Kagemusha is one of Kurosawa’s most historically interesting films, for a number of reasons. The story of an undistinguished, time-serving civil servant who, upon learning he has stomach cancer, channels his energies into one final positive act, building a children’s playground in a disease-ridden slum quarter, is truly heart-rending stuff. To allow us to provide a better and more tailored experience please click "OK", The Idiot (1951) | © japanesefilmarchive/Flickr. The following is a list of works, both in film and other media, for which the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made some documented creative contribution. Set in the 19th century, the story concerns a young doctor (Yuzo Kayama, later a popular musician) who is being trained by an older physician (Mifune), and their various interactions with patients and each other. With the financial and critical failure of Dodes’ka-den, a portrait of the grimy denizens of a shantytown on the outskirts of Tokyo, an attempted suicide threatened to put an end to Kurosawa’s career. Despite his age, the production exudes a freshness and vitality unlike anything he had made before, offering a feast for the eyes. The film would go on to be the third highest-grossing release in Japan for that year.While firmly entrenching Toshiro Mifune as a sta… One of the most beautiful anti-war films ever made, Renoir’s 1937 work is a powerful lamentation aimed at the death of the European aristocracy. Here is a list of the best films of his career. Much like Throne of Blood, it takes Shakespeare to medieval Japan in spectacularly extravagant fashion. With its accumulated wide-shots of threatening ranks of horsemen clutching banners assembled on distant hilltops and a standout scene in which overthrown warlord Hidetora wanders in a confused daze from the apocalyptic conflagration of his besieged castle, every image is so meticulously composed, every scene so perfectly constructed, as to provide the kind of satori moments of transcendent stupefaction all but lost in the CG age. The most celebrated Japanese filmmaker of all time, Akira Kurosawa produced a staggering body of work that stands as a monument of artistic achievement. Skilfully invoking memorable imagery of disintegrating ideals, The Grand Illusion is a tragicomic exposition of the futility of extensive warfare. How many have you seen? 1990s 3; 1980s 2; … Its title translates literally as ‘Spider’s Web Castle’, and the gothic setting of a deserted castle filled with dark shadows and swathed in fog forms the perfect frame for Mifune’s tortured turn as Washizu, the samurai usurper haunted by past crimes. Dersu Uzala is truly one of a kind. a list of 30 titles The Best 20 Films of the Noughties (2000-2009). He is still considered to be one of the greatest Japanese filmmakers in history and he is beloved worldwide. The film is best remembered for the striking scene in which Mifune’s character, Macbeth’s equivalent, meets his death in a hail of arrows. A lesser-known work from the master, Scandal is nonetheless worth checking out not only as an example of Kurosawa’s technical virtuosity and strong compositional approach, but for its critique of some of the less palatable aspects of westernisation. Kurosawa had famously extended production costs, along with the timeline Toho Studios had wanted him to adhere to. The villagers decide to hire seven wandering samurai to defeat the thugs before they can steal their crops. Kurosawa transports Shakespeare’s Macbeth to feudal Japan in this masterly movie, which features a mesmerising performance by Toshiro Mifune. The obvious influence of these more monumental titles makes it easy to overlook the more humanistic, personal aspects of the master’s wide array of low-key, contemporary dramas and potent literary adaptations. The following is a list of works, both in film and other media, for which the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made some documented creative contribution. Posted on February 20, 2020 February 20, 2020 by Patrick Galvan. Released in 1954, the same fateful year as another one of the most well-known Japanese movies — the original Godzilla — Seven Samurai is the Kurosawa film that usually garners the most votes as his best. The first serious phase of the director’s career came during the postwar era … Taken as pure entertainment, High and Low ranks among the very best films Kurosawa ever made thanks to the constant tension, corporate intrigue, and unpredictable plot developments. News, features and opinion on the world of film. Akira Kurosawa (23 March 1910 — 6 September 1998) is one of Japanese cinema’s few household names in the west, due to such groundbreaking jidaigeki period action films as Seven Samurai (1954), The Hidden Fortress (1958) and Kagemusha (1980). His inability to secure funds for another film in Japan prompted this