He's currently in pre-production on his first feature, and has been for a while because filmmaking is expensive. In the meantime, he's sitting on a mountain of unproduced screenplays. You can catch him performing standup at odd pubs around the UK that will give him stage time. By Ben Sherlock Published Dec 13, Share Share Tweet Email 0.
Related Topics Lists. The skyline is often high in Seven Samurai since the defenders of the village are constantly looking up to the mountains from where the attacks will come. The use of objects in the foreground and a sense of depth in an image was a relatively late feature of Japanese painting.
Such compositions became possible in Hollywood in the late s, not least in the films of John Ford e. Stagecoach in , and in the s they became associated with a new approach to realism in the work of Orson Welles and William Wyler. This is noticeable in the scenes staged in the relatively confined spaces of the huts in the town and in the village. The scenes in the town use depth to great advantage.
The crucial scene in which Kanbei accepts the job of defending the village starts with a long shot into the boarding house. In the foreground are the labourers, still taunting the farmers. In the middle ground are the four farmers and, standing behind them, Kanbei and Kikuchiyo.
Behind them, clearly visible and in focus, we can see the life of the town going on as people pass in the street. Katsushiro reacts to the taunting and picks up his sword. Most of the sequence is covered in long shot, panning swiftly as Katsushiro chases the labourers and Kanbei tries to stop him. But dramatic close-ups of Katsushiro, his sword, and Kanbei are cut into the action as the labourers run round the room.
Then one of the labourers hands a bowl of rice to Kanbei, pointing out that the farmers are eating millet in order to save the rice for the samurai. As Kanbei accepts the bowl and says to the farmers that he will accept their sacrifice, the bowl of rice is large in the foreground while the farmers cower against the far wall in the background. The whole scene makes perfect narrative sense through composition, framing, camera movement, editing and the positioning of the actors.
This short scene is perfect cinema—and it is only one of many such throughout the film. Emigration and immigration are unusual in a Japanese context: Japanese society remained relatively insular in the s, during a period when many European countries experienced migratory flows, both in and out.
In I Live in Fear , however, the head of a family company determines to emigrate to Brazil with all his extended family to escape the threat of a nuclear calamity. A counsellor is appointed to attempt to solve the family problem. A significant number of Japanese did in fact migrate to Brazil during the s and s.
Migration to Brazil began around , primarily by Japanese farmers looking for work on Brazilian coffee plantations. Today there are estimated to be 1. After two starring roles in Ikiru and Seven Samurai , Shimura seems to have been moved back into the character actor role in this and subsequent Kurosawa films.
Mifune is on top form, and is matched by Yamada Isuzu as the Lady Macbeth character. The forest, the mists, the birds—all seem actors in the drama expertly staged by Kurosawa. This exploration of contemporary business practices in Japan during the period of rapid expansion in the late s has been described as a modern version of Hamlet. Francis Ford Coppola is famously a fan. Here is a useful commentary on the film by the American critic Armond White:. Its revival takes down The Godfather, showing how exact, powerful and original a Kurosawa concept can be.
We understand the present through traditional, yet updated, moral codes. Western musical motifs in the opening wedding sequence create comical adjustments and commentary on the industrialism that changes Japanese culture, contaminating while modernising it. Kurosawa uses the format of grand tragedy to account for the enormous deceit he observes.
By using the gangster genre, Coppola was one remove from his subject. He lost his focus and wound up romanticising the corruption he intended to denounce. This was the result of misguided movie-brat modernism, where genre homage overwhelmed personal, artistic expression. The Corleone siblings coming 12 years after The Bad Sleep Well represented a popular adjustment to corruption; using the crime genre as a metaphor in a way acquiesced to the situation—thus altering the course of American cinema for the next 40 years.
But Kurosawa uses Jacobean, Shakespearean processes slightly revamping Hamlet to better indict contemporary materialism and corruption. Kurosawa never gives in to the narrative sensations of an action form and cinema regains its moral compass. It is both extremely rigorous and dynamic. But Kurosawa brings those undertones to his formally innovative surface. The tableau of Nishi and friends coming out of the munitions factory to reminisce about emerging from a bomb shelter captures the post-war miasma.
