|
The Director's Heart: Akira Kurosawa, 1910-1998
Carmen Ficarra
 The
essence of a director is more than the sum of his skills; it's in the stories
he chooses to tell. Throughout 50 years of filmmaking, Akira Kurosawa's
reputation as a superior craftsman was never in dispute. It's as evident in
the panoramic sweep of his battle scenes as it is in the poetic grace with
which he could denote the passage of time. But his enthusiasm for the
possibilities of his art went beyond a mastery of technique. Kurosawa, who
died in September of a stroke at the age of 88, saw film as a dynamic and
versatile language with which he could praise the forces of nature, decry the
evils of man, shed light on the problems of his country, and celebrate the
resilience of the spirit.
"The root of any film project for me is
this inner need to say something," he once wrote. Whether a samurai epic or
a modern detective story, what he had to say always revolved around the
conflicts that thrived in the hearts of his characters: dreams vs. duty; honor
vs. self-interest; nobility vs. survival. In each of his 30 films he gave voice
to these elemental struggles-the tug-of-war in the soul of life out of which all
things flow.
With the acclaim that followed the international
release of his masterpiece Rashomon in 1951, and The Seven Samurai three years
later, Kurosawa became better known in the West than any other Japanese
filmmaker. His popularity awakened the rest of the world to Japan's film
industry, while eliciting respect and homage for his own work from filmmakers
abroad. The Seven Samurai inspired The Magnificent Seven in 1960, while another
samurai film, Yohimbo (itself based on Dashiell Hammett's "Red
Harvest") was the basis for Sergio Leone's 1964 western, A Fistful of
Dollars. While a handful of Japanese critics frowned on Kurosawa's kinship with
American westerns and film noir, the director considered the opportunity to link
together traditions as culturally distinct as the Japanese Noh play and the
American gangster film part of the power and pleasure of making movies.
Dreams
"I am a man who likes Sotatsu, Gyokudo and
Tessai in the same way as Van Gogh, Lautrec and Rouault," he told his
critics. "In short, the Western and the Japanese live side-by-side in my
mind naturally, without the least sense of conflict."
He was born in 1910, in Tokyo's Omori district,
the youngest of eight children. His father, a teacher, took his family to the
movies often because-contrary to the opinions of his fellow teachers-he believed
they had "educational value." Although the young Kurosawa would later
frequent the silent-movie house where his older brother Heigo worked as a benshi,
narrating foreign films for audiences, he considered movies little more than a
pleasant diversion. His own artistic aspirations were as a painter. Although he
failed the entrance exam to art school at 17, he painted on his own and was good
enough to have two of his works exhibited.
For a while he led a bohemian life, painting and
sketching, immersing himself in the writings of Dostoevsky and Gorki (whose
works he would later film), and living cheaply with friends whose leftist
activities occasionally drew the wrath of the police. Kurosawa's own politics
were less dogmatic. He was an artist first-albeit an increasingly frustrated
one, unable to break through to what he felt was a strong personal style.
Dreams
By the age of 22, he wrote in his 1982 memoir,
Something Like an Autobiography, "I lost confidence in my abilities, and
the act of painting became painful for me." After working a few years as a
commercial artist, he answered an ad placed by the Photo Chemical Laboratory, a
new film company looking for assistant directors. Applicants were to submit an
essay on "the fundamental deficiencies" of Japanese films and what
they'd do to correct them. The assignment, Kurosawa later admitted, appealed to
his "sense of mischief." Inspired as well by the memory of his brother
Heigo (he'd committed suicide three years earlier, after the advent of talking
pictures had eliminated the need for benshi,), the keen-witted 25-year-old
Kurosawa, who'd spent so much of his leisure time watching films, wrote the
essay that was to launch him into the world of making them. His earliest
successes were as a screenwriter, winning two awards from the Ministry of
Education before directing his first feature in 1943. Based on a novel about the
origins of judo, Sanshiro Sugata focuses on the relationship between a student
and his teacher. "I like unformed characters," Kurosawa said at the
age of 72. "This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still
unformed myself." The beginner "entering the path to perfection"
was one of his favorite themes. His best treatment of it is the poignant and
intricately constructed Ikiru (1952), the tale of a dying civil servant
determined to do something meaningful with his final days. A story of spiritual
rebirth, Kurosawa also made Ikiru to criticize the disregard Japanese
bureaucrats had for the people they were hired to serve.
