By Alex Hudson
August 26, 2002
In 1971, deeply depressed and in faulty health, Akira Kurosawa attempted suicide. In the previous eight years, Kurosawa had slaved over making but two films - Red Beard and Dodesukaden - and both films were loathed by critics and financially disastrous. And although Kurosawa was revered worldwide, his Japanese homeland viewed him indifferently, or worse, with disgust.
The Last Emperor
Kurosawa lived and made three consecutive masterpieces; three brilliantly grand and madly ambitious epics that attest to human survival and resiliency. Dersu Uzala, Kagemusha and Ran reveal an artist at absolute peak form, an artist with hardened inner wisdom, an artist who knows more than his viewer, and an artist who has looked firmly into the eyes of the abyss and survived.
Affectionately called The Emperor by his crews, Akira Kurosawa applied unrivaled passion to lovingly and meticulously craft each of his thirty films. While making Ran, Kurosawa was unsatisfied with the look of a particular scene and decided that the grass was not vivid enough. He painted the grass, blade by blade. Kurosawa would wait hours, or even days, for the right cloud formation to form before shooting. But more than purely a master visualist, Kurosawa's work teems with meaning, insight; his films are above all meditations on the complexity of human nature.
Samurai's Son
Born to a country that expected total discipline, and born to a samurai class that demanded total perfection, Akira Kurosawa had no margin for error, and thusly developed an air of superiority despite flirtations with levity. Kurosawa's lifespan overlapped much of a century of upheaval in Japan. At 13, he watched streets littered with rotting human carcasses. In the aftermath of a particularly devastating earthquake, Akira's elder brother forced him to look, eyes wide open, at the carnage and burn the images of smoldering human remains into his mind, reasoning to his younger brother that if he could face the grimmest of realities, head on, any of life's future difficulties would be approached fearlessly.
Lacking career focus and, as a result, ambition, Kurosawa decided to apply for a position at Toho Studios, one of Japan's preeminent film studios. He had a fondness for drawing, and figured he could parlay his artistic acumen onto the production side of filmmaking. Toho accepted Kurosawa and immediately integrated him into their broad apprenticeship system. Basically a more rigid form of the bygone American studio system, the Japanese studios groomed potential directors, editors, and craftsmen by thrusting them onto as many film productions as possible, gradually elevating the artisans who proved themselves worthy.
Kurosawa assistant directed over 25 films before being elevated to director. His debut was Sugata Sanshiro, a fitting first effort about a young man learning the art of judo, and by extension, the art of life. As adept as any debut, Sugata Sanshiro is skillful and effortless, the work of a natural-born filmmaker.
Nation in Ruins
The eight subsequent films to Sugata Sanshiro possess hints of genius but are ultimately infrequently effective, undoubtedly curtailed and hindered by the acceleration of the Second World War. For a country that loathed change, the wholesale radical changes afflicted upon the Empire of the Sun were nothing short of catastrophic. The country emerged scathed and Kurosawa emerged hardened.
Kurosawa's immediate post-war efforts are noticeably darker; the flurry of ideas that were postulated and held dormant mid-war came cathartically pouring outwards. Stray Dog is the first of Kurosawa's masterworks and the first of his films to clearly define the dichotomy which would dominate his work; namely, the contrast between the despair of the powerless and the corruption of the powerful.
A gripping noir, Stray Dog marked Kurosawa's third collaboration with actor Toshirô Mifune, and the film represents Kurosawa's and Mifune's maturation as artists as well as the crystallization of the symbiotic merging of their talents. The two would develop a rapport as strong as any director and actor bond before or since, the equivalent or better of Wilder and Lemmon, Ford and Wayne, Scorsese and DeNiro, Welles and Welles.
In Stray Dog, Mifune plays Murukami, a young homicide detective who has his gun stolen. In ravaged Tokyo, a city of ruin just beginning to rebuild itself, guns are scarce and vice abounds. Murukami knows that his thief will soon become a killer, and his stolen gun will be the killing weapon. Guilt and shame wrack his being, and Murukami plunges into the underworld to hunt the stray dog of the title. He becomes obsessed with the chase, losing himself fully, and not until he finds the thief does he realize that he and the thief are two sides of the same coin, merely on different ends of circumstance. Pursuer and pursued; who is the real stray dog?
