Trevor Hogg profiles the internationally renowned filmmaker Akira Kurosawa in the second of a four part feature… read part one.
“After the Pacific War, a great deal of noise began to be made about freedom of speech, and almost immediately abuses and loss of self-control ensued,” recollected acclaimed filmmaker Akira Kurosawa of life in Post-WWII Japan. “A certain kind of magazine took up flattering readers’ curiosity, provoking scandals with shamelessly vulgar articles.” The prevailing sensationalist mentality had to be addressed. “I felt that this new tendency had to be stamped out before it could spread,” remarked the director. “This was the impetus for Skyandaru (Scandal, 1950).”
A tabloid newspaper falsely reports that artist Ichiro Aoye (Toshiro Mifune) is having a love affair with a famous singer, Miyako Saijo (Yoshiko Yamaguchi); he sues the publication only to be betrayed by his lawyer Hiruta (Takashi Shimura). “While I was writing the script an entirely unexpected character began to take on more life than the main characters, and I ended up being led around by the nose by him,” revealed Kurosawa. “This fellow was the corrupt lawyer Hiruta (“Leech Field”). He goes to the defendants to sell out his client, the plaintiff, who is sincerely attempting to battle the gangsters in court.”
“Since the silent film gave way to the talkie, sound appears to have overshadowed image,” observed the Tokyo-native. “At the same time, the flood of sound has made sound itself meaningless. In motion pictures both image and sound must be treated with special care. In my view, a motion picture stands and falls on the effective combination of these two factors.” By combining two short stories Rashomon and Yabu no naka (In a Grove) about medieval Japan by countryman Ryunoske Akutagawa, Akira Kurosawa produced a picture that harkened back to the old days of cinema. “Rashomon [1950] would be my testing ground, the place where I could apply the ideas and desires growing out of my silent film research.”
“When I took this project to Daiei [movie studio], I told them the only sets I would need were the gate and the tribunal courtyard wall where all the survivors, participants, and witnesses of the rape and murder that form the story of the film are questioned. Everything else I promised them, would be shot on location.” Akira Kurosawa went on to say, “There were only eight characters, but the story was both complex and deep.” The director observed, “Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings – the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are.” Pressured to disclose whose account is the most accurate, the moviemaker slyly replied, “Probably the person closest to the truth was the woodcutter but he’s lying too.”
“The introductory section, in particular, consisted of magnificent camerawork, as it led the viewer through the light and shadow of the forest into a world where the human heart loses its way.” To accomplish the dramatic effect, Akira had to break a movie industry taboo. “I had to figure out how to use the sun itself. This was a major concern because of the decision to use the light and shadows of the forest as the keynote for the entire film. I determined to solve the problem by actually filming the sun.”
Featuring a cast of Toshiro Mifune (Tajomaru, bandit), Masayuki Mori (Takehiro, samurai), Machiko Kyo (Massago, Takehiro’s wife), Takashi Shimura (woodcutter), Minoru Chiaki (priest), Kichijiro Ueda (commoner), Daisuke Kato (police agent), and Fumiko Homma (medium), the picture became an awards sensation. In 1951, the move won best screenplay at the Blue Ribbon Awards, Best Actress (Machiko Kyo) at the Mainichi Film Concours, the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and Best Director and Best Foreign Film at the National Board of Review. When Rashomon was screened at the Little Carnegie Theatre in New York, it became the first Japanese film to play in the post-war U.S.. The growing international acclaim resulted in the Academy Awards presenting the movie with an Honorary Oscar in 1952, and Hollywood remaking it as The Outrage (1964) with Paul Newman (The Hustler) and Claire Bloom (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold).
“Our directors aim at small accomplishments,” stated Kurosawa of the Japanese movie industry. “The scale is very small. We must take up big subjects and not be afraid of failure.” These words would come to haunt the director when he decided to make Hakuchi (The Idiot, 1951). “I had wanted to make this film since before Rashomon. Since I was little I’d read [Fyodor] Dostoevsky and had thought this book would make a wonderful film. Naturally, you cannot compare me to him, but he is still my favourite author, he is the one who writes most honestly about human existence. And I think that when I made this picture I really understood him.”
Released from a mental asylum Kinji Kameda (Masayuki Mori) travels to Hokkaido where he tragically becomes involved in the lives of two women, Taeko Nasu (Setsuko Hara) and Ayako (Yoshiko Kuga). “[The film] was difficult to make. At times I felt as though I wanted to die,” confessed the director. “Dostoevsky is heavy enough, and now I was under him – I knew just how those enormous sumo wrestlers feel. All the same it was a marvelous experience for me.” Helping him with his cinematic adaptation was a moment from Kurosawa’s childhood. “My brother once forced me to spend a day wandering through Tokyo looking at the victims of the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923: corpses piled up on bridges, corpses blocking off a whole street at the intersection, corpses displaying every manner of death possible to human beings. When I involuntarily turned away, my brother scolded me, ‘Akira, look carefully now.’ When that night I asked my brother why he’d made me look at that these terrible sights, he replied, ‘If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened. If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of.’ With my camera, like Dostoevsky with his prose, I have tried to force the audience – which is often unwilling – to ‘look carefully now.’”
