Happy 100th Birthday Akira Kurosawa!
Our friend Trevor Hogg at FlickeringMyth.com emailed me yesterday to remind me that 100 years ago today, noted screenwriter-director Akira Kurosawa was born. Trevor put together honorarium for the famous Japanese filmmaker:
Born a century ago on March 23, 1910 was an artist who had the ability to cinematically blend Japanese culture with Western storytelling, allowing him to craft an enduring legend. “I am a man who likes Sotatsu, Gyokudo, and Tessai in the same way as van Gogh, Lautrec, and Rouault,” stated renowned filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. “I collect old Japanese lacquerware as well as antique French and Dutch glassware. In short, the Western and the Japanese could actually be said to live side by side in my mind, without the least sense of conflict.”
Nicknamed “the Emperor” for his ability to handle everything from screenwriting, to film editing and directing, Akira Kurosawa came about his chosen profession accidentally. The twenty-six year old discovered the advertisement of a film studio looking for assistant directors; he applied and was hired by the Toho Motion Picture Company (then known as Photo Chemical Laboratory) for which Kurosawa went on to produce thirteen movies from 1943 to 1958. “I had dabbled eagerly in painting, literature, theatre, music, and other arts and stuffed my head full of all the things that come together in the art of film,” wrote the filmmaker in the memoir Something Like an Autobiography (1982). “Yet I had never noticed that cinema was the one field where I would be required to make full use of all I had learned.”
Kurosawa, who died in 1998, was a prolific talent with 69 writing and 33 directing credits including Rashômon (1950), Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai — 1954), and Kumonosu-jô (Throne of Blood — 1957).
Trevor is doing a 4-part retrospective of Kurosawa which we’ll be featuring here on GITS during the next few weeks, but hit the link to read Trevor’s birthday post.
By the way, Trevor found a documentary about Kurosawa online. Here is Part 1:
Links to parts 2–6 on FlickeringMyth.com.
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