawa was a close friend of director Ishiro Honda, who directed the original Godzilla.

[edit] Early career

Rashomon poster

In 1936, Kurosawa learned of an apprenticeship program for directors through a major film studio, PCL (which later became Toho). He was hired and worked as an assistant director to Kajiro Yamamoto. After his directorial debut with Sanshiro Sugata, his next few films were made under the watchful eye of the wartime Japanese government and sometimes contained nationalistic themes. For instance, The Most Beautiful is a propaganda film about Japanese women working in a military optics factory. Judo Saga 2 portrays Japanese judo as superior to western (American) boxing.

His first post-war film No Regrets for Our Youth, by contrast, is critical of the old Japanese regime and is about the wife of a left-wing dissident who is arrested for his political leanings. Kurosawa made several more films dealing with contemporary Japan, most notably Drunken Angel and Stray Dog. However, it was his period film Rashomon that made him internationally famous and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

[edit] Directorial approach

Kurosawa had a distinctive cinematic technique, which he had developed by the 1950s, and which gave his films a unique look. He liked using telephoto lenses for the way they flattened the frame and also because he believed that placing cameras farther away from his actors produced

better performances. He also liked using multiple cameras, which allowed him to shoot an action scene from different angles. Another Kurosawa trademark was the use of weather elements to heighten mood: for example the heavy rain in the opening scene of Rashomon, and the final battle in Seven Samurai, the intense heat in Stray Dog, the cold wind in Yojimbo, the snow in Ikiru, and the fog in Throne of Blood. Kurosawa also liked using frame wipes, sometimes cleverly hidden by motion within the frame, as a transition device.

He was known as "Tenno", literally "Emperor", for his dictatorial directing style. He was a perfectionist who spent enormous amounts of time and effort to achieve the desired visual effects. In Rashomon, he dyed the rain water black with calligraphy ink in order to achieve the effect of heavy rain, and ended up using up the entire local water supply of the location area in creating the rainstorm. In the final scene of Throne of Blood, in which Mifune is shot by arrows, Kurosawa used real arrows shot by expert archers from a short range, landing within centimetres of Mifune's body. In Ran, an entire castle set was constructed on the slopes of Mt. Fuji only to be burned to the ground in a climactic scene.

Other stories include demanding a stream be made to run in the opposite direction in order to get a better visual effect, and having the roof of a house removed, later to be replaced, because he felt the roof's presence to be unattractive in a short sequence filmed from a train.

His perfectionism also showed in his approach to costumes: he felt that giving an actor a brand new costume made the character look less than authentic. To resolve this, he often gave his cast their costumes weeks before shooting was to begin and required them to wear them on a daily basis and "bond with them." In some cases, such as with Seven Samurai, where most of the cast portrayed poor farmers, the actors were told to make sure the costumes were worn down and tattered by the time shooting started.

Kurosawa did not believe that "finished" music went well with film. When choosing a musical piece to accompany his scenes, he usually had it stripped down to one element (e.g., trumpets only). Only towards the end of his films are more finished pieces heard.

[edit] Influences

A notable feature of Kurosawa's films is the breadth of his artistic influences. Some of his plots are based on William Shakespeare's works: Ran is loosely based on King Lear, Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth, while The Bad Sleep Well parallels Hamlet, but is not affirmed to be based on it. Kurosawa also directed film adaptations of Russian literary works, including The Idiot by Dostoevsky and The Lower Depths, a play by Maxim Gorky. Ikiru was inspired by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Dersu Uzala was based on the 1923 memoir of the same title by Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev. Story lines in Red Beard can be found in The Insulted and Humiliated by Dostoevsky.

High and Low was based on King's Ransom by American crime writer Ed McBain, Yojimbo may have been based on Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and also borrows from American Westerns, and Stray Dog was inspired by the detective novels of Georges Simenon. When Kurosawa got to meet John Ford, an American film director commonly said to be the most influential to

Kurosawa, Ford simply said, "You really like rain." Kurosawa responded, "You've really been paying attention to my films."[2]

Despite criticism by some Japanese critics that Kurosawa was "too Western", he was deeply influenced by Japanese culture as well, including the Kabuki and Noh theaters and the Jidaigeki (period drama) genre of Japanese cinema.

[edit] Influence

Seven Samurai was remade as The Magnificent Seven. The story was also used as inspiration in numerous novels, among them Stephen King's 5th Dark Tower novel, Wolves of the Calla.

