The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa died at his home in Tokyo
September 6 at the age
of 88. Kurosawa, who made 28 films between 1943 and 1993, belonged to that generation
of European and Asian directors whose works dominated the international art
film world in
the 1950s and 1960s. One thinks of such figures as Federico Fellini, Ingmar
Bergman,
Michelangelo Antonioni, Satyijat Ray, Luis Buñuel, Luchino Visconti,
Robert Bresson and
Roberto Rossellini, all now either dead or inactive.
At his best Kurosawa demonstrated an extraordinary visual and intellectual vivacity.
Whatever his limitations--and there are moments when his conceptions seem overmatched
by
his emotions--one feels that Kurosawa never shied away from any problem or dilemma.
His
is a cinema of towering, almost superhuman confrontations, whether in medieval
forests or
modern city streets. He created, as one critic puts it, "dense fictional
worlds," in which his
fascination with human nature and social problems was given free range.
Kurosawa was born in 1910 in Tokyo, the youngest of eight children, to a family
that held
Samurai rank. His father was a military school administrator. The future director
refused to
undergo military training, developed an early interest in painting, and while
still a teenager
attended a private art school. According to his biographers, Russian literature
fascinated him.
He was later to adapt works by Dostoyevsky (The Idiot) and Gorky (Lower Depths)
for
the screen, and a Tolstoy story (The Death of Ivan Ilych) apparently influenced
another of
his films (Ikiru). Of Dostoyevsky he once said: "I know of no one so compassionate....
Ordinary people turn their eyes away from tragedy; he looks straight into it."
Shakespeare's
plays also influenced or formed the basis of a number of his works.
Unable to make a living at painting, Kurosawa in 1936 obtained
a position as an assistant
director at a leading Japanese film production company. After seven years as
an assistant, he
directed his first film, Sanshiro Sugata, in 1943, the story of a youthful
judo champion and
his search for spiritual enlightenment.
Drunken Angel (1948), another work influenced by Dostoyevsky, is generally
considered
to be the first of Kurosawa's major films. One might say that this film, and
Stray Dog
(1949), belong to the director's "neo-realist" phrase. In the latter
film, a novice policeman
(played by the youthful Toshiro Mifune) is pickpocketed on a crowded bus and
his Colt
revolver stolen. When the gun is used in several crimes, including murders,
he feels
responsible and tracks down the guilty man through the back streets of a Japanese
city. The
criminal is a young man of his own age, "the stray dog" become a "mad
dog," as a result of
his experiences in the war, referred to in the title. In a memorable final sequence
the two fight
it out in a muddy field. When the cop finally manages to get his handcuffs on
the young
man, the latter howls like an animal in pain. It is a wrenching moment. Rashomon (1950) was the film that brought Kurosawa international recognition,
winning
the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best
Foreign
Film in 1952. It remains, along with Seven Samurai (1954), Kurosawa's
most widely
known film. Rashomon tells the same story--the confrontation in the woods
between a
bandit and a samurai and his bride, watched by a woodcutter--in four different
versions. The
notion that the insistence on a "true version" is misguided is surely
a theme that turns up in a
great many postwar films, for fairly obvious reasons.
Ikiru (To Live), made in 1952, is one of Kurosawa's more remarkable films.
It tells the
story of a government bureaucrat who discovers that he is dying of stomach cancer
and has
only months to live. In fact, as a narrator informs us: "It would be difficult
to say that he is
really alive." His job is mind numbing and meaningless, his son insensitive
and unfeeling.
At first he turns to alcohol and prostitutes in an effort to come alive or at
least provide some
meaning to his last days. That only makes him feel worse. He then tries to relive
his youth
by spending time with a young woman. Not much comes of that either. In the end,
he
decides to spend the remainder of his life in service to others, campaigning
to turn a swampy
lot into a park for children.
Ikiru was the first of what one commentator calls "the half-dozen
masterpieces made
between 1952 and 1963." There is little question but that this was Kurosawa's
richest
period. In those years, in addition to Seven Samurai, in which a group
of warriors defend
a village against bandits, he made Record of a Living Being (1955), the
story of a man
driven mad by his fear of nuclear war; his riveting version of Macbeth, The
Throne of
Blood (1957), set in medieval Japan and reportedly T.S. Eliot's favorite
film; his version of
Gorky's Lower Depths (1957); another vivid piece laid in feudal Japan,
The Hidden
Fortress (1958); his examination of corruption in the corporate world, The
Bad Sleep
Well (1960), apparently a version of Hamlet ; Yojimbo (1961), based
loosely on
Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, about a samurai warrior up for hire in
a town with
warring factions, and its sequel, Sanjuro (1961). In 1963, Kurosawa directed
High and
Low, a film, also based on an American crime novel, about a kidnapping gone
wrong.
Kurosawa seems most at home in the period of postwar reconstruction where his
belief in
human possibility stubbornly pursued in the face of overwhelming odds--and in
the value of
classical literature as a means of cognizing reality--appealed to significant
layers of the
general population in Japan, and elsewhere, and even inspired them. Would it
be possible to
say that Japan's recovery, its increasing stature in the world presented problems
that were
beyond Kurosawa's scope? Or perhaps it was that a considerable section of his
audience no
longer found that his emotionalism and his humanism spoke to them. In any event,
Kurosawa came to be seen as old-fashioned, as a new generation of Japanese filmmakers
emerged in the 1960s. He seemed to reach an impasse with Dodeskaden (1970),
a
grotesque work that failed with audiences. In December 1971 Kurosawa attempted
suicide.