A year after Stray Dog, Kurosawa made Rashomon. Rashomon is the simple story of the rape of a woman and the killing of her husband. Kurosawa tells the story in four flashbacks. Each flashback tells a different account of what happened, with each of the four storytellers enhancing his place and role in the story. Rashomon is a grand statement on the subjectivity of truth, and the resulting fraudulence of perceived truth as a means of reshaping reality to best suit one's position within it. Rashomon put Kurosawa on the map. Rashomon put Japanese cinema on the map.
Dregs of Society
Increasingly, the Kurosawa protagonist is either a pitiful, tragic fool or a venal, mad tyrant. All are doomed to suffer. But whether shunned or adored by society, both the fool and tyrant are distanced from society; longing, smoldering, scheming, failing. Kurosawa's attraction to the nobility of the miserable is clear in his over-literal translation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. Though a ruinous failure, The Idiot is a precursor to The Lower Depths and Dodesukaden in Kurosawa's intention to create an excessively bleak environment to represent and mirror the mental bleakness of a defeated soul.
The Lower Depths and Dodesukaden are unrelenting looks at human misery. They are wallowing doses of the depressive side of Kurosawa's personality, just as Throne of Blood, Seven Samurai, and Kagemusha are thundering outbursts of his manic side. Kurosawa's masterpieces tiptoe between the worlds of the powerful and the powerless, the rich and poor, until this nebulous balance shatters when worlds begrudgingly collide. In his contemporary-set Ikiru, and later in High and Low, Kurosawa negotiates this balance flawlessly, satiating his social conscious while making taut, affecting dramas.
Shakespeare in Blood
Cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare rarely, if ever, work. Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Ran are not only two glaring exceptions, they are two of the finest films ever made. Though still faithful to their sources, Macbeth and King Lear, respectively, Throne of Blood and Ran transport Shakespeare's stories of grand malice to medieval Japan while integrating Kurosawa's visual mastery and thematic obsessions.
Kurosawa's interest in Western writers - Shakespeare, Evan Hunter, Dashiell Hammett - was the ultimate reason he alienated his peers and homeland; they thought his tastes too Western. Yet this belies the absolute reverence Kurosawa had for his country. Bittersweetly ironic, Kurosawa's contemporary dramas and historical epics would give Western audiences perhaps their fullest, most elaborate portraits of Japanese culture and history.
The Next World Has to be Better Than This One
In 1971, deeply depressed and in faulty health, Akira Kurosawa attempted suicide. He slashed his throat six times and his wrists eight. After putting his country on the cinematic map, and after making masterpiece after masterpiece, Kurosawa could not get funding to make a film.
He survived, recovered and received Soviet funding to make Dersu Uzala. Shot in Siberia, the film took four years to make. Dersu Uzala was an aborigine hunter-trapper who lived in eastern Siberia. Dersu saves a Russian explorer, Captain Vladimir Arseniev; the film is based on Arseniev's autobiographical In the Jungles of Ussuri. Dersu teaches Arseniev how to survive the unforgiving wasteland, and the two men soon develop a profound bond of friendship. In grace and simplicity, Dersu Uzala is Kurosawa's most mature film, a hauntingly beautiful and moving document of human survival.
In his reflective Something Like an Autobiography, published in 1982, Kurosawa overflows with warmth and humility, a contrast to his exacting and dictatorial presence assumed on set. Like most of the greats, Akira Kurosawa's final few films are unspectacular. His last film, Madadayo, was completed in 1993. It is not a particularly good film, but it is an apt bookend to Sugata Sanshiro, his debut. Whereas Sugata - and Kurosawa by extension - was a young student of life, just learning his craft, the protagonist of Madadayo, Professor Hyakken, is an old teacher of life, sharing his wisdom. Kurosawa lived in his creations; he was his protagonists.
Akira Kurosawa towered above the towers of cinema. His image was drenched in meaning, vastness. Kurosawa's films are not to be watched, they are to be absorbed; slowly inhaled, the engrossing aroma of richness and depth overtaking the senses. His epics were epic yet deeply personal. Kurosawa showed man at his most corrupt and at his most vulnerable and in the end, there wasn't much difference.
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