How to Improve Your Movie Literacy With Akira Kurosawa

By Shawn Swanky

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) was a Japanese movie director whose movies were enjoyed all over the world. Although he made over 30 movies with a wide range of themes and settings to considerable acclaim, he humbly claimed always to be a student of movies.

Late in life, Kurosawa considered "Ran" as his best movie. However, several of his movies have been influential in many different ways. The subjectivity of recollections about an event witnessed by different observers is now sometimes named The Rashomon Effect after Kurosawa’s "Rashomon." "The Hidden Fortress" provided inspiration for the Star Wars series of movies. "Seven Samurai" may be Kurosawa’s best loved movie, and was 17th in the critic’s 2012 Sight & Sound poll of best all-time movies.

Fantasy screen worlds in feudal Japan, contemporary settings, current topics, Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, Kurosawa was at home everywhere.

This introduction to Kurosawa provides the student with a quick but thorough exposure to this talented artist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365222276

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How to Improve Your Movie Literacy With Akira Kurosawa

How to Improve Your Movie Literacy With Akira Kurosawa

By Shawn Swanky

Copyright © 2016 by Dragon Heart Enterprises.

Cover art by Shawn Swanky.

For additional copies please contact [e-mail] or visit the online store at www.shawnswanky.com.

All rights of reproduction, storage, transmission or copying are reserved. This includes the right to create screenplays, documentaries, television programs or movies based in any way on the research contained herein.

For more information please email [e-mail].

ISBN 978-1-365-22227-6

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Preface

All students of movies, moviemaking or 20th century history can learn from Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998.) Kurosawa successfully combined popular entertainment with raising awareness and teaching solutions to philosophical or social issues.

Kurosawa had a passion for encouraging people to deepen their understanding of the human condition and its possibilities. While his optimism may have varied with experience, he believed in the value of art, drama or movies for motivating at least some viewers to improve their own lives or that of their communities.

Kurosawa’s work consistently makes the best all time lists of fans, critics and fellow directors alike. He directed 30 movies. His credits include 26 produced screenplays. He had ownership interests in various production companies. All this gave him an intimate knowledge of every stage in moviemaking, from creating scenarios to financing, producing and marketing the final product.

This ShawnSwanky.com introduction to Kurosawa focuses first on his public reflections about the art of moviemaking. Then, since one of his special skills was in creating story lines as a way of raising issues, the second part analyzes several of his movies with attention to the ways in which he would teach through story development.

Kurosawa tells us that, foremost of all, he would seek cinematic beauty. In this search, he hoped to produce tears, laughter and other manifestations of a cathartic experience in his audience. Catharsis refers to a cleansing, purging or exercising of emotion. There is no universally accepted theory about catharsis or about the reasons that we create drama to achieve it. Perhaps we have a complex shifting mixture of needs. Nevertheless, this seems a constant drive in humanity and Kurosawa understood this as a primary purpose of creating movies. Unlike some other directors, he believed in delivering what audiences want before taking up what he thought they needed.

For most of his career, Kurosawa’s work reflected a very optimistic view of human nature. He even believed that movies could motivate people to understand each other better, reduce harm and improve social relations.

Kurosawa also believed that the privilege of being able to make movies created a duty to the audience. He considered it morally wrong to make movies simply to capitalize on their pure entertainment value or with a primary aim to produce profits.

On this view, along with creating the opportunity for catharsis, a moviemaker should consider his or her work’s implicit teaching or its potential for beneficial social impacts. Notwithstanding this, a great fan of movies, Kurosawa usually can be found praising, rather than disapproving, movies made by other creators.

After Red Beard in 1965, Kurosawa’s work reflected a decidedly more tragic view of the human condition. On this view, while it is still possible for some individuals to learn and become more capable of coping with the uncertainties of life in constructive ways, on the whole, societies are at risk from deeper forces that are little capable of control and change. Accordingly, it then seems that he saw the moviemaker’s role as more in the line of revealing deeper truths and promoting understanding rather than in pursuing the possibilities for motivating actual immediate advances in social justice.

Throughout his career, Kurosawa kept the need for visual spectacle front and center. It is less surprising, then, to learn that, originally, he had trained as a painter and for a career in calligraphy.

Kurosawa started his moviemaking career as a screenwriter. He would continue creating scenarios and scripts to the end. He typically collaborated with two or three other writers. He did this as a check against some one aspect or some one character becoming unbalanced in proportion to the whole. Given his view of human nature, he imagined there might be a risk of this effect from some force of his own ego or from some too great love for one feature. Resisting ego was a habit in his working routine life as well as a theme in his work. This underscores his belief that beauty in a movie performance requires proportion. This applies equally to the allocation of screen time and in seeking moments of emotional power.

