AK

Mark Schilling schill
Fri Sep 18 02:12:37 EDT 1998


From: Mark Schilling <schill at gol.com>
To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Re: Kurosawa
Date: Friday, September 18, 1998

I might as well weigh in with my own piece on Kurosawa for the Japan Times.
It is as general and personal as I could make it. I felt that non-cineaste
readers (i.e., the vast majority) were only dimly aware of his achievement.
The foreign, especially American, obits -- mostly wire story rewrites
introducing Kurosawa to the masses who shy from anything with subtitles --
only strengthed this impression. The situation is better in Japan, but few
filmgoers under thirty, I would bet, have seen more than the unavoidable
masterpieces. My aim was simple: to get as many people as possible to watch
the films.  

	Why did you come to Japan? Hearing that question now, I try to be cute,
saying "This was the first stop on my world tour and I'm still waiting to
make my second." Many years ago, I would try to be honest: I would tell
people that I wanted to see the land of Kurosawa. 
	My experience was utterly typical among boomer film freaks; I saw
"Shichinin no Samurai" (The Seven Samurai) at a student film society
screening and was electrified. By that time, a decade and a half after its
release in 1954, it was considered a classic of world cinema, analyzed by
film scholars frame by frame. I only knew that I was seeing a terrific
entertainment that made medieval samurai warriors as comprehensible to this
Midwestern hick as the cowboys of John Ford. I also knew I was experiencing
visual art as profound as anything ever created for the screen.
	The parallels with Ford's "Stagecoach," another film society perennial,
were obvious; in both a group of strangers found themselves in a desperate
situation in an unfriendly land. Each member of the group may have been a
type -- Takashi Shimura's wise fatherly samurai leader, Claire Trevor's
whore with the heart of gold -- but each also had an integrity that had
nothing to do with formula or convention, everything to do with their
essential humanity, No poses, no neuroses -- what you saw was what you got.
     Both films had an epic sweep and scale born of an outsized talent and
ambition, leavened with a rough masculine humor and a humbling sense of
tragedy. Both tapped into a national mythos -- the cowboy as the loner hero
who upholds justice while disdaining the fetters of civilization, the
samurai as the embodiment of manly virtues, including an utter contempt of
death -- but both also acknowledged its darker side, that the loner dies
alone, that the samurai's noble sacrifice has little meaning in a chaotic
society concerned only with survival. Instead of a monument, he gets a
wind-blown dirt mound, soon to be forgotten
	"Shichinin no Samurai," however, was hardly a Ford homage, though
Kurosawaoften acknowledged his debt to  the American director. No one but
Kurosawacould have filmed the climatic battle in the rain with such
dynamism, such
fluency, such pathos. When Seiji Miyaguchi, playing the silent samurai who
epitomized the warrior's way is killed by a bandit's bullet, not only a
wholly admirable man but an ideal dies. Somehow he stands out from the
hundreds of movie samurai who have since died similar deaths. Somehow his
fall makes the tears start from my eyes every time I see it -- and I have
seen more than half a dozen times.
	The difference is a superbly understated performance and a director who
understands not only the mechanics but the reality of what he is shooting
and who can express that reality with a touch of what can only be called
genius. 
	Then there is Toshiro Mifune, who bursts onto the screen in a way that no
wearer of a ten-gallon hat could ever imagine. Though his ronin Kikuchiyo
begins the film as a grimacing, posturing buffoon who is the object of his
samurai companions' contempt, his strong hunger to prove himself, his
careless bravado and his raw peasant vitality make him a far more complex
and interesting character than the usual comic relief. While most of the
other characters are finished and complete -- they have only to live out
their individual destinies -- he has the potential for growth and change. 
	Kurosawa discovered his star at a Toho "New Faces" audition in 1946.
Mifune had intended to become a cameraman, but his application somehow got
mixed in with 4,000 others in the "New Faces" contest. As Kurosawa recalled
in his memoir "Something Like An Autobiography," actress Hideko Takamine
called him from the set where he was working to see "something really
fantastic." That something was Mifune, reeling around the room in what
Kurosawa described as a "violent frenzy." "It was as frightening as
watching a wounded or trapped savage beast trying to break loose," he
recalled. Fortunately Kurosawa had the presence of mind to get Toho to sign
this "beast" and cast him as a gangster dying of tuberculosis in the 1949
"Yoidore Tenshi" (Drunken Angel). A hit with audiences and critics alike,
this tale of life and death amid the ruins and squalor of early postwar
Japan proved to be breakout film for both actor and director. 
	The sheer physicality, grace, vitality and humor of Mifune's performance
in "Shichinin no Samurai" -- his drilling the hapless peasant recruits with
such hilarious mock ferocity -- make it tempting to compare him to Chaplin
and Keaton. But though comically scruffy and crude, he was also a heroic
figure who gave his own life to revenge the death of Miyaguchi's samurai.
His end is, in its own way, just as heartbreaking.
	The obvious Hollywood parallel, given Kurosawa's Ford connection, was John
Wayne, but in Kikuchiyo and such roles as the bandit Tajomaru in "Rashomon"
and the hired sword Sanjuro in "Yojimbo," Mifune also became the prototype
