Observations On Film Art - Kurosawa's Early Spring - Bordwell

18/01/12 Observations on film art : Kurosawas early spring
1/25 www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2009/12/08/kurosawas-early-spring/

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A quick note
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Kurosawas early spring
Tuesday | December 8, 2009 open printable version
The Most Beautiful (1944).
Fo Donald Richie
DB here:
Cinephile communities arent free of peer pressure. Sometimes you must choose or be thought a waffler. In
postwar France, the debate within the Cahiers du cinma camp often came down to big dualities. Ford or
Wyler? German Lang or American Lang? British Hitchcock or American Hitchcock? In the America of
the 1960s and 1970s, we had our own forced choices, most notably Chaplin or Keaton?
This maneuver assumed that a simple pair of alternatives could profile your entire range of tastes. If you liked
Chaplin, you probably favored sentiment, extroverted performance, and direction that was straightforward
(theatrical, even crude). If you liked Keaton, you favored athleticism, the subordination of figure to
landscape, cool detachment, and geometrically elegant compositions. One director risked bathos, the other
coldness. The question wasnt framed neutrally. My generation prided itself on having discovered the
enigmatic Keaton, in the process demoting that self-congratulatory Tramp. Keaton never begged for our love.
Of course it was unfair. The forced duality ignored other important figuresHarold Lloyd most notablyand
it asked for an unnatural rectitude of taste. Surely, a sensible soul would say, one can admire both, or all. But
we werent sensible souls. Drawing up lists, defining in-groups and out-groups, expressing disdain for those
who could not see: it was all a game cinephiles played, and it put personal taste squarely at the center of film
conversation.
In the 1950s another big duality slipped into Paris-influenced film talk. Virtually nobody knew about Ozu,
Shimizu, Gosho, Naruse, Shimazu, Yamanaka, et al., so two filmmakers had to stand in for the whole of
Japanese cinema. Mizoguchi or Kurosawa?
A problemaic aer
For Cahie the choice was clear. Mizoguchi was master of subtly shaping drama through the bodys relation
to space, thanks to quiet depth compositions and modulations of the long take. In Japan, land of exquisite
nuance, the dream of infinitely expressive mise-en-scene seemed to have come true.
There seemed to be nothing nuanced about Kurosawa, whose brash technique, overripe performances, and
propulsive stories seemed disconcertingly Western. Sold, like Satyajit Ray, as a humanist from an exotic
culture, he played into critics eternal admiration for significance. This director wanted to make profound
statements about the bomb (I Lie in Fea), the relativity of truth (Rahomon), the impersonality of modern
society (Iki), and the complacency of power (High and Lo, The Bad Sleep Well). Even his swordplay
movies seemed moralizing, with the last line of Seen Samai (The victory belongs to these peasants. Not to
us.) summoning up a cheer for the little people. Kurosawa could thus be assigned to Sarriss category of
Strained Seriousness. Hes the Japanese Huston, said a friend at the time.
But there was no overlooking his cinematic gusto. He made movie movies. He flaunted deep-focus
compositions, cunningly choppy editing, sinuous tracking shots (through forests, no less), dappled lighting, and
abrupt addresses to the viewer, by a voice-over narrator or even a character in the story. He exploited long
lenses and multiple-camera shooting at a period when such techniques were very rare, and he may have been
the first director to use slow-motion for action scenes. Bergman, Fellini, and other international festival
filmmakers of the 1950s didnt display such delight in telling a story visually. If you liked this side of his work,
you overlooked the weak philosophy. On the other hand, if you found the style too aggressive, it could seem
mere calculation on the part of a man with something Important to say.
The case for the defense was made harder by the fact that he was a controversial figure at home as well.
Japanese critics I met over the years expressed puzzlement about Western admiration for the directors style. I
was once on a panel in which an esteemed critic blamed Kurosawa for influencing Western directors like
Leone and Peckinpah. His violence and showy slow-motion had helped turn modern cinema into a blunt
spectacle. No wonder Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola, and Walter Hill have loved this macho filmmaker.
Today passions seem to have cooled, but I should confess that my own tastes remain rooted in my salad days
(1960s-1970s). I could live happily on a desert island with only the films of Ozu and Mizoguchi. Id argue
forever that Japanese cinema of the 1920s through the 1960s is rivaled for sheer excellence only by the parallel
output of the US and France. (For more on this matter, see my blog entry on Shimizu.) On Kurosawa,
however, my feelings are mixed. I still find most of his official classics overbearing, and the last films seem to
me flabby exercises. But there are remarkable moments in every movie. Overall, Ive responded best to his
swordplay adventures; Seen Samai was the first film that showed me the power of the Asian action
aesthetic. I think as well that his earliest work up through No Rege fo O Yoh (1946), along with the
later High and Lo and Red Bead, are extraordinary films. And, like Hitchcock and Welles, he is
wonderfully teachable.
We dont live on desert islands, and gradually were gaining easy access to the range of Japanese filmmaking
of its great era. We can start to see beyond the fortified battlements set up by generations of critics. With so
many points of entry into Japanese cinema, mighty opposites lose their starkness; polarities dissolve into the
long tail. Nevertheless, personal tastes take you only so far, and objectively Kurosawa still looms large.
Whatever your preferences, its important to study his place in film history and film art.
Gauging that place involves thinking outside some traditional conceptions of how films work. Like most
ambitious Japanese directors, Kurosawa provides bursts of cinematic swagger. This six-shot passage from
Rashomon revels in its own strangeness.