Kurosawa was a very hands-on director. From creating scenarios, supervising the set, directing actors and overseeing the use of sound, he also would do most of his own editing. In fact, after shooting, he would edit at the end of each day, partly for the advantage of instructing actors and crew for the following day. This also allowed him to meet tight schedules. Despite a fire at the studio, he began shooting Rashomon July 7, wrapped August 17 and premiered it August 25.

Kurosawa is known for several unique or innovative visual techniques. For example, he adopted the use of axial cuts in editing. Here the audience is moved through the action not by tracking shots or dissolves but by a series of jump cuts. This tends to focus the audience’s perspective. He also sometimes fragments the action in a scene by removing parts of a single motion. This eliminates time and concentrates information. Each of these effects shows how untroubled he was, in contrast to some other directorial traditions, about reproducing real or natural life. He was always seeking ways to make the audience’s experience more interesting as a tool for helping it to understand truth and beauty.

Kurosawa used the freedom he had won through success to innovate whenever he believed it would help build emotional effects. For example, he sometimes used silent screen techniques. He frequently used long lenses and multiple cameras. He sometimes disregarded the 180-degree axis that movies typically honor to keep from disorienting the audience’s sense of direction. He also used wipes, lines or bars crossing the screen as a form of punctuation to mark a scene's end. On the other hand, a simple cut will sometimes put the audience in a new scene and it will have to imagine the intervening action.

Kurosawa commonly used extremes of weather as an aid to the plot or as a means of foreshadowing and not necessarily only as a metaphor. He favored counterpoint between images and sounds. He believed that sorrow was magnified, not diminished, when reminders of joy or delight accompanied sad or awful images. As he would say, it is not just dying that is sad, it is worse to imagine never again enjoying love and laughter.

All these features make Kurosawa’s movies unique. In every department, he would make trials of experimental effects, pushing the limits or breaking conventions without distracting the audience from the story’s drive; indeed, seeking to magnify this drive in every way.

While apparently endorsing the underlying concept, Kurosawa pointedly remarked that, The art of cinema has been called an art of sculpting time. [By Andrey Tarkovski.] But time used to no purpose cannot be called anything but a waste of time. Whether this might have been an implicit comment on Tarkovsky’s work is hard to say.

In any case, Kurosawa shows his great respect for movie audiences by seeking to maximize every moment on the screen. His movies are devoid of mysterious things, of unexplained images, and of screen time without obvious action or with long silences.

Kurosawa did not write a treatise on making movies. However, his mid-career memoir, Something Like an Autobiography, (Trans. Audie E. Brock, Vintage Books, 1981) did include thoughts about the nature of cinematic beauty, moviemaking and reflections on some of his early movies. This memoir includes an appendix of Random Notes published as advice to young moviemakers. Those notes have been condensed and reordered here according to the issues arising at each stage of the moviemaking process.

Supplementing these notes are his observations about moviemaking as expressed in various interviews over the years, most collected in Akira Kurosawa Interviews, (Ed. Bert Cardullo, University Press of Mississippi, 2008.) Fred Marshall’s interview with Kurosawa on the release of Madadayo, in Kinema at uwaterloo.ca, contains his observation about The enviable world of warm hearts. Kurosawa can also be seen offering his insights on YouTube in the documentary, A Message from Akira Kurosawa.

On the Nature of Movie Performances

Most important is a dedicated search for THE MOVIE: the search for the soul of the movie.

It isn’t enough to just go and crank out a movie. You have to keep looking for what it is to be a movie. When I look over my work, only a few are real movies. I was still looking for what the soul of the movie is. It is an attitude. It is the discipline to recognize that you are looking for something unique. You must be dedicated to discovering and creating something spiritual.

There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be expressed in a movie. It must be present for a movie to be emotionally moving. When it is very well expressed, one experiences a particularly deep emotion while watching. I believe it is this quality that draws people to see a movie. It is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the creator in the first place.

The essence of movies lies in cinematic beauty.

First of all, I have to have a feeling about something. A feeling that it can become a movie. Whether it is a novel or anything else.

It is like a hunch. That's how I always know.

It wasn't an idea brewing for a long time. As I was reading it, (the description of a scene) inspired me. A fluttering white object in the book became a parasol in the movie (Rhapsody in August). Why was this change made? It is entirely different from the book. I tried to show the family details implied but not mentioned. The scene becomes true cinema when people cry at the parasol breaking.

Every time I make a movie, I feel a few scenes have reached the level of cinematic beauty. But I have never felt that way about an entire movie. I can tell the difference with the scenes that have really become cinema while editing. I feel a chill of excitement. It would be ideal to make a movie with every scene at that level.

It is something I feel. I know when it has happened. But I can’t explain logically why it happens.

I don't like to explain the theme of a movie to everyone before the shoot. A theme, alone, doesn't explain all the sensitive details of human feelings. I want us