Coppola only properly saluted Kurosawa in The Godfather III where he adapted the opera Cavalleria Rusticana to frame his characters in a richer cultural context that is yet to be fully appreciated. It is a full-blooded entertainment film. This application captured Kajiro Yamamoto. Yamamoto was considered to be one of the most renowned directors of Japan at that time.
Kurosawa was hired as an assistant to Yamamoto and he worked on 24 films during his time with the famous director. During his time as an assistant, Kurosawa learnt a lot and particularly gained knowledge about writing a quality script. We can safely assume that this was perhaps the boost he needed to become the director he became. The Second World War lasted between and , a time of great turbulence. However, Kurosawa took his inspiration from these years as well.
Kurosawa was enthusiastically bought the novel in its publication day and completed the entire book in a single sitting. He found the story intriguing enough to call the author immediately to secure film rights.
Kurosawa was right to be quick about this because soon other directors were interested as well. However, Kurosawa was successful and the film based on the novel was his debut movie as a director. Although the final film was missing 18 minutes of footage due to problems with the censorship office, it was quite a commercial success. They became close despite arguments and married in Yaguchi never resumed her acting career but remained married to the Japanese director until her death in After finding much popularity on domestic level, Kurosawa would soon become praised on an international level as well.
Rashomon did not only brought international acclaim to the director but is still remembered as one of the best films for its story telling method. Rashomon was a samurai murder story; a murder which was told from the perspective of four different characters. This method is still considered as one of the most appreciated and innovative devices for telling a story. Following the international success of this movie, Kurosawa would go on to make some great films that strengthened his foundation in the international cinema.
Kurosawa opened his own production company in Using this new development in his career, he produced Yojimbo in which also went to become one his most acclaimed works. However, Kurosawa soon fell into bad times. The filmmaking industry was already suffering due to the negative impact of television and things became worse due to the economic depression in Japan.
Being forced by such circumstances, he had to look for work in Hollywood but his projects did not do well. Eventually, Kurosawa became surrounded by financial problems coupled with emotional exhaustion so intense that he attempted suicide. He recovered but was not interested in carrying on his journey as a director. Kurosawa had no intention of moving his career any forward but he was approached by a Russian production company to make the film Dersu Uzala.
The production of the movie put a lot of pressure on the director and it made his health worse but he did not give up. Soon, the previous efforts of Kurosawa paid off and his admirer George Lucas who is famous for Star Wars brought him in to produce Kagemusha. Unknown to some people, Steven Spielberg is also a great admirer of Kurosawa and his works. They brought a movie called Dreams to the screen in In his final years as a director, Kurosawa did not produce films that were as epic as his earlier projects.
He made Rhapsody in August in and another film Madadayo in Both films were only successful on an average level not matching the popularity of the films directed by Kurosawa in his peak years.
It is unfortunate that an accident that happened during one of his own projects put a damper on his career. Kurosawa had to suffer a broken back when he fell during a project he was handling in The Japanese director suffered injuries so severe that he had to be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Obviously, he could no longer progress his career as a director. As his health became poor, he suffered a stroke in Kurosawa could not fight it this time and died at the age of He got the chance to work with Yamamoto and did not waste his time as an assistant with him.
Whatever skills Kurosawa learnt during that time were applied in his many successful projects and you can feel the influence of those skills clearly in the films. Kurosawa was able to come up with some amazing projects during his career and films like Rashomon are still considered to be one of the best Japanese films. Despite the troubling times Kurosawa had to experience after he was forced to seek work in the Hollywood, he was considered to be the best directors of the Japanese film industry.
Furthermore, the influence of his work can be seen in the current industry as well. The existing and coming generation of directors can learn a lot from the works put forward by Kurosawa. While the subject matter is intriguing, it would fall apart without the various styles of framing that Kurosawa employs throughout the film. In this video essay, I look at how and why he framed scenes the way he did.