He enjoyed a revival of his fortunes with Dersu Uzala (1975), made in
the USSR, and his
two epics, Kagemusha and Ran, a version of King Lear, made
in 1980 and 1985,
respectively. He continued making films into his 80s, directing Rhapsody
in August
(1991), a meditation on the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
European and American influences--from Eisenstein to John Ford--can be seen
at work in
Kurosawa's films. He has both been praised and criticized for being the most
"Western" of
the great Japanese directors. In return, Kurosawa has inspired a great many
European and
American film directors and trends, including, for better or worse, the so-called
"Spaghetti
Western." Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964), for example,
one of his Clint
Eastwood vehicles, is based directly on Yojimbo. One critic, contrasting
American
Westerns with their Japanese and Italian equivalents, noted that Italy and Japan
were both
defeated nations in World War II and that their film heroes consequently "lack
faith in history
as an orderly process in human affairs. What Kurosawa and Leone share is a sentimental
nihilism that ranks survival above honor and revenge above morality."
It is no insult to observe that Kurosawa worked within the general framework
of melodrama.
On the contrary, as another commentator put it very well, the director had "a
miraculous gift
for ennobling the melodramatic mood, for pulling off situations in which anyone
else would
have foundered on the shoals of ridicule." Kurosawa was a serious artist,
a major artist. A
familiarity with his most significant works ought to form part of the education
of anyone
who considers him- or herself a student of the human condition.
For a director of such worldwide importance, Akira Kurosawa hasn't always been
well served by
the international market. Not only does Madadayo, his final film, remain
unseen in this country
seven years after its completion, but a number of his earlier works have never
received proper
video release, an oversight this reissue of three Kurosawa social-issue dramas
goes a long way
toward correcting. Kurosawa considered 1948's Drunken Angel the film
in which he came into his
own as a director. It's probably no coincidence that it's also his first collaboration
with Toshiro
Mifune, the actor who would spend much of the next two decades playing John
Wayne to
Kurosawa's John Ford. Set in a dilapidated Tokyo neighborhood nowhere near recovered
from
WWII, Angel stars Mifune as a bullying gangster who, wounded in a scuffle,
seeks the care of
a kindhearted, hard-drinking physician (Ikiru star Takashi Shimura).
Once Shimura diagnoses
him with tuberculosis, their lives, and the life of the neighborhood, begin
to undergo a great
upheaval.
A none-too-subtle allegory of post-war Japan--it's not above recruiting
a smiling teen as a symbol of optimism--Angel finds both Kurosawa
and Mifune still harnessing their talents.
Even so, it's effective in its own right and a fascinating preview of films
to come,
featuring themes and elements (a dedicated physician, a neighborhood with a
disease-ridden
swamp) that Kurosawa would later revisit. Tuberculosis, in fact, pops up again
almost
immediately, playing a crucial role in 1950's Scandal, made just prior
to the director's
breakthrough masterpiece Rashomon. In Scandal, Mifune plays an
artist whose friendly
gesture toward a pop singer makes him the focus of an exploitative tabloid story.
Deciding to
take action, he hires a good-natured attorney (Shimura) whose financial problems
and
TB-afflicted daughter make him an easily corrupted target of the opposing side.
In his memoir, Something Like An Autobiography, Kurosawa writes of Drunken Angel,
"I wanted to take a scalpel
and dissect the yakuza." It's easy to get the sense with Scandal
that he felt a similar hatred
toward the tabloids. But what's remarkable about both films, and perhaps most
prescient of
future efforts, is the tremendous sympathy he directs toward his morally conflicted
characters.
Mifune's yakuza lieutenant in Angel and Shimura's corrupt lawyer in Scandal
eventually turn
the films into battles for their souls. By the time Kurosawa made 1955's I
Live In Fear, he'd
earned fame and critical accolades, neither of which won the film much of an
audience outside
Japan. One of Kurosawa's oddest works, it arrived on the heels of The Seven
Samurai, one of
his most immediately accessible. Mifune, almost unrecognizable under layers
of make-up,
stars as a graying patriarch whose fear of nuclear annihilation leads him to
make plans to
move his large family to a farm in Brazil. Thinking his fears irrational, and
expressing grave
concern over the dispensation of his estate, they take him to court and, like
a good judge,
Kurosawa lets both sides exhaust themselves without drawing a premature judgement.
Perhaps
a bit too loose and leisurely to be entirely effective, Fear still offers a
hugely compelling
glimpse at the post-war Japanese mindset, and at the Cold War mindset in general.
It's also a
fine showcase for Kurosawa's nearly unparalleled visual style, and, like its
companions in this
set, a must-see for the director's admirers even if it's not quite among the
very best entries in
his formidable filmography. http://avclub.theonion.com/reviews/cinema/cinema_d/drunkenangel01.html