Rashomon was remade by Martin Ritt in 1964's The Outrage. The Tamil films Andha Naal (1954) and Virumaandi (2004), starring Kamal Hassan, employ a storytelling method similar to the one Kurosawa uses in Rashomon. In a more recent incarnation, the film Hero also features a Rashomon style story. The 2005 animated film Hoodwinked applies the narrative structure of Rashomon to the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Rashomon not only helped open Japanese cinema to the world, but also entered the English language as a term for fractured, inconsistent narratives (see Rashomon Effect).

Yojimbo was the basis for the Sergio Leone western A Fistful of Dollars and two Bruce Willis films, prohibition-era Last Man Standing. The Hidden Fortress is an acknowledged influence on George Lucas's Star Wars films, in particular Episodes IV and VI and most notably in the characters of R2-D2 and C-3PO. Lucas also used a modified version of Kurosawa's wipe transition effect throughout the Star Wars saga.

[edit] Collaboration

During his most productive period, from the late 40s to the mid-60s, Kurosawa often worked with the same group of collaborators. Fumio Hayasaka composed music for seven of his films — notably Rashomon, Ikiru and Seven Samurai. Many of Kurosawa's scripts, including Throne of Blood, Seven Samurai and Ran were co-written with Hideo Oguni. Yoshiro Muraki was Kurosawa's production designer or art director for most of his films after Stray Dog in 1949, and Asakazu Nakai was his cinematographer on 11 films including Ikiru, Seven Samurai and Ran. Kurosawa also liked working with the same group of actors, especially Takashi Shimura, Tatsuya Nakadai, and Toshirō Mifune. His collaboration with the latter, which began with 1948's Drunken Angel and ended with 1965's Red Beard, is one of the most famous director-actor combinations in cinema history.

[edit] Later films

The film Red Beard marked a turning point in Kurosawa's career in more ways than one. In addition to being his last film with Mifune, it was his last in black-and-white. It was also his last as a major director within the Japanese studio system making roughly a film a year. Kurosawa was signed to direct a Hollywood project, Tora! Tora! Tora!; but 20th Century Fox replaced him

with Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku before it was completed. His next few films were a lot harder to finance and were made at intervals of five years. The first, Dodesukaden, about a group of poor people living around a rubbish dump, was not a success.

After an attempted suicide, Kurosawa went on to make several more films, although he had great difficulty in obtaining domestic financing despite his international reputation. Dersu Uzala, made in the Soviet Union and set in Siberia in the early 20th century, was the only Kurosawa film made outside of Japan and not in the Japanese language. It is about the friendship of a Russian explorer and a nomadic hunter, and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Kagemusha, financed with the help of the director's most famous admirers, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, is the story of a man who is the body double of a medieval Japanese lord and takes over his identity after the lord's death. The film was awarded the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival (shared with Bob Fosse's All That Jazz). Ran was the director's version of Shakespeare's King Lear, set in medieval Japan (and the only film of Kurosawa's career that he received a "Best Director" Academy Award nomination for). It was by far the largest project of Kurosawa's late career, and he spent a decade planning it and trying to obtain funding, which he was finally able to do with the help of the French producer Serge Silberman. The film was an international success and is generally considered Kurosawa's last masterpiece. In an interview, Kurosawa said that he considered it to be the best film he ever made.

Kurosawa made three more films during the 1990s which were more personal than his earlier works. Dreams is a series of vignettes based on his own dreams. Rhapsody in August is about memories of the Nagasaki atomic bomb and his final film, Madadayo, is about a retired teacher and his former students. Kurosawa died of a stroke in Setagaya, Tokyo, at age 88.

After the Rain (雨あがる Ame Agaru?) is a 1998 posthumous film directed by Kurosawa's closest collaborator, Takashi Koizumi, co-produced by Kurosawa Production (Hisao Kurosawa) and starring Tatsuya Nakadai and Shiro Mifune, son of Toshirō Mifune. Screenplay, script and dialogues were both written by Kurosawa himself. The story is based on a short novel by Shugoro Yamamoto, Ame Agaru.