The aspect ratio is not an error or lack of high quality footage — it's to best preserve Kurosawa's framing in the way that he intended that audiences view it. Can movement tell a story? More than any other filmmaker, he had an innate understanding of movement and how to capture it onscreen. Join me today in studying the master, possibly the greatest composer of motion in film history. Always keep learning, always keep growing no matter what your age.
Take at look at both these remarkable video essays below. Be ready to take notes. Love me some Kurosawa! So I want to begin by talking very briefly about what I call the moment of Rashomon. There's a bit of confusion, or at least chronological confusion, or inconsistency in the principle that we end the course with a film that was made and shown internationally before the last two films that we've seen in our course.
My reasons for that, as I partly explained in an earlier lecture, had to do with my desire to show a certain continuity amongst form of European cinema and the link between Jean Renoir, and the Italian neorealist, and the French nouvelle vague is so intimate that it seemed to me important to show you that progression in sequence. But if we had been going by strict chronological order, we would have introduced this Kurosawa film a bit earlier, because it was made in , and in , it won an important international prize, The Golden Lion, the highest prize available at the Venice Film Festival in And this had a seismic effect on movies around the world.
The dramatic and powerful subject matter of Kurosawa's film of course riveted attention. But even more than that, the freedom and imaginative energy of his stylistic innovations in the film had a profound impact on filmmakers around the world. And when the film was shown at Venice in , another effect it had when it won the prize was to introduce Japanese cinema to a wider world.
It was the first significant Japanese film, Kurosawa, the first important Japanese director to gain a reputation outside of Japan itself.
In fact, there are many film buffs, and especially specialists in Japanese film, who are somewhat resentful of Kurosawa's eminence, even though no one denies that he is an eminent director, because there are other directors. The two I've listed under item in our outline are the most dramatic examples, Mizoguchi and Ozu, who are often thought to be his superior, even greater directors than Kurosawa.
This is a debate of nuances. All three of these directors are major artists. But it is true, I think, and it is widely recognized that Kurosawa was the director who crossed that barrier more immediately, more dramatically than any other, and opened the world, not just to Japanese cinema, in some degree, but opened the world in some longer sense to Asian cinema more generally, that the so-called Western world, the European and American cinema universes had been fairly oblivious to Asian cinema and certainly to Japanese cinema prior to this.
And the appearance of Rashomon, its enormous impact in , began to change that. So that what was demonstrated in moment when Rashomon won this reward, won The Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, was a reinforcement of a principle I've been discussing throughout the semester, the notion of film as an international medium, the notion that directors from different national cinemas were now being deeply influenced by directors from other nations, and that film itself was in some deep way, a global phenomenon, even an international form.
And one mark of this, the emergence of cinema as a fully recognized independent art form. Obviously people had thought this, and many directors had achieved artistic distinction before this. But I'm talking about the public understanding of movies, the way people in different cultures actually recognized and thought about movies. It was as if this is the moment in which movies were understood to enter the museum in a certain way, to earn in a public sense, the status that more traditional art forms had had.
And one of the explanations for why this would have been so, why it would have had such a powerful impact? Now, I think I mentioned last time that this insight was partial in the United States— especially, that is to say, in the 50's and early 60's, it began to dawn on movie critics and scholars of whom there were only a few at that time and then movie audiences that European films and Asian films, especially Japanese films, might have great artistic value.
But it was a longer time before Americans began to realize that their own native forms of films had had a similar kind of authority. Let's remember historically what it represented in Europe and in the United States. It's the moment of the emergence of Italian neorealism, which itself begins to establish a kind of very powerful claim on people's attention.
One irony of Rashomon's success was that it was not very successful in Japan when it was released in. And the producer , the production company responsible for the film was very dubious about entering it in the competition, didn't think it was a significant film, even though it transformed Kurosawa's career because of the immense recognition it finally got.