Here traditional over-the-shoulder shots submit to a brazen geometry. Out of an ABC film-school technique
Kurosawa creates a cascade of visual rhymes and staccato swiveled glances. Yes, an ingenious critic could
thematize this bravura passage. (The symmetries put the central characters, each of whom asserts a different
version of what happened, on the same visual and moral plane.) Instead Im inclined to think that the shots
constitute a little thrust of pure cinema, a brusque cadenza that keeps our eyes, if not our hearts or minds,
locked to the screen. From this angle, Kurosawa claims some attention as an inventor of, or at least tinkerer
with, the disjunctive possibilities of film form.
His centenary arrives in 2010, and the occasion is celebrated by Crierion with a set of twenty-five DVDs.
Most of these titles have already been available singly, and the discs lack all the bonus features we have come
to admire from the company. Yet the crimson and jet-black box, the discreet rainbow array of slip cases, and
the subtly varied design of the menus add up to a good object, like the latest iPodsomething you want even
if it means re-buying things you already have. Theres also a handsome picture book with notes by Stephen
Prince on each film.
To viewers who need the assurance of cultural importance, this behemoth announces: You must know
Kurosawa to be filmicall literate. And thats more or less true. Just as important, the inclusion of four
rarities from his early years gives the collection a claim on every film enthusiasts attention. One hopes that
those titles will eventually appear separately, perhaps in an Eclipse edition. [See 15 May 2010 update at the
end.] For now these copies of the wartime features are far better than the imports Ive seen.
The Big Box makes it tempting to mount a career retrospective on this site, but thats far beyond my capacity.
Future blog entries may talk more of this complicated filmmaker, but for now Ill confine my remarks to these
early works. They offer plenty for us to enjoy.
Adacios propaganda
Although Kurosawa was only seven years younger than Ozu, he belongs to a distinctly different generation.
Ozu directed his first film in 1927, at the ripe age of twenty-four. He grew up with the silent cinema and made
masterful films in the early 1930s, during the long twilight of Japanese silent filmmaking. Kurosawa became an
assistant director in the late 1930s. Although he evidently directed large stretches of Yamamoto Kajiros
Horse (1941), he didnt sign a feature as director until he was thirty-three. His closest contemporary, and a
director whom some Japanese critics consider his superior, is Kinoshita Keisuke. Kinoshita was born in 1912
and his first feature, The Blossoming Port, was released in the same year as Kurosawas debut.
Kurosawa and Kinoshita began their careers making wartime propaganda. Their task was to display Japanese
self-sacrifice and spiritual purity in stories of both the past and the present. In the Sanshiro Sugata films
(1943, 1945), Kurosawa presents judo as an integral part of Japanese tradition and a path to enlightenment.
Much of the external conflict is devoted to uniting martial arts (ju-jitsu, karate) under the rubric of the less
aggressive but more powerful judo, and to showing how it can defeat American-style boxing. But the internal
dimension is also important. Judo is a means of tempering character and accepting ones proper place.
Humble, unflagging devotion to ones vocation becomes heroic.
The same quality can be found in The Most Beautiful (1944), a story of teenage girls working in a factory
manufacturing lenses for binoculars and gunsights. Vignettes from the girls lives dramatize the need for
cooperation and sacrifice, even as wartime demands for output threaten the girls health.
A more detached conception of the Japanese spirit underlies The Men Who Tread on the Tigers Tail
(1945). This adaptation of a plot from Noh and Kabuki theatre shows officers escorting a general through
enemy territory. Disguised as monks, the bodyguards are forced to bluff their way through a checkpoint. The
situation is one of hieratic suspense, made more tonally complex by Kurosawas addition of the movie
