Venice Film Festival: Akira Kurosawa: A Century of Cinema International panel moderated by Peter Cowie (6 September)

[Jonathan M Hall]

Dear KineJapanners,

Here are the details of the event Lorenzo mentioned.
The pickings don't seem great for Japanese film this year, although  
Tsukamoto and his film will be there.
Are there any KineJapanners going to Venice?  We could meet and toast  
to ...?

Jonathan




La Biennale di Venezia
66th Venice International Film Festival

Akira Kurosawa: a Century of Cinema
International panel moderated by Peter Cowie (6 September)


To mark the imminent 100th anniversary of his birth, the great Japanese
director Akira Kurosawa will be the subject of the international  
panel that
will be held at the Venice Lido on Sunday September 6, 2009 at 3 pm  
in Sala
Pasinetti (Palazzo del Cinema), organized by the 66th Venice  
International
Film Festival (2-12 September) and moderated by Peter Cowie, film
historian, author and founder of The International Film Guide.

On 23 March 2010 Akira Kurosawa would have been 100 years old. Given  
that
his discovery in the West came as a result of the Golden Lion he won  
at the
1951 Venice Film Festival with Rashomon, and that the festival  
awarded him a
Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 1982, it is significant that his
profile and his achievements as a filmmaker should be discussed in  
Venice
this year.

The participants in the meeting chaired by Peter Cowie (Great  
Britain) will
include some of the world’s best-known experts on Kurosawa’s work,  
such as
Teruyo Nogami (Japan, writer and for many years Kurosawa’s chief  
assistant),
Donald Richie (United States, writer, director and critic, authority  
on the
culture of Japan – where he has been living since 1947 – and author  
of the
‘definitive’ study of Kurosawa, as well as firsthand witness to a
half-century of his activity), Michel Ciment (France, writer and critic,
editor of the magazine Positif), Richard Corliss (United States,  
critic for
the weekly Time) and Aldo Tassone (Italy, critic, director of the France
Cinéma festival and author of several books on Kurosawa).

The panellists will address the multiple aspects of Kurosawa’s figure  
and
work, including: his vision of society and politics; the comparison  
between
Kurosawa and the other great Japanese filmmakers; his relations with  
Eastern
and Western culture (Shakespeare, Gorky, Dostoevsky, van Gogh); the
enthusiastic reception given to Kurosawa by American culture and cinema;
comparisons with other great Japanese auteurs such as Ozu and Mizoguchi;
their numerous remakes; his sources of inspiration in Japanese culture;
Kurosawa’s work on the set; his talent as a painter; his use of  
colour and
music; the difficulty he often had in getting funding for his films in
Japan; his love of history and the lessons that he has offered to  
each new
generation.

Akira Kurosawa (1910-98), was the representative of Japanese cinema
best-known to the rest of the world, in a career that was surprisingly
marked by Western influences, moving from genre to genre for fifty  
years.
The film which won the Golden Lion at Venice, Rashomon (1951), the  
story of
a murder set in the 12th century and told from four different points of
view, made his international reputation as a great artist, opening  
the doors
of the West to other Japanese directors like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji
Mizoguchi. Growing up with an admiration for American cinema,  
Kurosawa took
his inspiration from John Ford for Seven Samurai (1954), which won the
Silver Lion at Venice. Hollywood has repaid the compliment several  
times:
John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960) was an adaptation of Seven
Samurai, while characters in the Star Wars series were inspired by
Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958, Silver Bear at Berlin) and he  
was able
to make his film Kagemusha (1980) thanks to the intercession of  
George Lucas
himself and Francis Ford Coppola. In 1990 Kurosawa was given an Honorary
Academy Award.

Peter Cowie (Great Britain). Critic and cinema historian, he was the  
founder
and editor in 1963 of the International Film Guide. He has written some
thirty books on the cinema, including critical biographies of Ingmar  
Bergman
and Francis Ford Coppola, and appreciations of Louise Brooks and Joan
Crawford. From 1989 to 2000 he was international publishing director of
Variety.  Cowie has lectured on four continents and has been a visiting
professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His study  
of the
work of Kurosawa will appear from Rizzoli in 2010 under the title Akira
Kurosawa: Master of Cinema.

Venice, August 25, 2009


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