for a long line of dirty Hollywood heroes, beginning with Clint Eastwood in
the 1964 "Yojimbo" remake "A Few Dollars More" and continuing today with
Bruce Willis's unshaven oil-driller-turned-astronaut in "Armageddon." 
     It would have been impossible to imagine "Shichinin" -- or Kurosawa's
career -- without him. It was one of the great actor-director pairings in
film history, comparable to Wayne and Ford, Marlene Dietrich and Josef von
Sternberg, Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni. Kurosawa, whose
talent was for depicting human beings in the extremity of their passions
and desires, had found an actor who could expresses extremes better than
anyone alive.   
	There were, of course, many more films, both before and after "Shichinin
no Samurai" -- a total of thirty to be exact, seventeen with Mifune, over a
span of fifty years. When he made his first, the 1943 "Sanshiro Sugata," he
was only 33, when he made his last, the 1993, "Madadayo," he was in his
eighties, the last surviving master director of Japanese cinema's Golden
Age.. 
	Born in Tokyo in 1910, the youngest of seven children, Akira Kurosawa grew
up wanting to become a painter. A pacifistic type who hated the military
drilling then compulsory in Japanese schools, he had no intention of
following in the footsteps of his father, a physical education instructor
of samurai background. With the encouragement of charismatic art teacher
named Seiji Tachikawa, he pursued his ambition, entering the Doshusha
School of Western Painting after graduating from middle school -- the
equivalent of today's high school -- in 1927. 
	Another strong influence was his older brother, Heigo, who worked as a
benshi (a narrator for silent films) and led a bohemian life that his
strait-laced father considered scandalous. From him, Kurosawa developed a
love of both films and literature. He was especially fond of the 19th
Century Russians, including Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gorky, and later used
their works as the basis for his films. 
	When his brother committed suicide in 1933, Kurosawa was devastated.
Deciding to find a real job and end his dependence on his parents, in 1936
he took an assistant directors' test at the P.C.L. Studios and passed.
Assigned to the unit of director Kajiro Yamamoto, he found his last and,
some ways, most important sensei. Yamamoto not only freely shared his
knowledge with his young AD and assigned him an ever greater share of
responsibility -- he recognized Kurosawa as a standout from the beginning
-- but encouraged him to write scenarios as a way of breaking into
directing. Kurosawa turned them out at a furious rate, winning praise and
recognition for his talent, including an Education Ministry award. 
	Ironically, his first film, the 1943  "Sugata Sanjuro," was based, not on
an original script, but a novel by Tsuneo Tomita. It was on a "safe"
subject -- the education of a young  judo instructor in the Meiji Period --
which Kurosawa's own scenarios evidently were not. Though exploiting the
dramatic potential of the material to the fullest, including a showdown
scene in the tall grass and moonlight that is still considered one of his
best, Kurosawa filmed the fighting techniques of his characters as
realistically as possible. Thus the parameters of his aesthetic -- visual
intensity and innovation combined with emotional and physical authenticity
-- were already in place. 
	Ironically again, this son of a militarist, who got a zero in his military
education classes for never showing up at the drill field or rifle range,
became best known, both at home and abroad, for his samurai period films,
beginning with "Rashomon" -- the first Japanese film to win a major
international film prize, a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in
1951. This vividly acted and stunningly photographed film about the
unknowability of truth made Kurosawa a hero at home and a celebrity abroad.
His success also confounded the Japanese film industry, which had
considered "Rashomon" "too Japanese" to ever appeal to foreign audiences.
His distributor, Daiei, had not even wanted to enter it in the festival. It
was selected only on the insistence of Guilliana Stramigioli, an Italian
film distributor living in Japan who had the honor of introducing Kurosawa
to the world.
	He scored a critical and commercial success again in 1954 with "Shichinin
no Samurai," though it took a year to shoot and was the most expensive film
ever made in Japan. Like a later director who went millions over the budget
making a film about a sinking ship, Kurosawa was roundly criticized by the
local media for arrogance and extravagance. He was stuck was a nickname he
grew to hate: Tenno or Emperor. He returned the antipathy -- and had the
last laugh when the film was later voted in critics' poll as one of the ten
best of all time. 
	Likewise popular was the 1958 "Kakushi Toride no San-Akunin" (The Hidden
Fortress), with its fairy tale save-the-princess story line, was the
closest Kurosawa ever came to sheer entertainment. Packed with droll comedy
and slambang action, it was an irresistibly enjoyable film that became an
enormous hit in Japan and later served as the inspiration for "Star Wars"
-- the two robots being taken from two bumbling peasants in the film. 
	Another well remembered period drama hit was the 1961 "Yojimbo,"
Kurosawa's attempt to make a black comic Eastern Western. Toshiro Again
playing a ronin in need of a shower and a shave, Mifune strides into a
lawless town where two feuding factions are both looking for a hired sword.
Seeing that both sides are equally bad, the crafty Mifune decides to pit
them against each other, while collecting from both and doing as little