Kurosawa believed the director's role
encompassed every aspect of production, from coaching the actors to mixing the
sound. While his painter's sensibilities were responsible for the stunning
visuals that many regard as his claim to genius, he was also an excellent editor
with an intuition for rhythm and timing. (1963's High and Low contains some of
his finest work in this area.) On all his productions, he'd do a nightly
rough-cut of each day's shooting to give himself, his cast and crew an immediate
idea of the direction a film was taking.
Akira Kurosawa
His grasp of all the aspects of film reached its
first zenith in The Seven Samurai, Kurosawa's personal rebellion against the
"wholesome" oversimplicity which he felt characterized most Japanese
films. For Samuari's monumental battle sequences, which he knew would be
impossible to match-cut in the way he envisioned them, he used three cameras
running simultaneously:
"I put the A camera in the most orthodox
positions, used the B camera for quick, decisive shots and the C camera as a
kind of guerrilla unit." He would continue to make use of this technique
for the remainder of his career, even in films where the action level was low,
because he found it allowed his cast to be more natural. "With multiple
moving cameras," he pointed out, "the actor has no time to figure out
which one is shooting him.
Kurosawa could be a tough man to work for,
storming off projects when things didn't suit him, and having sets torn down if
the slightest detail was wrong. He treated his actors gently, yet could demand
Promethean efforts of them as well, as during the filming of Throne of Blood
(1957), when he insisted that Toshiro Mifune wear a protective vest and be shot
with real arrows.
 He
was no more demanding on his cast and crew than he was on himself. In 1970,
after years of difficulty raising money for his projects, he made Dodes'kaden,
about the inhabitants of a Tokyo slum. The film, though one of his most
heartfelt, got tepid reviews and, for the first time in his career as a
director, lost money. The following year, despondent and suffering from a
chronic stomach ailment, he attempted suicide by slashing himself 22 times on
the arms, hands and neck. Discovered by his maid in a blood-filled bathtub, he
eventually recovered not only his health and spirits, but his career. In 1972 he
received an offer from the Soviet Union to write and direct anything he liked.
The resulting project, Dersu Uzala, took four years to complete, and won an
Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. He would make five more films before he
died. Among them, Ran (1985) and Dreams (1990) stand out as two of the most
visually arresting of all time.
Kurosawa's staff sometimes referred to him as
kaze-otoko, or "wind man." The name dates back to his first
directorial effort, Sanshiro Sugata. The final sequence, a magnificently staged
fight to the death between two martial-arts masters, takes place in a wind-swept
field in which the combatants are all but obscured by the tall, swaying grasses
that envelop them. The human drama Kurosawa creates by allowing us only a few
glimpses of the fighters' flying limbs is enhanced, then ultimately dwarfed, by
the overpowering presence of the punishing wind with which they both must
contend.
In this one scene, barely five minutes of film,
Kurosawa shows us that the greatness which would follow over the next
half-century-the fluency with visual images, the instinct for knowing whether to
make a scene unfold, or explode had already taken root. And it's here that he
begins to explore the relationship that would fascinate him for the rest of his
career, the one between man and nature.
In all of his films, Kurosawa delighted in
framing his characters against vast backdrops of sky-not merely for the beauty
shot, but to contrast the scope of man's endeavors with the enormity of the
world around him. Likewise, it is hard to think of another director who managed
to use rain with such success as both a narrative and pictorial device. It
provides the veil of uncertainty through which much of Rashomon is told; carries
us into the netherworld in the opening segment of Dreams; engulfs the savage
necessity of the climactic battle in The Seven Samurai. It's easy to come away
from Kurosawa's films with renewed awe for the power and magnitude of nature. If
we allow them to show us, in nature's beauty and terror, in its ability to
destroy and restore, a perfect reflection of ourselves, then we'll begin to have
some understanding of what was in the director's heart all along.
Courtesy of the MovieMaker Magazine Website
www.moviemaker.com
|
|