overseas shift, and the result is a magical tapestry of a world seldom seen by outsiders. Fortunately an invitation from the Soviet Union’s Mosfilm to helm this Siberia-set 70mm adaptation of explorer Captain Vladimir Arsenyev’s 1923 autobiography put him firmly back on the international map. A loose adaptation of Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom, this tense police procedural drama focuses on the kidnapping of a successful businessman’s son, all within the broader context of a society that was rapidly becoming more affluent and seeing an increasingly pronounced wealth gap. Find out about international touring programmes, BFI Film Academy: opportunities for young creatives, Get funding to progress my creative career, Search the BFI National Archive collections, Read research data and market intelligence, Search for projects funded by National Lottery, Apply for British certification and tax relief, Get help as a new filmmaker and find out about NETWORK, Find out about booking film programmes internationally. The film is best remembered for the striking scene in which Mifune’s character, Macbeth’s equivalent, meets his death in a hail of arrows. We took all of the movies directed by Akira Kurosawa and looked at his Rotten Tomato Critic, Rotten Tomato User, IMDB, and Letterboxd scores, ranking them against one another to see which movies came out on top. Winner of the best director award at the Venice Film Festival 2020 for his period espionage drama Wife of a Spy, Kurosawa was known initially as a proponent of the horror genre, his first films coinciding with the turn of the millennium wave of J-horror. The film that launched Kurosawa’s name outside his homeland (and those of its stars Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo), Rashomon’s Golden Lion Award at Venice in 1951 awakened a postwar generation of international festival and arthouse audiences to the manifold pleasures of Japanese cinema. This is all the more impressive when one considers that Kurosawa was 75 years old during the making of the film. ... Best Films of 2010! While certainly not the first samurai story committed to film, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai nonetheless set a standard, pretty much from the moment it was released. A portrait of the academic and author Hyakken Uchida (1889–1971), unfolding across the decades following Uchida’s retirement just prior to the beginning of Second World War, much of its runtime is given over to the good cheer accompanying the riotous annual drinking parties held every year to mark his birthday by the former students who venerate him. Together with Godzilla, it’s the seven ronin, or masterless samurai, from this film who adorn a pair of massive murals outside the Toho Studios entrance in Setagaya, Tokyo. Combining two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, its script also broke the mould of conventional cinema plotting, introducing the concept of the unreliable narrator in its contradictory accounts of the rape of a samurai’s wife as relayed by the key suspects and witnesses to the crime, including one testimony delivered from the murdered samurai himself by a medium. Kurosawa directed this masterpiece at the lowest point of his career in Japan, a situation that was mainly down to the commercial failure of his previous film, Dodesukaden, which was completed a full five years before Dersu Uzala. The costume designer deservedly won an Oscar. Top 10 Akira Kurosawa Films. The story stars two humorous bumbling peasants who find themselves caught up in a major conflict involving a princess and rival warring factions, which makes you think of how R2-D2 and C-3PO got unwittingly mixed up in an epic battle between good and evil. Ironically, that foreign language was Russian, and the country Kurosawa was representing was the Soviet Union. Drunken Angel also began a string of collaborations between Kurosawa and composer Fumio Hayasaka, who would later go on to work with Kurosawa’s eminent peer Kenji Mizoguchi. Aside from the independently produced Dodes’ka-den in 1970 (remarkably, his first film in colour), he would not direct another film in his homeland for 15 years. 