comedian Enoken. Enoken plays a dimwitted porter reacting to the charade played out by his betters. By
dramatizing one of the most famous episodes in Japanese literature, Kurosawa was reasserting the tradition of
devotion to duty and honor. The Men Who Tread on the Tigers Tail was released the same month that the
atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima.
During earlier decades, Japanese cinema had created a complex tradition. In part, it conducted a sustained
dialogue with Western cinema. Tokyo had access to a wide range of Hollywood movies, and directors studied
American technique closely. Just as Ozu would not be Ozu without his early fondness for Lubitsch and Harold
Lloyd, Mizoguchi learned a good deal from von Sternberg. Between 1938 and 1942, alongside German
imports Tokyo theatres screened Fury, Only Angels Have Wings, The Sea Hawk, The Awful Truth, Angels
with Dirty Faces, Boys Town, Young Tom Edison, Only Angels Have Wings, and many French titles. In
1942, with Hollywood films now banned, one could still see Ren Clairs Le Million and Nous la libert
films that had been circulating in Japan since the early 1930s and could have served as models of flashy sound
technique. Its misleading to talk of Ozu as purely Japanese and Kurosawa as Western: All Japanese
directors of the 1920s and 1930s were deeply acquainted with Western cinema, and American cinema in
particular furnished a foundation for most local filmmaking.
Yet there are crucial differences. Japanese cinema welcomed extremes of stylistic experimentation that would
have been rare in Western cinema. The 1920s swordplay films (chambara) pioneered rapid editing, handheld
camerawork, and abstract pictorial design. (I supply some examples here.) Directors working in the
contemporary-life mode (the gendai-geki) experimented similarly, often achieving remarkable visual effects
and bold stylization. Mizoguchi and Ozu have become our emblems of this creative rigor and richness, but they
are the peaks of what was a collective approach to filmic expression. Not every film was an experiment
indeed, most behave like Hollywood or European productionsbut many ordinary movies, signed by
unheralded directors, exhibit flashes of unpredictable imagination. This was the tradition of permanent
innovation that directors of the Kurosawa-Kinoshita generation inherited.
As the war dragged on, however, Japanese studio productions lost much of their audacity. Production fell from
over 400 films in 1939 to fewer than 100 in 1943. Censorship may have made filmmakers cautious about style
as well as subject and theme. Most of the fifty-plus films Ive been able to see from the period 1940-1945 are
quite conservative aesthetically. Several of these seem to me quite good, but they rely on fairly standard
Hollywood technique sprinkled with touches that had become markers of Japanese cinema (sustaining scenes
in rather distant shots, using cuts rather than dissolves to shift scenes, and so on). Swordplay films become
more severe and monumental. Even Mizoguchis Genroku Chushingura (1941-42) and Ozus There Was a
Father (1942), superb as they are, are more elevated in tone than the directors earlier works.
Against this backdrop, Kurosawas films stand out; they are the most extroverted works I know in this period.
Their innovations remain vivid; Sanshiro Sugata, for one, with its hierarchy of competitors, its rivalry among
schools, and its visceral technique, may have invented the modern martial arts film. But we should also realize
that these early films build upon the traditions already firmly established in Japanese cinema.
Plaing with the passing moment
Consider transitions. Kurosawa is famous for his elaborate links between sequences, from the hard-edged
wipes to swift imagistic associations. But we should recall that transitional passages offer moments of flashy
style in American and European cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, and indeed right up to this day. (For
examples, go here and here.) In the same year as Sanshiro, Kinoshita gave us this moment in Blossoming
Port. A con artist is trying to bilk money from a town. He bows, leaving an empty frame.