“I worked very hard and put everything I had into this picture,” stated Kurosawa. “It ran into trouble as soon as it was shown in Japan. It was cut, it caused friction with Shochiku, the studio for which it was made, and it was attacked by the critics. It may not have been the best film I made. But we have a saying that parents love best the child that is lame.” Reflecting further about the movie which caused Daiei to rescind its offer of making another project with him, the director remarked, “As entertainment, I don’t think it is a failure. Of all my films, people wrote me most about this one. If it had been as bad as all that, they wouldn’t have written. I trust my audience. They understood what I was saying.”
Rescued by Rashomon becoming a global phenomenon, Akira Kurosawa produced Ikiru (To Live, 1952). “Occasionally, I think of my death,” stated the filmmaker, “then I think, how could I ever bear to take a final breath, while living a life like this, how could I leave it? There is, I feel, so much more for me to do – I keep feeling that I have lived so little yet. Then I become thoughtful, but not sad. It was from such a feeling that Ikiru arose.”
Reminiscing about the picture which details the life of a Post-war civil servant who is doomed by stomach cancer, Kurosawa said, “What I remember best here is the long wake sequence that ends the film, where – from time to time – we see scenes in the hero’s later life. Originally, I wanted music all under this long section. I talked it over with [Fumio] Hayasaka and we decided upon it and he wrote the score. Yet when it came time to dub, no matter how we did it, the scenes and music did not fit. So I thought about it for a long time and then took all of the music out. I remember how disappointed Hayasaka was. He just sat there, not saying anything, and the rest of the day he tried to be cheerful. I was sorry I had to do it, yet I had to.” The music composer had a profound effect on the life of his director. “We worked so well together because one’s weakness was the other’s strength,” confided Kurosawa. “We had been together for ten years and then he died. It was not my only loss – it was music’s loss as well. You don’t meet a person like that twice in your life.”
“Ikiru was critical of bureaucrats, but it was respected, and it was given an award by the [Japanese] Education Ministry.” The picture which starred frequent collaborator Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Kyoko Seki, and Makoto Kobori almost did not get released internationally. “The distribution company felt it would not be understood by foreigners,” stated Kurosawa. “Especially the second part, the wake, they felt, would be incomprehensible. But I kept after them. Finally, they agreed to submit it to the Berlin Film Festival. At the Berlin Film Festival, it was very well received, and I won the Silver Bear, the prize for best film. This experience served to confirm my belief that film is international and humanity is universal.”
Growing up in a household where his father was a descendant of a legendary class of Japanese warriors, Akira Kurosawa revisited his family heritage with Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954). A village of farmers seeking to protect its crop from marauding bandits, hires a group of mercenaries. “Some ambitious samurai were naturally intent on advancing their own careers and did not pay any attention to the weak and the needy,” explained Kurosawa. “At the time there were many samurai who were traveling all over Japan in order to find better employment under more powerful lords. These seven samurai are the real samurai, but in the worldly sense there was something missing in them because they couldn’t get jobs and further their careers.” Explaining the actions of Kambai Shimada (Takashi Shimura) who is the leader of the group, Kurosawa stated, “Being a samurai, although he is a jobless ronin, he had the natural moral obligation to help the peasant [a baby had been kidnapped by a thief and held hostage in a small hut],” explained the moviemaker. “As the samurai class is superior to any other, they felt the duty of being the guardians of society. So when the commoners could not handle a situation, they had to use their good judgment.”
Shimada is aided by his warrior compatriots Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), Gorobei (Yoshio Inaba), Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi), Shichiroji (Daisuke Kato), Katsushiro (Ko Kimura), and Heihachi (Minoru Chiaki). “Out of their compassion for the peasants,” remarked the director, “they helped them, going beyond their class role; in the end they help the peasants because they had to. However, in the beginning their intentions were mixed. The samurai were preoccupied with themselves, not so much helping the peasants out of compassion. Kikuchiyo, played by Mifune, was the ideal go-between – the samurai brought up amongst the peasants. As time went on, both sides, samurai and peasants, had to come down to the very basic condition where they had to fight together to fend off an enemy…They all melted together into the same class.” Kurosawa does not view the villagers as being weak, “It is the samurai who were weak because they were being blown by the winds of time. They won the battle for the peasants, but then they were dismissed and went away. The peasants remained to till the earth. I made Shimura say at the end, ‘We have lost again.’”
Capturing the story for the big screen, the filmmaker employed a revolutionary method. “Much is often made of the fact that I use more than one camera to shoot a scene,” remarked Akira Kurosawa. “This began when I was making Seven Samurai, because it was impossible to predict exactly what would happen in the scene when the bandits attack the peasants’ village in a heavy rainstorm. If I had filmed it in the traditional shot-by-shot method, there was no guarantee that any action could be repeated in exactly the same way twice. So I used three cameras rolling simultaneously. The result was extremely effective, so I decided to exploit this technique fully in less action-filled drama as well.” He went on to say, “As a general system, I put A camera in the most orthodox positions, use the B camera for quick, decisive shots and the C camera as a kind of guerilla unit.”