10 Worst: The Idiot (1951) The Idiot is an adaptation of a Russian novel of the same name by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A stylistic similarity between the two films is the way in which Kurosawa transitions from one shot to the next using a wipe, something that George Lucas would emulate a little under two decades later. Kurosawa’s oeuvre is not particularly regarded for its focus on sympathetic female characters, but the central turn by Setsuko Hara (better known for her work with Yasujiro Ozu) in his fifth feature (and first of the postwar period) showcases another side to the director, and also counts as his most overtly political work. Kane and Vertigo don’t top the chart by divine right. During the final days of World War II, production funds for Japanese films were at a bare minimum. Kurosawa undoubtedly played a pivotal role in the emergence of cinema as the predominant art form of the 20th century. The first of two films Kurosawa made for the Shochiku studio (alongside the Dostoevsky adaptation The Idiot in 1951), this punchy social drama takes a righteous swipe at the gutter press, as Toshiro Mifune’s up-and-coming painter is snapped by the paparazzi while sitting on a hotel balcony with a famous singer (played by Yoshiko Yamaguchi), the photo inspiring a fabricated story in a popular gossip magazine. Inspired by several real-life incidents, No Regrets for Our Youth is an intelligent and balanced drama about wavering ideologies and personal allegiances set between 1933-46, the years of imperial Japan’s increasing militarisation through to its wartime defeat. With Japan’s studio system increasingly incapable of accommodating the costs of the long shooting periods and large-scale sets and action sequences required for his productions, Kurosawa left his studio Toho after Red Beard (1965). BFI Japan 2020: Over 100 Years of Japanese Cinema, Watch No Regrets for Our Youth online on BFI Player, Watch Throne of Blood online on BFI Player. Very loosely inspired by Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ikiru is one of Kurosawa’s most emotionally resonant films, one that leads the audience to contemplate life and legacy in a very subtle and poignant manner. Kurosawa would explore this line – between good and bad – in many of his films: Kagemusha (1980), in which a thief, acting as the double for a feudal lord, slowly assumes the characteristics of his master, is one example; contemporary crime dramas Stray Dog (1949), about a policeman searching for his stolen pistol, and High and Low (1963), about an investigation into a … Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. Needless to say, the outraged artist refuses to take things lying down and vows to take the magazine’s editor to court. It received the year’s Academy Award for best foreign language film. Hugely influenced by the Hollywood films of John Ford, as well as by Shakespeare, he made films about characters and situations that audiences in the West easily recognized. “What are Akira Kurosawa’s Best Movies?” We looked at all of Kurosawa’s directed filmography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question! All 30 Akira Kurosawa Movies Ranked From Worst To Best. His films, like The Hidden Fortress, influenced popular culture and a generation of young filmmakers. With a running time of over 200 minutes, Kurosawa’s first samurai film is a quintessential action film, and it exerted enormous influence on both Japanese cinema and Hollywood, most notably in the 1960 Western remake The Magnificent Seven. This action-filled adventure film is credited as a major inspiration for the original Star Wars films. … He's already the subject of a Google doodle, now here's a guide to … Through these characters, Kurosawa demonstrates the care and compassion that should be shown to all humans, regardless of social status or wealth. The Best Japanese Horror Movies From folk tales to body horror to monster movies, Japan’s cinema finds new ways to thrill and disturb audiences. Without further ado, here are Akira Kurosawa's 5 Best Films (& 5 Worst). Set during the civil war of the late-16th-century Warring States period, Kurosawa’s massively influential magnum opus depicts a group of masterless samurai recruited by a farming community to fend off frequent raids by a gang of bandits. The film also lent its name to the Rashomon Effect, which refers to contradictory descriptions of the same events given by different people. Based on Arsenyev’s encounters in 1902 with the elderly, gnomic, nature-loving scout from the nomadic Nanai tribe who lends his name to the film (and served as a model for George Lucas’s creation, Yoda), it sees Kurosawa back in epic form as the two wrestle against the ice and snow of the steppes. This in itself is reflected in the ease by which they’ve in turn established an action template so readily adapted by filmmakers from all over the world. Over a career of about sixty years, Kurosawa made critically acclaimed masterpieces like Seven Samurai and Rashomon. This includes a complete list of films with which he was involved (including the films on which he worked as assistant director before becoming a full director), as well as his little-known contributions to theater, television and literature. This postwar drama, made during the American occupation of Japan, and therefore subject to strict censorship regulations, marked the first in a long series of collaborations between Kurosawa and the actor Toshiro Mifune. Here Mifune plays a gangster who contracts tuberculosis