For his birthday week, we here at MovieJawn are celebrating the work of Akira Kurosawa! Check out all of the pieces here.

by Éireann Mannino, Contributor

At this juncture, the only viable contribution to the discourse on Akira Kurosawa, one of the most celebrated, analyzed and discussed filmmakers of all time, is perhaps the personal one, the anecdotal, the memorial. How we come to know a great filmmaker can sometimes be the only means of breaking new ground because it celebrates the liminal space wherein we and the artist indirectly interact, a conversation held at 24 frames per second. Filmmakers make films, and they flicker before our eyes, but truly nothing in our experience happens outside of our own consciousness, thus they flicker behind our eyes as well. The sensual and transpositional experience that we call a film happens within each of us and thus we, as essential as the lamp or the lens, each embody a cinematic work when we watch. The poetry of some films never leave us, and the context of that encounter becomes the stage of our merging into that poetry.

The anecdotal framework allows me to broach the ostensible divide in Kurosawa‘s career, that of black and white and color, with his color works looming large in my initial impressions of “cinema” and “film” being distinct from “movies” over all. This paradigm shift, upon which Kurosawa would never renege, neatly defines two significant eras of his creativity and it does so along a reasonable threshold of early-to-mid, and mid-to-late career, albeit that the proportion of prolificacy favors his first 30 years. AK’s sheer elevation and evolution in craft upon entering the realm of color, ever the painter, make the sparsity of his last 23 years, constrained by critical and institutional backlash and neglect but expansive of visual ideas, all the more weighted for parity. He wasted no time wading gently into the spectrum, but would dive into the deep end as anyone who has seen even one minute of his chromatic debut Dodes’ka Den (1970) can attest.

Within this clean divide from monochromatic to color, we can also ascertain where Kurosawa’s heart and sympathy lay, which as his career pressed onward, seemed to lean in the opposite direction of his peer Ozu’s increasing condolences for the postwar youth, as he favored the old or the aging character at the mercy of unmitigated change. Kurosawa explored the trauma of modernization, westernization, nuclearization and war that had a profound effect on the Japan he knew, and did so with an increasingly experimental flare. Having been born even before WWI, his heart knew better how to bear the tragedy and inevitability in entropy, more than he knew how to alight with youthful optimism. It was no wonder that vibrant color would allow Kurosawa to inversely explore new depths of darkness.   

THERE HAS TO BE A FIRST

It is no exaggeration to say that Kurosawa is the reason I love cinema. In no small way, he is the one who opened me to the profundity and possibilities of the medium as a form of art and ideation. At the age of 11, confronted with one of his most richly realized visions, I learned more than can be expressed in mere words, so I present here the bare architecture of that encounter.

We had only had a VHS player for a short while when my father brought home AK’s Dreams on VHS from Hollywood Video. Then obsessed with the Star Wars Trilogy, I wouldn’t be aware of the significance of the relationship between Lucas and Kurosawa for many years, but it was a subtext I cannot deny, that unbeknownst to me perhaps smoothed the transition in my awareness from west to east. I found myself transfixed by the watercolor-esque image of a young person amid a vast blooming field of flowers and a fading rainbow arcing across a deep blue sky. It remains a singularly satisfying and beguiling image, contains some small underpinnings of terror in its beauty. I was transported before we ever hit the play button, the trifecta of one-word critical appraisals, “Enchanting” “Striking” and “Glorious” quickening my pulse. On the back of the box too, I noticed the curious string of words “Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams is presented in ‘matted' widescreen format preserving the original aspect ratio of its theatrical presentation.” Suddenly the term “aspect ratio” became important to me, and would never cease to be. This alone, a message written in a little box under the summary” consecrated my early appreciation of the preservation of an artists’s vision, that a “work” is the result of a series of decisions and intentions that needed to be protected, and that something significant is to be gleaned from seeing a film in its original shape. Looking back, I cannot conjure a more impactful and influential encounter with an artistic object in my entire life.

MAN IS A GENIUS WHEN HE IS DREAMING

Yume (Dreams, 1990) as it is known in Japan, became “Akira Kurosawa‘s Dreams” for its US release. Already his fifth work in color, Dreams marks the first script AK had penned alone in over 40 years, thus the authorship of the title is an apt and wholesome one. In any case, it introduced me to the concept of auteurism, and made Kurosawa my north star of “artistic vision”. Dreams is the first Japanese film, indeed the first foreign and subtitled film I had ever seen, thus bursting the bubble of my yet isolated view and challenging my trained western aestheticism.

An omnibus film, Dreams is a series of eight distinct vignettes that explore a dreamworld of parables and flights of fancy and of caution that span generations. These eight stories, so potent and vivid in their expression, so distilled in their natures and elements, left an immeasurable impact on my imagination so as to be inextricable from me entirely to this day. Dreams also set a fairly high standard, within and without the master’s oeuvre. This was Kurosawa with all his wits and wisdom about him as well as his newfound sense of artistic play, blending joy and hazard, sorrow and jubilation, nature and spirit that few of his other works manage with such presence.

What this also means, is that the first Kurosawa film I ever saw was a late Kurosawa, indeed a proper late Kurosawa, being one of his last films. I would repeat this pattern when I introduced myself to Ozu via his unexpectedly final work Sanma No Aji (An Autumn Afternoon). The first of three conclusive works made in as many years between ’90 and ’93 (Dreams, Rhapsody in August, Madadayo), Dreams sparked off a relative burst of activity, feeling like a return to the quickstep pace of his 40’s, 50’s and 60’s stretch of well financed back-to-back productions. Major studios like Shochiku, Toho and Daiei, perhaps enamored of the more sympathetically humanistic and less critical tones in his last two scripts, softened their own critique and made sure the master’s visions could be realized.   

WALKING OUT OF THE TUNNEL

If late Kurosawa bears a kind of lightness, it is only because Kurosawa had already taken us to hell, to the darkest and dingiest corners of society, to the slums and to the brink of apocalypse, to the depths of apathy, the primal edges of the human animal, the densest realms of greed and rage, and into nightmares. With his final cinematic gestures, deep breaths of life in full color, he seemingly rediscovered the splendid and rounded sort of humanity that made Seven Samurai so intimate and endearing despite its scale and violence. The final three works, brighter in nature as they may appear, still contain their own sense of danger and tragedy, and play with quieter kinds of unrest, but find pathways toward catharsis. What strikes so deeply is the persistent sincerity and incredibly honed technique of these works. His confidence had never had such lightness of touch, and it moves by measure of that softness. 

Seeing the master’s final film, Madadayo, as an ostensible adult, in the same living room I had, as a child, seen Dreams (my first Kurosawa) made for a powerful and circuitous experience. The knowledge that I had reached the end of an oeuvre, that no new works would follow, resonated deeply in me. The tragedy was only that felt suddenly as if I could grasp the size and shape of AK’s career, which had always seemed like a vast landscape with a hazy horizon that bled into the sky. Suddenly, it seemed like a limited thing, limited to 31 films. However that sadness gave way to a kind of solace, because I also knew that I would never tire of them, and I would never actually reach that horizon, not by miles.