And Kurosawa himself recognized— he'd been making films for almost a decade before that, but Rashomon was his most ambitious film to that point, and it also incorporated more innovative strategy, visual strategies than any he had tried before. It established him as an international director. And I mentioned the names of two other directors just from different traditions as a way of reminding you of another feature of this phenomenon, another reason, as I began to say earlier, for why this moment was such a significant one.
And the term I use here is modernism, modernist cinema. Remember, one of the ways to understand this idea is to recognize that a great revolution in the arts had occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, the end of the 19 th century, and at the turn of the 20 th century. We've talked about this earlier. It's the movement we call modernism. It's the moment of Picasso.
It's the moment of James Joyce, and it was a kind of revolution in both visual art, literature, music took place in this period. And what was among the characteristics of this modernist movement was a newly complicated and self-conscious attitude toward narrative itself, toward storytelling. So modernism in literature and in art involved, among other things if not a hostility or antagonism, at least a kind of skepticism about inherited traditional categories and ways of doing things. And one form this took in narrative was to dislocate or disorient the narrative line.
Instead of telling a story in a chronological sequence, a lot of the great works of fiction of the modernist era, books by writers like Joseph Conrad, or Proust, the great French novelist who was so preoccupied by memory and human subjectivity, or the great German novelist, Thomas Mann, a number of other great figures that we could mention began to construct stories in which chronological order was profoundly disrupted. And they also began to create stories in which there were multiple narrators.
And the effect of multiple narrators begins— even if you do nothing more than have multiple narrators, you begin to raise questions about the veracity, the truthfulness of any single perspective. And you will understand when you look at Rashomon why this movie embodies many of these same modernist principles. But the point is that cinema, as a narrative form, lag behind these more traditional arts.
And it really wasn't until the s, and partly because of films like Rashomon, that it began to be recognized that the movies too could embrace and embody the principles of modernism. So one way to understand what happened in the s is to recognize that directors like Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish director, and Fellini, the great Italian director, and the inheritor and expander of the neorealist tradition, going far beyond a narrow realism, that directors like that began to create films that in a formal sense, in a structural sense, and also in terms of their content had the kind of complexity, nuance, and skepticism, and even the philosophic self-awareness that was characteristic of high modernism at the turn of the 20 th century.
So it's as if what was going on was the movies themselves were now asserting themselves as a modernist art. I don't mean as a contemporary art. I'm referring specifically to the modernist movement, and to the dislocated, and much more demanding kinds of narrative strategies that are characteristic of the modernist movement.
So Rashomon played a fundamental role in this sort of transformation of what we might call the cultural understanding of movies among ordinary people, as well as among scholars, critics, and other filmmakers. I want to mention one other point. I'll give you a kind of note to clarify some of what I've been implying, some of what I implied when I talked about Mizoguchi and Ozu as directors who were often even more highly regarded than Kurosawa.
I'll leave that to each individual film goer. All three directors are astonishing and remarkable. But it wouldn't be appropriate to talk, even about this single film, Rashomon, without paying respects to those two great directors whose dates I've put on your outline. I won't talk about individual films by these directors, but I urge you all to look them up, read about them in David Cook's history of narrative film, and think about experimenting by extending your knowledge of Japanese cinema by trying films by these two remarkable directors.
One of the things that's characteristic of all three of these directors, of Kurosawa, even more fully of Mizoguchi and Ozu, Ozu most fundamentally of all, is that their films are marked by a kind of impulse toward stylization, toward fabular, fable-like equations that distinguish them in some ways from Western, from European, and American films.
And I think that one explanation for this has to do with the longer artistic traditions of Japanese society. Japanese film grows out of theatrical traditions, like kabuki theater, or Noh drama, N-O-H drama, both of which have profoundly stylized and fable like qualities. They're anti-narrative, in some sense, and any of you who have ever had even a minimal experience with either of these two theatrical traditions will understand what I'm discussing.