and develops a bond with the hard-drinking doctor who diagnosed him. Menu. Introduction Akira Kurosawa, a man who would have turned one hundred years old in September 1998, will always be considered as one of the influential moviemakers in cinema history. This blending of Eastern and Western traditions is thrilling to behold. It incorporates numerous elements of Japanese Noh Theatre, which dates back to the 14th century. Along with Tarkovsky, I consider Kurosawa the greatest of all filmmakers. Akira Kurosawa (23 March 1910 — 6 September 1998) is one of Japanese cinema’s few household names in the west, due to such groundbreaking jidaigeki period action films as Seven Samurai (1954), The Hidden Fortress (1958) and Kagemusha (1980). Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura is wonderful as the man who only finds meaning in his life as death rears its ugly head, while his in-laws wrangle over his pension pot. The plot revolves around four characters giving different accounts of the same occurrence, leading the audience to question the nature of truth, motivation, interpretation and recollection. In movies like Seven Samurai and High and Low, director Akira Kurosawa took the cinematic language of Hollywood and improved on it, creating a vigorous, muscular method of visual storytelling that became a stylistic playbook for the likes of Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. First of all, it emerged through what might’ve been the single most frustrating shoot of the director’s career. A ranking of all thirty films directed by Akira Kurosawa, presented in order of best to worst. Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a unique case of a filmmaker, even for an industry as diverse as the Japanese one, and not just for his additional roles as a film critic and a professor at Tokyo University of Arts. Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa is often regarded as one of the best and most influential directors in the history of cinema. There is nothing subpar within this large and varied body of work, and I’ve omitted many a worthy title in the aim of giving a fuller picture of the fruits of an incredible six-decade filmmaking career. Kurosawa’s most famous film concerns a village under attack from a group of bandits. Akira Kurosawa is an influential director. Seven Samurai: The rocky road to classic status of Akira Kurosawa’s action masterpiece, Down the Bunka: Japanese underground cinema of the 1960s, Top trumps: the giants of Japan’s monster movies, Born: 23 March 1910, Omori, TokyoDied: 6 September 1998, Tokyo. We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements. The main character of Ikiru (which means ‘to live’), played by the long-standing Kurosawa mainstay Takashi Shimura, is a terminally ill bureaucrat who attempts to find a meaning and purpose to life before he passes away. Here are 10 of his best movies. While the relentless verbal punning in the dialogue is occasionally lost in translation (the title, meaning ‘Not Yet’, alludes to a legend about an old man who refuses to relinquish his hold on life), the discernible self-reflective aspect to this celebration of a life well-lived nevertheless has an undeniable poignancy. Akira Kurosawa redefined the action film with his samurai epics set in Japan’s medieval past. The masterful atmospheric cinematography of Kazuo Miyagawa, and the late-10th-century Heian period setting adds to the haunting, purgatorial ambience. June 30, 2020. Akira Kurosawa, the legendary Japanese director, was born 100 years ago today. The enduring popularity of such titles lies in no small part to their open influence from Hollywood, particularly the westerns of directors such as John Ford. Japanese horror movies got a big leg-up in the 1950s and 1960s with Ugetsu and Kwaidan , before spinning heads over time with transgressive cult works ( Tetsuo: The Ironman ), comedic takes ( Hausu , One Cut of the Dead ), and crossover hits ( … The following is a list of works, both in film and other media, for which the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made some documented creative contribution. The Top 20 Movies Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa; The Best Horror Movies Of the 1980s; The Best Science Fiction Movies of 1977; The Best Comedy Movies Of the 2000s; The Most Recently Released Movies; The Most Recently Added Movies; Movies by Decade … Yojimbo (1961) Although the majority of Kurosawa’s films were contemporary dramas, he tends to be best known for his samurai works. Explore the history of film in list form. It's one of the most unique stories ever in cinema; it also contributed much to action movies and film techniques including the masterful use of rain during an epic battle or action sequence among many others. Although the script uses not a single line from its source, Kurosawa’s