real work as he can get away with. The story is brilliant, the comedy,
hilarious, the execution perfect. It became the number one hit of the year
in Japan and was later remade in the West, first as "Fistful of Dollars,"
the Sergio Leone spaghetti Western that propelled Clint Eastwood to
stardom, and most recently by Walter Hill's 1996 "Last Man Standing," with
the setting changed to the modern American Southwest and Bruce Willis
playing the Mifune role. 
	But though his period dramas from the fifties and sixties may have defined
the essence of Kurosawa for the Japanese mass audience and much of the
outside world as well, he was far more various. A fundamentally serious man
who believed that cinema, as a popular medium, should address major themes
of both topical urgency and universal importance, he made films set in
present-day Japan dealing with everything from postwar alienation and
confusion (Yoidore Tenshi, 1948) to the terror of atomic war (Ikimono no
Kiroku [Record of a Living Being], 1955), corporate corruption (Warui Yatsu
Hodo Yoku Nemuru [The Bad Sleep Well]) and the difficulty of living a
meaningful life (Ikiru, 1951). The last is Kurosawa's greatest triumph
among his modern dress films, with Takashi Shimura portraying a bureaucrat
dying of cancer, who finds redemption only in working unselfishly for
others. By turns an expose of the bureaucratic mind set, an examination of
a dysfuntional family and the story of an ordinary man's confrontation with
his own end -- and his colleagues' willful misunderstanding of his
sacrifice, "Ikiru" has a formal beauty and emotional power that raise it
far above the run of its countless cinematic imitators and descendants. The
scene of the about-to-die Shimura sitting on a swing and singing a
melancholy song in the snow is among the most quoted in Japanese films, but
the original image is still the most poignant -- it numbers  among the
moments of what Kurosawa called "real cinema" that he spent his lifetime
seeking. 
	From his mid-fifties to mid-sixties, Kurosawa underwent a shattering
crisis of confidence, falling out with Mifune during the two-year shoot of
"Akahige" (Red Beard, 1965), the last film they were to make together, and
being fired by 20th Century Fox after disputes over the Japanese portion of
"Tora Tora Tora," a turgid war epic about the events leading up to the
attack on Pearl Harbor. Finally, in 1971, after the commercial failure of
"Dodeskaden," a highly stylized, episodic drama about the lives of Tokyo
slum dwellers, Kurosawa tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists. 
     He survived but was now unfinanciable in Japan. Notorious for going
over the budget and schedule -- he could keep cast and crew waiting for
hours, if not days, for the perfect cloud formation -- he had become an
expensive liability at a time when television was devastating studio bottom
lines. His comeback film, the 1975 "Derzu Ursala," was made on location in
Russia, with a Russian cast and crew and the backing of Mosfilm. It won him
his second Academy Award -- his first had been for "Rashomon" -- but he
still could not find  work in his home country. 
	Once again his foreign admirers came to the rescue. At the urging of
George Lucas and Francis Copolla, Twentieth Century Fox partly funded
"Kagemusha," an epic about battling warlords in 16th Century. Released in
Japan in 1980 by Toho, the film grossed $10 million and restored his
reputation, but compared with the period dramas of his peak years,
"Kagemusha" was static and mannered, as though Kurosawa had spent all those
years filming it in his head (and making hundreds of continuity drawings
for it), while slowly losing its narrative pulse and drive.  
	In 1985, with the backing of French producer Serge Silberman, Kurosawa
released "Ran," a period retelling of "King Lear" that was, at nearly $10
million, the most expensive Japanese movie ever made. "Ran" became an
international success, setting a US box office record for a Japanese film
not broken until 1997 by "Shall We Dance?" The film has magnificent set
pieces, including the climatic burning of the mad lord's castle, but they
seem to stand in isolation -- paintings in a series.    
	In his later years, Kurosawa changed direction yet again, from big-budget
monument building to gentle-spirited reflections on the meaning of all,
including the 1990 "Yume" (Dreams) and the 1991 "Hachigatsu no Rhapsody"
(Rhapsody in August). Though condemned by some critics as "geriatric
cinema," these films contained characteristic Kurosawa moments, such as the
hauntingly beautiful fox wedding in "Yume" and the heart-breaking climatic
run in the rain in "Hachigatsu no Rhapsody." He was also showered with
honors, including a 1990 Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
	After his 30th film, the 1993 "Madadayo," quickly disappeared from
Japanese screens, Kurosawa was once again found himself unbankable in
Japan. Refusing to be discouraged, he began writing a script for his next
film. Titled "Umi wa Miteita" (The Ocean Was Watching) it was to be the
first since the 1944 "Ichiban Utsukushiku" (The Most Beautiful) centered on
its female characters -- Edo-era prostitutes. He died, however, before he
could bring it into production.       
      "My movies are like my children," he once told me. "I love them all,
though I feel more affection for the failures. It's like they say -- you
love your wayward children the best. But when I'm asked which film is my
favorite, I always say my next one.
Potters never feel that they have made the perfect piece, no matter how
good it is -- they always want to make something better. I'm the same way
-- I'm never satisfied."     
     







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