Rashomon, 1950, Kurosawa Akira

Kurosawa Akira
The Complete Works

December 1 to January 9, 2005

 

Long before his death at the age of 88, Kurosawa Akira was called tenno in his country – the last Emperor of cinema. He was granted what only few filmmakers were able to achieve: being perceived to an equally high degree by the general public and by art historians, critics and philosophers. And even fewer non-Western artists can boast (or bemoan) the fact that their name evokes an entire universe in the imagination of the public, a universe which is included in the Western canon without hesitation.

 

Both were and are the case with the director of Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Kagemusha. Ever since his "breakthrough success" in the West in the early 1950s, the Japanese artist Kurosawa has been considered a central figure in the popular history of world cinema.

 

At the same time, for both financial and legal reasons, his works are rarely seen in European movie theatres today. While the reputation of his older colleagues Ozu and Mizoguchi continues to grow, and while many other Japanese masters are slowly being discovered in the West, there is now the danger of an entire generation studying the film medium without having had the "Kurosawa Experience".

 

In the area of film education, this experience is roughly comparable to one’s first encounter with Van Gogh or John Coltrane in the course of mastering other disciplines: it works like a sudden, blinding flash of lightning, and it instantly kindles a passion.

 

In order to make such experiences possible once again, the Film Museum will present Kurosawa's complete works for the first time in Austria since the 1980s. They comprise 31 films, created between 1943 and 1993: samurai epics and contemporary films; subjects snatched from newspaper headlines and carefully crafted adaptations of literature – all spread between realism and extreme stylization. Kurosawa is the "large form" (Deleuze) and the deep breath, a cinema of wide-open spaces and precise action.

 

But it is also a cinema of moral considerations and decisions, shaped by questions of power, humanity, masculinity. At its centre are the interplay of serenity and violence; and the rituals and forms which need to be preserved or shattered.

 

Kurosawa, who was born in Tokyo in 1910, came from an old samurai family whose traditions played a determining role in his early education. His attitude towards his father, admiring and distanced at the same time, is reflected frequently in his works, such as in the ambiguity towards the Bushido, the samurai's code of ethics.

 

Kurosawa went to high school in Tokyo, and then plunged into an "artist's life". He studied art history, joined the "Japanese Group of Proletarian Artists", and became an avid reader of world literature. The Russian authors, primarily the world view of Dostoyevsky, would leave a clear mark in his later work.

 

Unsatisfied with his work as a magazine illustrator, he wrote a polemic on cinema in 1936 ("The Fundamental Shortcomings of Japanese Films"). The same year, he was hired by Toho as an assistant director. With few exceptions, he was to remain faithful to the Toho studio until the 1960s.

 

His début as director, Sugata Sanshiro (Judo Saga), was already a mature film and enjoyed immediate success with both critics and the public. Following this, Kurosawa came up with a series of "Neorealistic" masterpieces about post-war Japanese society: films like Nora inu (Stray Dog) and Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel) which precisely characterized this "confused and depraved era" (as his film Shubun put it in 1950) thanks to their powerful imagery and vehement social criticism.

 

The 1950s brought Kurosawa a string of worldwide successes: Rashomon, Ikiru (Living), Shichinin no Samurai (The Seven Samurai), Donzoko (The Lower Depths), and Kumonosu-jo (Throne of Blood). They made Kurosawa and his favourite actor, Mifune Toshiro, the first emissaries of Japanese cinema in the West.

 

Kurosawa’s reputation as the "most Western" director in Japan dates from this period, but it is mainly due to the fact that he frequently adapted works of European literature (Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Gorki); inversely, his samurai films became a strong stimulus for directors such as Sergio Leone and John Sturges who remade them in the shape of Westerns.

 

It was Kurosawa himself who first countered this reputation, and for good reasons. His specifically Japanese conception of the image, the manifold treatment of Japanese cultural traditions and the reference to concrete topics of Japanese society show him to be a storyteller who regularly aims for the "universal" on the basis of his (and Japan’s) very specific cultural and social concerns. Kurosawa's later works demonstrate the enormous scale of this artistic logic.

 

They include such influential morality tales as Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) and Tsubaki Sanjuro, contemporary thrillers and extremely intimate films (such as his very last works Rhapsody in August and Madadayo), as well as the dreamlike, highly stylized “spectacles” like Kagemusha, Ran and Dreams. In order to realize these later works, Kurosawa accepted the financial support of his American admirers Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg.

 

Kurosawa, the "Last Emperor", almost reached the year 2000 both in his life and his oeuvre. Now it's time to preserve his "empire", which reaches beyond any cultural or national boundaries – it can only be realized in the dreamspace of cinema.