These are theaters of gesture and of very decisive, symbolic representation. What we would think of as sort of realistic characters or realistic stories are not a part of these very ancient traditions. These theatrical traditions go back hundreds, even thousands of years. So there's a tradition in Japan of a kind of stylized, of symbolic representation. And you'll see, I think, how in Russia, how powerfully this principle operates in Rashomon.
Even when film itself emerged in Japan in the silent era, it emerged in a slightly different way. And one of the most interesting features of silent film tradition in Japan was the appearance of a character who has no counterpart in Western cinema, a character called a benshi, B-E-N-S-H-I.
Any of you heard of it? Well, he essentially was a narrator and explainer, and he stood next to the movies in a way and gave explanations. He said now, we will introduce the villain. Now, we will introduce— he was like a kind of intermediary, a narrator or a concierge who mediated between the audience and the text, who gave the audience information. Again in one sense, we might think of it as an anti-narrative tradition, as a tradition in which things are presented or spoken rather than literally acted out, and certainly one in which the details of a story are less important than its general outline.
So when we talk about stylization, one of the things we're talking about is an impulse toward what we might think of as generalized argument instead of specific argument, an impulse to have one moment stand symbolically for many other moments, and what we might think of as a simplification or a distillation of reality into certain symbolic moments that are thought to be emblematic in certain ways, but don't necessarily have a realistic feel.
And you'll see almost instantly when this film begins, there's a kind of prologue. And then when the film makes a transition into the first sequence that takes place in the forest, you'll begin to see what I mean when I say that the film seems to enter into a kind of symbolic realm in which your sense of reality is in some sense undermined, as if you're entering into a dream or a symbolic space.
Kurosawa, talking about that astonishing sequence at the beginning of Rashomon, said that camera's complex movements and the movements of a character himself—everything is in motion in that remarkable opening sequence.
Some people have called it the most visually poetic sequence in the history of movies. Kurosawa called this moment a moment in which the camera was shown to be penetrating into a space where the heart loses its way, as if you're penetrating into an ancestral space, into a space that's dreamlike in fundamental ways.
So the very opening of the film, or almost the very opening of the film establishes this kind of complexity. I don't want to exactly call it an ambiguity, but this complexity about the nature of the reality that you're watching. And this is even before the film proceeds to present essentially four different accounts of the same event, these four different accounts conflicting with each other in a variety of ways. So these abstracting, or symbolizing, or stylizing narrative and dramatic traditions lie behind and shape the movies in Japan, even movies like Kurosawa's, which embrace the camera's freedom in a way that's much more characteristic of Western directors than of Eastern ones.
Ozu, the second of the two directors I've listed on your outline, is especially famous for holding his camera almost stationary for a tremendously long time. And in fact, he's sometimes called a director who tries to create a zen aesthetic, because the camera is so quiet, and so stationary, and relatively inactive.
It's a style that lays tremendous emphasis on the nuances of facial expression and vocal tone. And both Mizoguchi and Ozu do, in some sense, have an even greater sense of stylization in many of their films than Kurosawa does. But I don't want to oversimplify, because they are also capable of very great, realistic moments, and they have a moral realism that's at least as powerful in their films as Kurosawa himself.
Kurosawa's career is a very remarkable one. And I wish I had time to talk about it in detail. Organizational structure of Japanese cinema was not unlike the structures that developed in Western societies in the United States or in France. There were essentially monopolies of not a small number, but a relatively larger number of film production companies operating at different levels of significance. So they were second rate, and then they were second level and third level production companies, as well.
But all of them operated in a similar way. The director was a more dominant than major figure in this system, and surrounding each director were a group of workers and a group of creative people, including usually performers who went with a director from film to film, as well as his technical people.
They would often use the same people to write their music, and the same crew to work on the film— if they could succeed, get the same cinematographer. It means the group, or cadre. The Kurosawa group worked on a series of films. I don't mean it was always identical. There were changes, but it was a stable group unified especially by Kurosawa's vision and supervision. And I've listed here a few of his most famous and fundamental films besides Rashomon.
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