To coincide with the 100th anniversary of Kurosawa's birth, his unfinished documentary Gendai no Noh will be completed and released in 2010. While filming his masterpiece Ran in 1983, Kurosawa experienced a number of problems during production, including financial troubles, and temporarily postponed filming to work on a non-fiction project. The documentary was to be about classic Japanese Noh theater, whose style had a substantial influence on Ran, as well as Throne of Blood and Kagemusha. Only about 50 minutes of footage exist, but to finish the film, an additional hour will be shot using Kurosawa's original screenplay.[3]

[edit] Awards

1951 – Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Rashomon 1951 – Academy Award: Best Foreign Language Film for Rashomon 1954 – Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Seven Samurai 1959 – Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival for The Hidden Fortress

1975 – Academy Award: Best Foreign Language Film for Dersu Uzala 1980 – Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Kagemusha 1982 – Japan Foundation: Japan Foundation Award.[4] 1982 – Career Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 1984 – Légion d'honneur 1985 – Order of Culture 1989 – Honorary Academy Award 1992 – Praemium Imperiale 1999 – Lifetime Achievement Award at the Japanese Academy Awards 1990 – Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize

[edit] Filmography

Year Title Japanese Romanization

1943Sanshiro Sugataaka Judo Saga

姿三四郎 Sugata Sanshirō

1944 The Most Beautiful 一番美しく Ichiban utsukushiku

1945

Sanshiro Sugata Part IIaka Judo Saga 2

續姿三四郎 Zoku Sugata Sanshirô

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail

虎の尾を踏む男達 Tora no o wo fumu otokotachi

1946 No Regrets for Our Youth わが青春に悔なし Waga seishun ni kuinashi

1947 One Wonderful Sunday 素晴らしき日曜日 Subarashiki nichiyōbi

1948 Drunken Angel 酔いどれ天使 Yoidore tenshi

1949 The Quiet Duel 静かなる決闘 Shizukanaru ketto

Stray Dog 野良犬 Nora inu

1950

Scandal 醜聞 Sukyandaruaka Shūbun

Rashomon 羅生門 Rashōmon

1951 The Idiot 白痴 Hakuchi

1952Ikiruaka To Live

生きる Ikiru

1954 Seven Samurai 七人の侍 Shichinin no samurai

1955I Live in Fearaka Record of a Living Being

生きものの記録 Ikimono no kiroku

1957

Throne of Bloodaka Spider Web Castle

蜘蛛巣城 Kumonosu-jō

The Lower Depths どん底 Donzoko

1958 The Hidden Fortress 隠し砦の三悪人 Kakushi toride no san akunin

1960 The Bad Sleep Well悪い奴ほどよく眠る

Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru

1961Yojimboaka The Bodyguard

用心棒 Yōjinbō

1962 Sanjuro 椿三十郎 Tsubaki Sanjūrō

1963High and Lowaka Heaven and Hell

天国と地獄 Tengoku to jigoku

1965 Red Beard 赤ひげ Akahige

1970 Dodesukaden どですかでん Dodesukaden

1975 Dersu Uzala デルス・ウザーラ Derusu Uzāra

1980 Kagemusha 影武者 Kagemusha

1985 Ran 乱 Ran

1990Dreamsaka Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

夢 Yume

1991 Rhapsody in August 八月の狂詩曲Hachigatsu no rapusodīaka Hachigatsu no kyōshikyoku

1993Madadayoaka Not Yet

まあだだよ Mādadayo

[edit] See also

Akira Kurosawa Memorial Short Film Competition Samurai cinema

[edit] Notes

1. ̂ Yojimbo. 2. ̂ A.K., Chris Marker, 1985 3. ̂ Unfinished footage by Kurosawa to be released 4. ̂ Japan Foundation Award, 1982.

[edit] Further reading

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema ISBN 0-8223-2519-5

Akira Kurosawa. Something Like An Autobiography. Vintage Books USA, 1983. ISBN 0-394-71439-3

Stephen Prince. The Warrior's Camera. Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-691-01046-3

Donald Richie, Joan Mellen. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. University of California Press, 1999. ISBN 0-520-22037-4

Stuart Galbraith IV. The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. Faber & Faber, 2002. ISBN 0-571-19982-8

Toshimitsu Shima. Kurosawa Akira no iru fukei. Shinchosha, 1991. ISBN 4-103-83501-X

Bert Cardullo. Akira Kurosawa: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers). University Press of Mississippi, 2007. ISBN 1-578-06997-1

