The Other Akira : Akira Kurosawa  (1910-1998)

Nowadays, among the youth of Japan, and among cult movie consumers everywhere, the name Akira is associated with sci-fi animation. Though the character is already dead before the movie starts, the movie that bears his name (Akira, 1989) is widely recognised as the high point of the art of anime. Its two young heroes are called Tetsuo and Kaneda. Kaneda survives, but Tetsuo ultimately suffers the fate of the mysterious Akira. As victims of the scientific, political and managerial megalomania of their elders, they are both destroyed (or self-destruct) in something like a nuclear apocalypse^[1].

The other Akira who enjoyed fame in the West was Akira Kurosawa, the classic Japanese director of art movies like Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Ikiru, High and Low, Yojimbo, and Throne of Blood. These films were screened at international film festivals in the 1950s and 60s and some of them eventually found a place among the European and American film classics in video rental shops. In fact for many years Akira Kurosawa was the only Japanese film director known in the West, admired by intellectuals who otherwise despised the movies as well as film buffs who generally preferred popular commercial cinema to the art cinema.

It was Rashomon that brought Japanese cinema to the attention of the West and led to the identification of Japanese cinema with the art movie, the period movie and Kurosawa. It was the first of a string of Japanese art movies with exotic period settings that won major awards at the Venice Film Festival in the early Fifties. The French critics were more entranced by Mizoguchi’s period films -  Ugetsu Monogatari, Sansho Dayu, Chikamatsu Monogatari, Saikaku Ichidai Onna – that were shown in subsequent years at Venice; but the American and Australian critics remained exclusively fans of Kurosawa for many years. Just as the Bengali art cinema of Satyajit Ray came to represent Indian cinema, so Kurosawa’s art cinema came to represent Japanese cinema. The films of both directors were regularly screened at international film festivals throughout the 50s and 60s; western film audiences rarely had the chance to see any other examples of Indian or Japanese cinema. The American critic, Donald Richie, who came to Japan during the Occupation, and came to be recognised as the expert on Japanese cinema, contributed to the cult of Kurosawa, by dismissing the bulk of Japanese film production as formulaic and sentimental and elevating Kurosawa to the position of the pre-eminent Japanese film artist. He was not recognised as such in Japan. When he died Richie called him a prophet without honour in his own country.

Rashomon was not popular in Japan, either with audiences or critics. The general public found it obtuse and mystifying. The literati were not pleased with the liberties taken with the tone and content of Akutagawa’s short stories, on which the film was based. (Akutagawa was a modern short story writer  who suicided in 1927, at the age of 35; Richie compares his status in Japan to that of Poe in America and Maupassant in France.)  Japanese film critics, especially those on the left, were dismayed at the Venice Film Festival’s selection of Rashomon; they rated contemporary works of social criticism more highly. Iwasaki Akira (another Akira) declared that the optimistic message of good will tacked on to the end of the film did violence to the whole tenor of the work. It showed that the humanist Kurosawa was not in accord with the nihilism and misanthropy of Akutagawa. Veteran Japanese film masters like Mizoguchi were dismayed that their work was overlooked in favour of that of a young upstart.

One could say that Kurosawa has had more influence on foreign cinemas, especially the Hollywood action cinema,   than in Japan, where he has no direct heirs. A number of his films have been re-made as Hollywood westerns or spaghetti westerns. Martin Ritt retold the story of Rashomon (1950) in The Outrage (1964); John Sturges re-made The Seven Samurai (1954) as a western, in The Magnificent Seven (1960); and Yojimbo (1961) spawned a whole genre of spaghetti westerns, starting with Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), starring Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name. Kurosawa himself adapted a number of classic Western plays and novels to the screen: Dostoievsky’s The Idiot, Gorky’s The Lower Depths, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear. Recognised as a bravura stylist and a master of action cinema who could transcend the east-west cultural divide and have “universal” appeal, he was supported in his later difficult years by Spielberg, Lucas and Coppola.  