Without a discernible cut, heads pop into the empty frame, rocking to and fro.
Another cut reveals that the people we see are in a boat tossing on the waves, and the conmans partner is
enjoying an outing with the locals. Kurosawas scene-changessites of what Stephen Prince has called
formal excesscan be seen as prolonged, imaginative reworkings of this tricky-transition convention.
Japanese filmmakers were more willing to play with the expressive and decorative side of filmmaking than
most of their Western peers. Directors created not only flashy transitions but moments of stylistic playfulness
within scenes. Sometimes this just adds to the overall tone of comedy, as in this pretty passage in Heirokus
Dream Story, another 1943 release. The hero, played by Enoken, is squatting and talking to a charming girl
(Takamine Hideko). She twirls her parasol between them, and we get a straight-on cut that creates a moment
of abstraction as the parasol glides across the frame in contrary directions. (The vertical pair of frames shows
the cut.)


This decorative symmetry would be rare in Hollywood outside a Busby Berkeley number, but it enlivens the
characters exchange in a way similar to the more dramatic Rahomon sequence. To borrow a phrase that
Kepler applied to natures way with snowflakes, a filmmaker may seek to ornament a scene by playing with
the passing moment.
Likewise, in The Blooming Po, as an older woman recalls a romance of her youth, the natural sound fades
out and the back-projection behind the carriage shifts from the seaside to urban imagery of the period shes
remembering.

The frank artifice of this shot shows that Japanese filmmakers were eager to let us enjoy the forms with which
they were working.
A similar explicitness about style can be seen in one of Kurosawas signature devices, the axial cut. This
technique shifts the framings toward or away from the subject along the lens axis. If the shots are short enough,
we sense a bump at the abrupt change of shot scale.
Kurosawa often uses this cutting to stress a momentary gesture or to prolong a moment of stasis. But it can
structure a simple dialogue scene as well. In Sanshiro Sugata, the heros first conversation with Sayo takes
place as they descend a stair toward a gateway. Kurosawa uses axial cuts to keep up with them as they move
away from us down the steps. Illustrated with stills, this technique looks like a forward camera movement, but
in fact these images come from separate shots.

The crux of the scene is Sayos revelation that the man Sanshiro must fight is her father, and instead of big
close-ups to underscore his reaction, Kurosawa simply lets his hero halt while Sayo continues down the steps.
The steady pattern of cut-ins to the characters backs makes Sayos sudden turn to the camera more vivid,
and Sanshiros reaction is underplayed by not giving us direct access to his face.
An earlier entry traces theaxial cut back to silent film, when its jolting possibilities were exploited in Soviet
montage cinema. Japanese directors also used the device often. Yamanaka Sadao, one of the most-praised
directors of the 1930s, used axial cuts prominently in an early dialogue scene of Humanit and Paper
Balloons (1937). The cuts are accentuated by low-height compositions that maintain the steep perspective of
the street.

The technique gains more punch in Japanese swordpla films. Here is a percussive instance from Faihfl
Sean Naoke (1939), four short shots anking us inward in a wa that Kurosawa would make his own.


Tom Paulus reminds me that Capra films sometimes make use of this technique, as in this string of
concentration cuts from M. Smih Goe o Wahingon (1939).