Over a year in production, with half the time spent in distant locations, the completed film was three hours long. Two shorter versions were released; one for the international market and the other for the Venice Film Festival where the picture won the Silver Lion. Seiji Miyaguchi was awarded Best Supporting Actor at the Mainichi Film Concours. The movie was an Oscar contender for Best Art-Set Decoration (Black and White) and Best Costume Design (Black and White), while the BATFAs nominated it for Best Film and Best Foreign Actor (Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura). The picture was remade by Hollywood as the acclaimed Western, The Magnificent Seven (1960) featuring Yul Brynner (The King and I), Steven McQueen (The Sand Pebbles), Charles Bronson (Machine-Gun Kelly), James Coburn (Affliction), Eli Wallach (Baby Doll), and Robert Vaughan (The Young Philadelphians).
Shifting to a contemporary setting, Akira Kurosawa produced Ikimono no kiroku (Record of a Living Being or I Live in Fear, 1955) about an elderly man (Toshiro Mifune) who wants to take his family to Brazil to escape the next atomic war. Film critic Donald Richie stated that the filmmaker had “created in the old father a kind of everyman, a modern Lear even, who sees what may happen and fears it.”
Kurosawa could relate to his main character as he himself had lived through the devastation of WWII. “It is both a physical and psychological fact that if you are not right there having bombs fall on your head, whatever you see is strangely beautiful,” recounted the director. “Even the bombing of Tokyo, which I watched from a close but safe distance, was like an incredible spectacle, a pageant with search-lights, flashes of light and smoke.”
Reverting once again to Western literature for inspiration, Akira Kurosawa focused his attention on a revered English playwright. “I wanted to make Macbeth. The problem was how to adapt the story to Japanese thinking? The story is understandable enough but the Japanese tend to think differently about such things as witches and ghosts.” To make the classic Shakespearean play more acceptable to his homeland audience, the moviemaker set the story within a familiar historical era. “During the period of civil wars [1460 to 1560] in Japan, there were plenty of incidents like those portrayed in Macbeth. They are called ge-Koku-jo [a retainer murders his lord and deprives him of his power].” The other aspect making Kumonosu-jô (Throne of Blood or Castle of the Spider’s Web, 1957) more comprehendible was its cinematic presentation. “I utilized the Japanese style of painting known as Mushare [warrior painting] in my overall design, and forms of Japanese Noh drama in staging the dramatic elements of the film. My aim was to transform Shakespeare into pure Japanese by borrowing freely from Japanese art forms.”
“Drama in the West takes it character from the psychology of men or circumstances; the Noh is different,” explained Kurosawa. “First of all, the Noh has the mask, and while staring at it, the actor becomes the man whom the mask represents. The performance also has a defined style, and in devoting himself to it faithfully, the actor becomes possessed. Therefore, I showed each of the players a photograph of a mask of Noh which came the closest to the respective role; I told him that the mask was his own part. To Toshiro Mifune, who played the part of Taketoki Washizu [Macbeth], I showed the mask named Heida. It was a mask of a warrior. In the scene in which Mifune is persuaded by his wife to kill his lord, he created for me just the same life-like expression as the mask did.”
“Originally, I wanted to produce this film and let a younger director direct it. But when the script was finished and Toho [the movie studio] saw how expensive it would be, they asked me to direct it. So I did.” It was just as well as the veteran Akira Kurosawa found the principle photography to be an extremely challenging experience. “The camera work was very difficult because there were so many full shots, and the shooting was carried out while I gave strict instructions about the poses of the characters. If the actors moved into an incorrect position, the balance of the picture was broken. If a single shoulder went out of frame, everything was ruined.” The picture was filmed on a famous natural landmark. “We decide that the main castle set had to be built on the slope of Mount Fuji, not because I wanted to show this mountain but because it has precisely the stunted landscape I wanted.” Recruited to help in the building of the pivotal structure were American soldiers from a nearby U.S. Marine Corp base. “When I went into the ways the castles were constructed in those days, some of them made use of wood which was grown as if it had been a maze. Therefore, the wood was named “the wood of spiders’ hair,” meaning the wood that catches the invaders as if in a spider’s web. The title Castle of the Spider’s Web came to me in this way.”
With the release of his next two films, Kurosawa created what he referred to as his “jidaigeki [period picture] trilogy.”
Continue to part three.
Movies… For Free! Rashomon (1950)
Movies… For Free! Throne of Blood (1957)
For more on the filmmaker visit AkiraKurosawa.info, the Akira Kurosawa Foundation or the British Film Institute.
Also be sure to read Trevor’s article marking 100 years since the director’s birth – Akira Kurosawa: A Cinematic Artist.
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.
