“Human beings share the same common problems. A film can only be understood if it dissects this correctly.” The phrase belongs to Akira Kurosawa, and in it he explains his peculiar ability to make films with a global reach. without denying their native Japanese culture. Born in Tokyo in 1910, the filmmaker was the seventh child of one of the city’s wealthy families.
Kurosawa did not immediately turn to the cinema, an art that at the time of his birth was still in its infancy. In fact, showed his first creative activities in the field of painting, although he soon abandoned this discipline because he did not consider himself skilled enough. When Western cinema entered Japan, however, the young Kurosawa was quickly fascinated by it: he would soon make it his calling. After several years of apprenticeship, his debut as a director would come in 1943 with The legend of the great judo. However, neither this nor his subsequent six tapes would meet Kurosawa’s expectations. The Second World War, in addition, would distort his way of understanding cinema, since the authorities supervised the script and each one of the frames: his style, considered too Western, had to be softened for the sake of an orientalizing vision loaded with nationalist slogans.
Still, Kurosawa loved Hollywood cinema, and did so with a special passion for the work of John Ford. He was also passionate about the western side of other artistic disciplines such as literature, which had a great weight in his later work. In fact, Shakespeare and Dostoyevski would serve as a clear inspiration for his cinematographic work.
With a style assimilable for the western public, Kurosawa exposed the Japanese customs and traditions
Once the war was over, the filmmaker soon began to make films capable of portraying the social and historical conflicts in his country; deep down, however, those movies served as an excuse to rework film genres as little oriental as the western. This is the case, for example, of the seven samuraiwhich Hollywood producers would like so much that they would end up creating their own American adaptation with The seven magnificents. It would not be the only one: something similar would happen with Yojimbo y For a bunch of dollars.
The true milestone of his new stage as director, however, would be reached with Rashomon, the masterpiece of his black and white cinema. The film was made with golden lion in an edition of the Venice Festival that, moreover, history would remember as absolutely unforgettable: A Streetcar Named Desire, the great carnival o The river were just some of his memorable opponents. Kurosawa obtained with her the Oscar for the best foreign film, opening the doors of international festivals not only to his cinema but to that of other Japanese filmmakers.
With a style assimilable to Western audiences, Kurosawa exposed Japanese customs and traditions, deploying, incidentally, a series of completely new cinematographic resources. The narrative structure of that film, in which the same event is told from different points of view, has gone down in history under the name of “Rashomon effect”. Thus, many of those who saw Reservoir Dogs at its premiere they were surprised by a way of narrating that, however, had been inaugurated by the Japanese filmmaker almost half a century earlier.
Kurosawa would always continue to adapt the Japanese idiosyncrasy to a Western way of making movies. His films incorporated innovative filming techniques and an exquisite aesthetic sense whose origin could well be located in his early pictorial learning.
With the failure of ‘Dodeskaden’, Kurosawa would attempt suicide with more than 30 cuts in his veins
It would be at 60 years of age when he would suffer the first box office failure with his film dead desksreleased in 1970. It was not trivial: the failure plunged him into such a deep depression that would lead him to attempt suicide, propitiating more than 30 cuts in the veins. Although he was saved in time, his emotional health would not be restored until he filmed another of his masterpieces, Dersu Uzala, in 1975: a story of friendship between a Russian military man and a lonely hunter in the Siberian taiga. The work, a true visual poem of overwhelming beauty, earned him the second Oscar of his career.
A decade later, Kurosawa once again surprised the public and critics with Ranwhat compiled all the virtues of his previous cinema. In this case, the Japanese freely adapted The Lear King, by Shakespeare, placing the narrative in medieval Japan of the sixteenth century. The overwhelming plastic beauty of the film, as well as its epic and unforgettable staging, soon converted Ran at one of the pinnacles of global cinematographic art.
Tireless, at the age of 85 he signed his latest masterpiece, as well as his most personal and experimental film: it is about dreams, an avant-garde exercise that many consider among the most visually fascinating works in the history of cinema. With it, Kurosawa thrilled Western audiences with this metaphorical account of his own history and that of the changes experienced by his native country throughout it.
On one occasion, when asked about the meaning of some of the scenes he had shot, Kurosawa replied that “everything what i want to say is in the movie itself. If what I have said in my film is true, someone will understand. Words from someone who was probably the only director capable of bringing the western and eastern world closer together with so much art and beauty.