Interestingly, M. Smih ran on several Tokyo screens in October 1941; it may have been the last Hollywood
feature to receive theatrical distribution before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
To say that Kurosawa adapts traditional devices doesnt take away from his accomplishment. No artist starts
from zero, and in commercial cinema, filmmakers commonly revise schemas already in circulation. So
Kurosawa puts his own spin on the axial cut, not only by using it frequently, but also by varying it in the course
of a film. Sanhio Sgaa 2 makes the axial shot-change a sort of internal norm, but then varies it: inward or
outward, cuts or dissolves, how great a variation of scale? When Sanshiro leaves Sayo, the three phases of his
departure are marked by simple repetition: each time he halts and looks back, she responds by bowing.

Like the Rashomon sequence, this shows Kurosawas fondness for permuting simple patterns. But theres an
expressive payoff too. The framings that make Sayo dwindle to a speck give the axial cuts the forlorn, lingering
quality we usually associate with dissolves. In addition, for viewers who know Sanshiro 1, the scene calls to
mind the staircase passage weve already seen. Their first extended encounter is paralleled by their last one.
Axial cuts are easier to handle when the subject is unmoving, or moving straight toward or away from the
camera. What about other vectors of motion? In The Men Who Tread on the Tigers Tail, as the generals
bodyguards file out of the compound, they pass a line of soldiers in the foreground. Kurosawa combines
concentration cuts with lateral cutting, so our men stalk leftward through the frame once, then again, then again,
each time both closer to us and further along the row of soldiers.

Kurosawa revises other traditional techniques. You can find moments of extended stasis in swordplay films of
earlier decades, and the technique surely owes something to the prolonged mie poses in Kabuki. But
Kurosawas early films turn long pauses into living freeze-frames. Instead of using an optical effect, he simply
asks his actors not to move! One combat in Sanshiro shows the audience caught in absolute stillness, staring at
the result of Sanshiros throw. In Sanshiro 2, our hero and the boxer stand like statues in the prizefight ring
until the American collapses. And in The Men Who Tread on the Tigers Tail, the groups gathered at the
checkpoint are absolutely unmoving for nearly fifty seconds as Benkei leads them in prayer.
This shots tactful, reverential composition echoes a fairly standard image for showing loyal retainers; heres an
example from a 1910s version of Chushingura.
In sum, I think that for his manly movies Kurosawa sifted through the Japanese film tradition and pulled out
the most vigorous techniques he could find, all the while recognizing that rapid pacing needs the foil of extreme
immobility. He compiled a digest of many arresting visual schemas available to him, and then pushed them in
fresh directions. He realized as well that he could apply this sharp-edged style to genres dealing with modern
life.
A most stubborn oung woman
Although we think of Kurosawa as a masculine director, two of his finest films center on women. The Most
Beautiful and No Regrets for Our Youth can be thought of as propaganda, but this label shouldnt put us off.
Propaganda works partly because it taps deep-seated emotions, and Id argue that the formulaic nature of a
social command can allow filmmakers a chance at emotional and formal richness. Because the message can
be taken for granted or read off the surface, an ambitious director can go to townnuancing the presentation,
complicating its implications, taking the clichd message as an occasion for pushing formal experiment. (Which
is one aspect of what the Soviet montage filmmakers did.)
The Most Beautiful, probably the best movie ever made about child labor, starts off as a doctrinaire effort.
Before even the Toho logo fades in, a title declares: Attack and Destroy the Enemy. The first fifteen minutes
are filled with pledges to help the war effort, work to meet an emergency quota, obey orders, display filial
devotion, build noble character, and think constantly of how making flawless lenses saves soldiers lives. The
rest of the movie focuses on the pain of doing all this. This story of patriotic affirmation is steeped in tears.
The films structure looks forward to the ensemble-based, threaded plotlines employed in Red Beard and
Dodeskaden. We follow various stories, if only briefly, as the teenage girls push themselves beyond the limits
proposed by their overseers. The factory directors and the dormitory mother are barely characterized, so that
the focus falls on the girls who have left their homes to serve their country. One looks out the window when a
train passes; another walks sobbing across a garden made of heaps of earth from each girls native village.
When one girl falls from a roof, she promises to keep working on crutches. Another hides the fact that she has
a fever. In this movie, workers cry out Mother! in their sleep.
Sanshiro Sugata pulses with the exuberance of a young mans body itching for constant movement.
Kurosawas second film applies his muscular techniques to a static situation: Girls bent over machines. True,
there are interludes of a marching and volleyball, the latter calling forth a standardized stretch of montage, but
the directors central task is to dynamize conversations. He finds a remarkable array of options. We get good
old axial cutting, but there are also jump cuts (as if the action were too urgent to wait for dissolves),
resourcefully simple staging (see this entry), abrupt close-ups, quick flashbacks, and judicious long takes
jammed with actors.
Off on the right stand two tall girls frowning and looking down; their quarrel will burst out in a later scene.
The virtuosity here is quieter than in Sanshiro, largely because of the insistent threat of shame. A Hollywood
film of the period might play up the triumphant achievement of the quota, but here this goal fades away.
Instead, the plot is driven by a nearly desperate fear of failure. The men in charge offer bluff reassurance, but in
a reprise of high-school nerves, the girls fret constantly about doing less than their mates. Their anxiety is
translated into gesture-based performancenot through Western hysteria but through gestures of lowering the
eyes, bowing the head, turning ones back. The Most Beautiful has some of the greatest back-to-the-camera
scenes in film history, and Kurosawa doesnt hesitate to insert some of these moments in wide shots, creating a
delicate emotional counterpoint. At one moment the girls are distracted by a passing airplane but their leader is
sunk in thought; at another moment the girls challenge the leader while her accuser cant face her.

