Akira Kurosawa (1910 - 1998) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, editor and producer whose career spanned nearly six decades and some thirty features. [1] His 1950 film Rashomon won the Golden Lion at Venice and effectively introduced Japanese cinema to Western audiences, while Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Ran influenced filmmakers across genres and continents. [2]
Early life and entry into film
Kurosawa was born on 23 March 1910 in the Ōi district of Tokyo, the youngest of eight children in a family of samurai descent. [1] He trained as a painter and exhibited work in his youth, an interest that later shaped his precise storyboarding and compositional sense.
In 1936 he answered a newspaper advertisement for assistant directors at Photo Chemical Laboratories, the studio that became Toho. He served a long apprenticeship under the director Kajiro Yamamoto, working as assistant director and screenwriter before making his directorial debut in 1943 with Sanshiro Sugata, produced under wartime censorship. [2]
International breakthrough
His postwar films Drunken Angel and Stray Dog began his long collaboration with the actor Toshiro Mifune, who would appear in sixteen of his pictures. In 1950 he made Rashomon, which recounts a single violent incident through mutually incompatible testimonies. [1]
The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and an Academy Honorary Award, drawing sudden international attention to Japanese cinema and lending the language the term "Rashomon effect" for contradictory accounts of the same event. [3] Ikiru followed in 1952, a study of a dying bureaucrat seeking meaning in his final months.
Major work
Seven Samurai (1954), in which a poor village hires masterless swordsmen to defend it from bandits, established conventions of the assembled-team narrative that recur throughout world cinema; it was remade in Hollywood as The Magnificent Seven. [2] Yojimbo was likewise adapted into the Italian western A Fistful of Dollars, and The Hidden Fortress is acknowledged as an influence on Star Wars.
He adapted Western literature to Japanese settings repeatedly, turning Macbeth into Throne of Blood, The Lower Depths and King Lear into Ran, and Dostoevsky's The Idiot into a film of the same name. [1]
Later career and legacy
Funding grew difficult in the 1970s as the Japanese studio system contracted. He made Dersu Uzala in the Soviet Union, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and later secured foreign backing — from George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola for Kagemusha, which shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1980, and French support for Ran in 1985. [1]
Kurosawa received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 1990, along with Japan's Order of Culture and the People's Honour Award, the Kyoto Prize, the Praemium Imperiale and the Legion of Honour. [1] He died in Setagaya, Tokyo, on 6 September 1998, and is consistently ranked among the most influential directors in the history of the medium.