celebrated transplantation of Macbeth to the lawless realm of 16th-century Japan counts among the finest screen adaptations of Shakespeare ever realised, a faithful rendition of the story that works perfectly within its own historical context. Akira Kurosawa is unquestionably the best known Japanese filmmaker in the West. The most expensive Japanese production of its day, it introduced all the hallmarks associated with Kurosawa’s name: an epic runtime detailing the recruitment of the mercenary force, the training of the farmers, and the fortification of the village in anticipation of the climactic attack (the original western release was trimmed down from the original 207 minutes); on-location shooting with a strong focus on landscapes and environmental conditions to reflect the inner psychologies of the human elements within them; a fastidious recreation of sets, costumes and weaponry of the era; and lots and lots of stunning horse-bound battle sequences shot using multiple camera setups. Hand-picked. Shot in Russia’s Far East on 70mm film, this epic account of an explorer who befriends a hunter won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Kurosawa fans most likely expected this film to be at the top. As Mifune’s enigmatic masterless samurai roams into a desolate town overrun by grotesque rival criminal gangs, the whistling wind whisks leaves down deserted streets through which a dog runs with a severed human hand clamped in its mouth and the grimy residents, cowering behind shutters, fear to tread. 28. This includes a complete list of films with which he was involved (including the films on which he worked as assistant director before becoming a full director), as well as his little-known contributions to theater, television and literature. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail. Seven Samurai (1954)was Akira Kurosawa at his finest. Kurosawa limited himself to one title per director, giving a unique perspective on the best world directors and his personal favorites. Yukie is the privileged daughter of a Kyoto University law professor who is controversially removed from his post for his leftist beliefs. Akira Kurosawa (Japanese: 黒澤明 Kurosawa Akira; March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and producer who directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years.He is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. The relatively modest 110-minute runtime makes this (and its shorter 1962 follow-up Sanjuro) a more accessible entry point into Kurosawa’s oeuvre than his more grandiose swords-and-samurai sagas. 3 Best Films of Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa transports Shakespeare’s Macbeth to feudal Japan in this masterly movie, which features a mesmerising performance by Toshiro Mifune. With 30 titles to his name as a director since his 1943 debut Sanshiro Sugata (and many more as a screenwriter), distilling Kurosawa’s must-see titles into a tidy top 10 list is something of a fools errand. Akira Kurosawa (1910-98) was the director who first brought international attention to Japanese cinema. Possessing a similar synthesis of psychological tension and austere formal elegance to its more claustrophobic companion piece, Throne of Blood, it is even bigger and bolder in ambition. “Master of horror” is not traditionally an accolade recognised by the world’s leading film competitions, but for Kiyoshi Kurosawa, it’s proved something of a boon. ©2021 British Film Institute. Devoid of the elaborate action sequences and intense inner dramas for which he is renowned, and featuring a whimsical mid-section involving a missing cat that lasts almost half an hour, Kurosawa’s directorial swansong initially seems slightly underwhelming. BFI Japan 2020: Over 100 Years of Japanese Cinema is a major celebration of Japanese cinema beginning on BFI Player. 0. The film portrays her relationships over the years with two of his former students, both rival for her affections, and her love affair and ensuing marriage to one of them, who is arrested for his anti-government activities and subsequently disappears from public view. Partly inspired by George Stevens’s Shane (1952), Kurosawa’s quintessential ‘samurai/western’ Yojimbo (‘The Bodyguard’) thrives on this cross-cultural synergy, right down to the soundtrack. Though best known for samurai epics like SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO, his intimate, contemporary-set dramas, such as IKIRU and HIGH AND LOW, are just as searing. The austere staging and performances, drawing upon traditional Noh theatre, lend an appropriate note of theatricality to proceedings, blurring the gap between the real and the supernatural, while Kurosawa surpasses even himself with the quite jaw-dropping climax as Washizu’s violent misdeeds catch up with him.

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