James Goodwin. Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-801-84661-7

James Goodwin (editor). Perspectives on Akira Kurosawa. G.K. Hall & Co., 1994. ISBN 0-816-11993-7

Teruyo Nogami. Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies With Akira Kurosawa. Stone Bridge Press, 2006. ISBN 1-933-33009-0

Manuel Vidal Estevez. Akira Kurosawa. Ediciones Catedra S.A., 2004. ISBN 8-437-61131-8

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Akira Kurosawa

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa at the Internet Movie Database Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database Great Performances: Kurosawa (PBS) Kurosawa project Akira Kurosawa News and Information 黒澤明 (Akira Kurosawa) (Japanese) at the Japanese Movie Database AkiraKurosawa.com

(Japanese) Akira Kurosawa at Japanese celebrity's grave guide

Awards and achievements

Preceded byRené Clément

for The Walls of Malapaga

Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

1951for Rashomon

Succeeded byRené Clément

for Forbidden Games

Preceded byAndré Cayatte

for Justice Is Done

Golden Lion - Venice Film Festival1951

for Rashomon

Succeeded byRené Clément

for Forbidden Games

Preceded byFederico Fellinifor Amarcord

Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

1975for Dersu Uzala

Succeeded byJean-Jacques Annaudfor Black and White in

Color

Preceded byFrancis Ford Coppola

for Apocalypse Now and Volker Schlöndorfffor The Tin Drum

Palme d'Or - Cannes Film Festival1980

for Kagemusha (tied with Bob Fossefor All That Jazz)

Succeeded byAndrzej Wajdafor Man of Iron

Preceded byFrancis Ford Coppola

for Apocalypse Now

BAFTA Award for Best Direction1980

for Kagemusha

Succeeded byLouis Malle

for Atlantic City

Preceded byWoody Allen

for Manhattan

César Award for Best Foreign Film1981

for Kagemusha

Succeeded byDavid Lynch

for The Elephant Man

Preceded byCharles Chaplin, Anatoly

Golovnya, Billy Wilder

Career Golden Lion1982

Succeeded byMichelangelo Antonioni

Preceded byEastman Kodak, National

Film Board of Canada

Academy Honorary Award1989

Succeeded bySophia Loren, Myrna Loy

v • d • e

Films directed by Akira Kurosawa

1940s

Sanshiro Sugata · The Most Beautiful · Sanshiro Sugata Part II · The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail · Those Who Make Tomorrow · No Regrets for Our Youth · One Wonderful Sunday · Drunken Angel · The Quiet Duel · Stray Dog

1950s

Scandal · Rashomon · The Idiot · Ikiru · Seven Samurai · I Live in Fear · Throne of Blood · The Lower Depths · The Hidden Fortress

1960s

The Bad Sleep Well · Yojimbo · Sanjuro · High and Low · Red Beard

1970s

Dodesukaden · Dersu Uzala

1980s

Kagemusha · Ran

1990s

Dreams · Rhapsody in August · Madadayo

v • d • e

Cinema of JapanActors · Awards · Directors · Cinematographers · Composers · Editors · Festivals ·

Producers · ScreenwritersFilms A–Z · Silent films · Films by director · Films by genre: Anime · Documentary ·

Horror · Jidaigeki · Pink · Science fiction · Tokusatsu · Yakuza

Films by year

1898–1919 · 1920s · 1930s · 1940s · 1950 · 1951 · 1952 · 1953 · 1954 · 1955 · 1956 · 1957 · 1958 · 1959 · 1960 · 1961 · 1962 · 1963 · 1964 · 1965 · 1966 · 1967 · 1968 · 1969 · 1970 · 1971 · 1972 · 1973 · 1974 · 1975 · 1976 · 1977 · 1978 · 1979 · 1980 · 1981 · 1982 · 1983 · 1984 · 1985 · 1986 · 1987 · 1988 · 1989 · 1990 · 1991 · 1992 · 1993 · 1994 · 1995 · 1996 · 1997 · 1998 · 1999 · 2000 · 2001 · 2002 · 2003 · 2004 · 2005 · 2006 · 2007 · 2008 · 2009

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Kurosawa"Categories: 1910 births | 1998 deaths | Academy Honorary Award recipients | BAFTA winners (people) | César Award winners | Japanese film directors | People from Tokyo | Légion d'honneur recipients | Deaths from strokeHidden categories: Articles needing additional references from December 2008 | Articles containing Japanese language text

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