The girls stories are woven around Watanabe, the section leader. Somewhat older than the others and
nowhere near as spontaneous or joyous, shes the emblem of unremitting self-sacrifice. If Sanshiro matures in
the course of his films, learning the humbling responsibilities of becoming a supreme fighter, she comes to her
more mundane task already grown up. Nol Burch has pointed out that Kurosawas protagonists are notably
stubborn, and Watanabe offers a prime instance.
At the climax she has to search through thousands of lenses for a flawed one that she accidentally let
through. Kurosawa forces us to watch her, exhausted from hours of work, hunched over her microscope and
keeping awake by singing a patriotic song. One shot holds on her groggy efforts for over ninety seconds, so
we register both the enormity of her task and her obstinate refusal to quit. This shot will be paralleled by the
films final one, which lasts almost exactly as long, when she returns to her workbench. Now her concentration
is broken, again and again, by quiet weeping. Kurosawa claims that when he made the film he knew Japan
would lose the war.
The ending of The Most Beautiful calls to mind a moment in another Kinoshita film, again one released in the
same year as Kurosawas. Arm (1944) ends on a similarly ambivalent note, with a frantic mother pushing
through a crowd cheering recruits marching off to war. Through cries of Banzai! she stumbles along to get a
last glimpse of him, but soon her trembling figure is lost in the excitement. It isnt exactly an exalted note on
which to close a patriotic film.
A mother is central to Watanabes sacrifice in The Most Beautiful as well, and her plight reminds me of
historian John Dowers telling me that Japanese soldiers may have charged into battle shouting the name of the
emperor, but many died murmuring, Mother.
Like other filmmakers, Kurosawa had to execute an about-face when the Americans came to occupy Japan.
Along with Mizoguchi, Kinoshita, and most others, he began to make films that condemned the feudal forces
that had led Japan to war and affirmed the need for liberalizing the society, not least with respect to womens
roles. Kurosawas contribution was No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), a survey of the 1930s and 1940s
through the experience of a daughter of the middle class. At first shes oblivious to the authoritarian threat and
then, awakened to her social mission, she plunges into what we would now call the politics of everyday life.
With the same verve that Kurosawa dramatized sacrifice for the motherland, he quickens a liberal fable of
emerging political consciousness. Again, he finds ways of making propaganda deeply moving, while leaving his
unique stamp on the project.
I hope to write about No Regrets and other Kurosawa titles in the future. But one implication should already
be clear. Kurosawa remains on our agenda through his commitment to a mode of storytelling that pursues vigor
without lapsing into the diffuse busyness of todays spectacles. He stretches our senses through staccato
action, yet he drills into other moments so implacably that we are forced to see deeper. He lifts certain
Japanese and imported traditions to a new pitch, in the process often creating something indelible and
enduring.
The point of departure for all things Kurosawa is Donald Richies Films of Akira Kurosawa, first published in
1965 and updated since. It was a trailblazing auteur study, written from deep knowledge of the films and many
encounters with the director. Another indispensible source is Kurosawas Something Like an Autobiography
(Knopf, 1982). Although it stops after the success of Rashomon, the book offers fascinating information about
Kurosawas early life and first films. (The Most Beautiful is not a major picture, but it is the one dearest to
me.) Information on the later films is collected in Bert Cardullo, Akira Kurosawa: Interviews (University
