Director: Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa directed thirty features over more than fifty years and changed how action is filmed in the process. The multiple-camera long-lens coverage he developed for Seven Samurai, the telephoto compression that flattens a charging line of men into a single moving mass, and the willingness to hold a shot until weather does something interesting are all techniques Western directors adopted wholesale without always understanding why they worked.
His reputation in the West rests heavily on the samurai films, which is a distortion. Ikiru is a study of a bureaucrat dying of cancer who tries to get a playground built. High and Low is a kidnapping procedural about class. Rashomon is a structural experiment about testimony that gave the language a term for contradictory accounts of the same event. The samurai pictures are the ones that traveled, partly because Hollywood kept remaking them, and Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress all became Westerns or space opera in translation.
He worked with a repertory company, and Toshiro Mifune appears in sixteen of his films before the partnership ended. The Mifune performances are physically enormous, all scratching and shouting and sudden stillness, and they work against Takashi Shimura’s quiet precision in the same frame. Kurosawa’s compositions frequently place those two energies at opposite ends of a wide shot and let the tension sit there.
His late career was funded largely from outside Japan after the domestic industry lost interest, with Coppola and Lucas backing Kagemusha and Spielberg attached to Dreams. He won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, received an honorary Oscar in 1990, and remains the reference point most cited when Western directors talk about staging.
