Posted on 07/09/2022 7:41:02 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Akira Kurosawa may be one of cinema's more humane filmmakers. While he did see a lot of sadness and injustice in the world, and would address those issues in his films, few of his works skewed full-bore into cynicism. Often, wicked characters would face retribution for their actions -- seen most notably in Kurosawa's Shakespeare adaptations "Throne of Blood" (1957), "The Bad Sleep Well" (1960), "Kagemusha" (1980), and "Ran" (1985) -- but more often, their moral fall was depicted as a great, tragic failing of the world. He looked and saw people, not archetypes. If one sees archetypes in Kurosawa movies, it's probably because he originated many of them. It was only with his outlandish Old West-inflected samurai films "Yojimbo" (1961) and its sequel "Sanjuro" (1962) that Kurosawa would allow himself to dip into his own version of adolescent misanthropy.
Because of his focus on the more human aspects of his movies, Kurosawa rarely bends full-bore into the fantastical or the artificial; "Throne of Blood" is his only film with out-and-out supernatural elements (the ghost in "Rashomon" was arguably the medium playacting) and his films only became more stylized and colorful ("Ran," "Dreams") late in his career. When Kurosawa worked with actors, he endeavored to keep their experience organic and natural, breaking down as much artificiality as possible.
This got Kurosawa in a small amount of trouble from time to time, as he was occasionally criticized for making his sets too big and elaborate. In his 1983 autobiography "Something Like an Autobiography," Kurosawa explained that it was his aim of connecting with actors that kept his set design as complicated as it was.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doaQC-S8de8
I enjoyed Dersu Uzala immensely and recommend it.
I concur. Such a film.
THE SEVEN SAMURAI will never be surpassed.
I saw it on the big screen right before the COVID lockdown. Really a one-of-a-kind movie.
American films were generally that way under the Hays Code which stipulated the antagonists in a film had to reap the consequences of their bad actions, either being killed, caught, or at a minimum, undergoing repentance and atonement.
One criticism of Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart's, "It's A Wonderful Life," is that it was in violation of this element of the code, in that Mr. Potter never faced repercussions for his greed and theft of George Bailey's money.
Kurosawa was the Japanese John Ford.
Because of the indelible images on his movies, Americans see the Old West through the eyes of John Ford (who, ironically, was mimicking the imagery of Frederick Remington). By the same token, the world sees Medieval Japan through the eyes of Akira Kurosawa.
You haven’t seen SNL’s lost ending to “It’s A Wonderful Life”, have you ? ;-D
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