Kurosawa’s work is by no means confined to the period film or action cinema. His films span a variety of genres. His early films were home-front propaganda films made during the Pacific War; in the early post-war years under the American occupation, he made contemporary social issue films and detective films; in his late years, he made personal films, which Stephen Prince^[2] labels psycho-biographical. Even in his middle period, he made a number of contemporary social issue films (addressing the threat posed by the atomic bomb, the evils of corporate capitalism, social inequality and bureaucratic government), in between more entertaining action films.

In general, his films betray a strong strain of didacticism, a fondness for parables and allegories that grapple with the problems of truth and falsehood, illusion and reality, virtue and vice. These big themes made him popular with the liberal intelligentsia around the globe.

In his films, wisdom or virtue is usually represented by an older man who acts as mentor to a younger man who must learn the Truth or the Way from the master. Japanese critic Sato Tadao claimed that Kurosawa’s major theme was the pursuit of manliness, which involved both physical and spiritual strength, as well as intensive training^[3]. Feminist critic Joan Mellen^[4] has noted the marginalisation of women in Kurosawa’s work, the fact that he is almost exclusively concerned with relationships between men. More recently, Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro^[5] has claimed that Kurosawa’s films often marginalise the woman by transforming her into either a consumer with insatiable desire or a mere commodity or spectacle. But, he goes on to say, the woman is marginalised in a much more fundamental way by being excluded from the films’ central preoccupation with male bonding, classically exemplified in the master-disciple or hero-villain relationship. Woman has no place in this closed circuit, exclusively concerned with the split male subject…

Kurosawa’s themes may be spiritual and/or existential, but his films are far from restrained. They are full of excessive emotions and actions, exaggerated gestures, grotesque characters and caricatures. They cover a wide range of moods and tones – from the sublime to the ridiculous, the savage to the maudlin, the sardonic to the sentimental. Kurosawa and his cast created a gallery of grotesque and bizarre characters made memorable by their exaggeratedly idiosyncratic quirks and their exaggerated facial expressions and body gestures, expressing fear, bravado, cowardice, curiosity, and abject humility.

Above all, Kurosawa was a bravura stylist. He had a fondness for the hard-edged wipe, and jolting cuts between long shot and close-up, moving shots and fixed shots, scenes of violent agitation and scenes of protracted tense stasis, and shots of contrary movement. When he adopted wide-screen cinematography in the Sixties, and colour photography in the Seventies, he experimented with the expressive potentialities of the medium in each case and used them both inventively. Noel Burch, the neo-formalist film theorist, found him the heir of Soviet director, Sergei Eisenstein, in his use of dramatic editing techniques. However, the power of Kurosawa’s cinema to shock, disturb and provoke diminished over time, as many of his stylistic trademarks were absorbed into mainstream commercial filmmaking.

American film critic Stephen Prince has bemoaned the fact that Kurosawa’s legacy has been largely evident in the action cinema. Kurosawa the moralist, the one who cares about human suffering and values the attempt to live a humane and virtuous life, has been overlooked and underrated^[6]. Maybe that is because Kurosawa’s brand of didactic moralism has dated more than his macho stylistics - although it seems to have made a come-back in President Bush’s recent rhetoric.  The post-humanist cinema of the 80s and 90s did not lack moral concerns but preferred not to preach.  

Freda Freiberg

^[1] I have written about this movie as an example of post-modern movie-making and an incarnation of the post-nuclear sublime at some length in an essay entitled `Akira and the Postnuclear Sublime’, which is included among a collection of essays under the title, Hibakusha Cinema, edited by Mick Broderick and published by Kegan Paul International in 1996.

^[2] See Stephen Prince,  The Warrior’s Cinema: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, Princeton University Press, 1999.

^[3] Sato Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema, Kodansha, 1982, p 28.

^[4] In The Waves at Genji’s Door: Japan Through Its Cinema, Pantheon, 1976, Ch 4.

^[5] Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema, Duke University Press, 2000, pp 328-9

^[6] The Warrior’s Cinema: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, ch 9.