Press of Mississippi, 2008). A biographical overview, with details on each films production, is provided in
Stuart Galbraith IV, The Emperor and the Wolf (Faber, 2001).
For background on Japans wartime cinema, the central work is Peter B. Highs The Imperial Screen
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). See also John Dowers magnificent surveys of the war and the postwar
period, War without Mercy (Pantheon, 1987) and Embracing Defeat (Norton, 2000).
Nol Burch argues that Kurosawa is best understood as working within a tradition of indigenous Japanese art;
his pioneering To the Distant Observer (University of California Press, 1979) is available online here. Linking
formal preoccupations to changing subjects and themes, Stephen Princes The Warriors Camera (Princeton
University Press, 1999) argues that Kurosawa was forging heroic figures appropriate to developments in
Japanese society. In Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Duke University Press, 2000),
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto puts the films in political contexts, while also considering how Kurosawa has been
understood within the Western academy.
Critics have long recognized that Kurosawas formal inventiveness came with an impulse toward large
statement. Brad Darrach reconciled the two tendencies in an overheated specimen of Timespeak:
Not since Sergei Eisenstein has a moviemaker set loose such a bedlam of elemental energies. He
works with three cameras at once, makes telling use of telescopic lenses that drill deep into a scene,
suck up all the action in sight and then spew it violently into the viewers face. But Kurosawa is far
more than a master of movement. He is an ironist who knows how to pity. He is a moralist with a
sense of humor. He is a realist who curses the darknessand then lights a blowtorch.
This comes from A Religion of Film, a remarkable primer on the art cinema in its American spring. It was
published in Time of 20 September 1963 and is available here. The same antinomy of stylist vs. moralist
persists, with less complimentary results, in Tony Rayns obituary in Sight and Sound (October 1998), p. 3
and in Dave Kehrs recent review of the Criterion boxed set.
I wrote about Kurosawas work in our textbook Film Histor: An Introduction (third edition, McGraw-Hill,
2009), pp. 234-235 and 388-390. My larger arguments about classic Japanese film can be found in Ou and
the Poetics of Cinema (online here) and in two articles in Poetics of Cinema (Routledge, 2008), A Cinema
of Flourishes: Decorative Style in 1920s and 1930s Japanese Film and Visual Style in Japanese Cinema,
1925-1945, which analyzes some of the films Ive considered here. I talk a little more about editing in Seven
Samurai in this entry. In another I discuss how Kurosawas humanism fits into one 1950s ideological
framework.
Yamanakas Humanit and Paper Balloons is available on DVD in the Eureka! series. For a cinematic
homage to early Kurosawa, see Johnnie Tos Throw Down.
Thanks to Komatsu Hiroshi for supplying the date of Faithful Servant Naosuke. And as a PS, thanks to
Luo Jin for pointing out a slip of the finger: the original post had Kurosawa older than Ozu!
PPS: 9 December: The Criterion site has just posted a reminiscence of Kurosawa by Donald Richie.
PPPS: 15 May 2010: Criterion has just announced that the four films discussed in this entry will be released as
a separate collection on the Eclipse label.
Last Modified: Tuesday | September 28, 2010 @ 11:20 open printable version
This entry was posted on Tuesday | December 8, 2009 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Asian cinema, Directors: Capra, Directors:
Kurosawa Akira, Directors: Mizoguchi Kenji, Film criticism, Film history, Film technique, Film technique: Cinematography,
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Observations On Film Art - Kurosawa's Early Spring - Bordwell

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