AK

[Aaron Gerow]

Here's the draft of a short piece I did for the Daily Yomiuri on very (I 
repeat, very) short notice.  It appeared yesterday.  Not anything I'm 
proud of, but maybe fodder for the discussion mill.

Aaron Gerow


	The master is dead. What can one say?
	When a great artist like Akira Kurosawa dies, there is the usual deluge 
of elegiac profundity praising his immensity and mourning his loss, even 
though that does little to clarify the meaning of his existence.
	Giving an historical accounting of his importance is certainly not 
without merit, and such was the intention behind the government's 
decision to confer upon him posthumously the People's Honor Award, citing 
Kurosawa "for giving self-confidence to Japan after the war" and for 
being "the master who gave birth to the Japanese film world."
	Truly illustrious endeavors, but not really true.  
	There were decades of Japanese film history before Kurosawa, with 
masters like Ozu and Mizoguchi preceding him by far. What Kurosawa did, 
by winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Rashomon, was 
make Japanese cinema known abroad. Yet why must we start the history of 
this film world with its recognition by the West? Kurosawa is revered as 
"sekai no Kurosawa" (the world's Kurosawa), as a Japanese who influenced 
the likes of Spielberg and Lucas, but why must we cite such figures to 
justify his illustriousness? Recalling that Rashomon, which received good 
but not great reviews at home when it first came out, was only lauded 
after its Venice coup, one sees an unfortunate tendency among Japanese to 
depend on a dominant West when judging their own.
	Considering his domestic influence, Kurosawa less gave "self-confidence" 
to Japan, than tried to give it a self. Especially in the immediate 
postwar, when many blamed the lack of "responsible" individuals for 
Japan's blindly collective march towards war, Kurosawa tried to offer 
images of such people in films from Drunken Angel to Ikiru, heroes who 
had a moral sense of self with which to oppose a corrupt society.
	Kurosawa was enough of a modernist to understand the ambiguities 
inherent in this self, either as a result of the moral complexity of 
society (as in Stray Dog, where the villain mirrors the hero) or of 
deeper existential issues (as in Rashomon, where truth itself is 
questioned). 
	His idealism ebbed when it became clear Japan was not ready for his 
humanistic individualism.  His later heroes either went practically 
insane, as in Record of a Living Being, or were snuffed out by a cabal of 
corruption, as in The Bad Sleep Well.  What was left was the black humor 
of Yojimbo or the attempt to locate individualism in the past, as in Red 
Beard.
	What has been lost in all the recent national celebrations of Kurosawa 
is the fact his country largely ignored him after the 1960s.  After his 
suicide attempt in 1971, he had to go to Russia to make Dersu Uzala, and 
most of his last works were dependent upon foreign investment.  It was as 
if Kurosawa, while given lip service at home as a cinematic master, was 
left alone as an artistic self.
	There were reasons his message often fell on deaf ears. If he was called 
"too Western," it was often because his vision of the individual too 
closely resembled Western bourgeois liberalism (with Red Beard being like 
Frank Capra goes to Edo). His love of greater-than-life heroes could 
often seem like a paean to the elite, which in Seven Samurai became a 
nostalgic ode to the samurai. There were also disturbing similarities 
between the individuals in his pro-war propeganda films like The Most 
Beautiful, who lead the masses through superior self-control, and his 
sagacious masters impressing their disciples.
	One wonders if Kurosawa just no longer fit the times. It would be hard 
to mourn him like Sadao Yamanaka, who died in his prime; Kurosawa's last 
works, while not without their merits, were shadows of his early 
masterpieces. One just does not hear many younger filmmakers voicing the 
wish to carry on his message or tradition.
	Yet must Kurosawa be praised only because of past greatness? I think it 
is a cliche to speak of the undying nature of art--history never shows 
such mercy. What lasts the trials of time are those works that can be 
seen anew, that can be reborn amidst new generations.  Shakespeare lived 
on in Kurosawa and so it is important that Kurosawa has been passed on to 
Leone, Sturges and others.
	Possibly a film like Shinji Aoyama's An Obsession is one Japanese 
attempt to rewrite Kurosawa for the future. A remake of Stray Dog, it is 
the product of a different world and as such criticizes Kurosawa's 
humanism, yet not without attempting to translate into contemporary film 
language his basic issue of how to construct the self amidst social human 
relations.
	Kurosawa is dead but he remains to be spoken by newer tongues.