Top 10 Akira Kurosawa Films

10. The Hidden Fortress (1958)

Rescued from obscurity after George Lucas acknowledged it as an influence on Star Wars, Hidden Fortress shows the director using widescreen, or TohoScope in Japan, for the first time. It's an action picture but it also share elements of the road movie and the American western. John Ford was a major influence on Kurosawa and it can definitely be felt here.


9. The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

A tale of revenge that combines elements of Shakespeare's Hamlet with film noir. It's a film that gets its hooks in you with the first 10 minutes. Kurosawa examines the dangers of corporate ladder climbing. Imagine Billy Wilder's The Apartment turned into a murder mystery. It has some of the most interesting shots to boot. But I'll let Tony Zhou explain that further:




8. Throne of Blood (1957)
An adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Throne of Blood represents one of the most brutal films in the director's filmography. It's relentless pace. The absolutely balls to the wall performance of Toshiro Mifune. The haunting scene with the And of course those final ten minutes. How the hell that was pulled off or how anyone wasn't hurt is one of life's great mysteries.

7. Red Beard (1965)
Kurosawa's last collaboration with Mifune proved to be one of the best. Red Beard is an overlooked film in Kurosawa's canon. A three hour medical drama set in feudal times about a physician, Noboru Yasumoto, who is sent to an infirmary to visit. He soon learns he has to stay and this sets his character off. Here we see the director take on humane themes through gentle, sweeping drama. A key section of the film deals with the story of a poor boy and Otoyo, a young female patient whom Noboru helps recover from her unhealthy domestic situation.

6. Yojimbo (1961)
The influence of Kurosawa takes on a cyclical nature when examined. The director greatly admired John Ford and the western. So he took that influence to the set of Yojimbo. This film in turn inspired Sergio Leone to create A Fistful of Dollars. What many consider to be one of the first spaghetti westerns.

The character of Sanjuro (played by Toshiro Mifune) is fed up with the corruption of his town and engineers a rivalry between two of the towns clans. Movie cool was not born with Pulp Fiction. Kurosawa was doing that decades before. Yojimbo is proof.

5. Ran (1985)
The director's visual peak as far as scope goes. Kurosawa began using color in 1970 with Dodo-saken. It was a failure at the box office and led the director to attempt to take his own life. He then moved to Russia to work on Dersu Urzula. A project that rejuvenated him. He wasn't as prolific as his "golden period" in the 50's. The work he churned out though showed him using color in new and interesting ways. Kurosawa doesn't allow any easy solution on this production as far as color. King Lear, from which the story was adapted, is an incredibly dark work. Yet the color is over saturated. Making for unforgettable images. There's never been anything like these images in film before or since. On this scale and sheer composition.

Ran could never have been made by Akira at the age he was at Samurai. There is a sense of old age wisdom with his use of long lenses and camerawork. There's no close ups or reaction shots. No dolly shots. Yet what he captures has the vitality of one of his pictures from the 50's. He was fearless. More importantly as this film proves, his work is timeless.

4. High and Low (1963)


A thriller that starts out as a game of cat and mouse and morphs into a police procedural. Akira's influence from Western cinema is apparent here as he adapts an American novel from Ed McBain. But he doesn't stop when the book does. He deliberately goes beyond the page and creates more story from the perspective of the kidnapper. It's an underappreciated work that is as every bit as fascinating as the next film I will be talking about...

3. Seven Samurai (1954)
Kurosawa's use of history in Seven Samurai has contemporary relevance. Honor, responsibility, the hierarchy of social classes. By going into the past he uncovers these truths. Beyond just historical narrative, the film is also a how to manual for the cinematic craft.

The use of silence. The flawless editing, particularly during the samurai battles. The staging and compositions. Seven Samurai is a film school where countless lessons can be received from the master. Want to learn how to make a good action movie? Want to learn how to make good movies in general? Watch Seven Samurai.

2. Ikiru (1952)
Kurosawa can be described as a humanist. No more is it apparent than Ikiru.

The story of an aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer, Ikiru examines the exploration of life through the eyes of this dying man. It's a universal theme that I find myself coming back to again and again and one I wish to explore in my own work.

As much as I love Toshiro Mifune's multiple roles in Kurosawa's films, I have to go with Takashi Shimura as the protagonist Kanji Watanabe as my favorite performance in Kurosawa's work. It's a film that poses a delicate question: If you had 6 months to live, what would you do?

1. Rashomon (1950)
When Rashomon opened at the Venice Film Festival it stunned audiences. Here was a film so radical in design, no one had seen anything like it. Set in 11th century Japan in order to explore the extremities of human behavior. The nonlinear narrative that employs flashbacks to show the crimes of those involved. The use of perspective through each of the four characters being examined. The effect, later dubbed the Rashomon effect has been used in countless stories. In Rashomon though, Kurosawa never lets us know which perspective is true. There are no answers. Only more questions.

In his autobiography, Something Like An Autobiography, he lets us know that the film is in fact not about subjectivity of truth but about the quicksand of ego. It's a milestone of filmmaking.




He was also a master of movement.



Akira Kurosawa left behind a remarkable body of work that continues to inspire and teach filmmakers to this day. From his humanist fables Rashomon, Ikiru and Red Beard to his samurai epics Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and Hidden Fortress to his thrillers such as High and Low. Like the sun whose rays beamed through the forest in Rashomon, Akira was a man who brought hope in a dark place.

Happy 105th birthday, Master.

Blind Spot Series: Ugetsu

Hauntingly beautiful. Exquisite. Sublime. These superlatives have cropped up whenever this movie is brought up. It's a film that, along with Rashomon, help introduce Japanese cinema to American audiences. When I first watched it I knew it was special but it had this elusive quality to it. It was only until I watched it again that its qualities seized me.

Kenji Mizoguchi's best known work announced him as someone who filmmakers and critics would revere. Ugetsu adapts the stories of  Ueda Akinari, first published in 1771, and casts its characters in the midst of a civil war in 16th century Japan. It tells us parallel stories of women who are confounded by social mores and the greed of the men they love.

Rather than it be a reflection of reality, something Yasujiro Ozu, another Japanese filmmaker seemed more attuned to with Tokyo Story, Mizoguchi creates a fairy tale-esque world. The kind of stuff that would have Guillermo Del Toro giggling to himself in ghoulish glee.

Filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda commented that Mizoguchi was a supreme realist while also being a supreme fantasist. Quite so. With Ugetsu, Mizoguchi broke through the barriers confined to realism and sought out to create a fantastical realm around the subjects he was depicting. This type of narrative is intoxicating in the way the director uses it. The narrative blends reality, memory and fantasy seamlessly so the viewer is always kept of their toes. We've seen this type of storytelling before in European cinema with Jean Vigo's L'Atalante and Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast where the fantastical overwhelms the realistic. Now Eastern Asia cinema tackles it in a hauntingly lyrical way. It blends the two together in a way that unites them. It's as if Mizoguchi is saying that this is one world.

Another thing to note with Mizoguchi is the moving camera. As opposed to Yasujiro Ozu who keeps his camera locked down, Mizoguchi allows his camera to roam freely. Kazuo Miyagawa who shot Kurosawa's Rashomon and Yojimbo, along with some of Ozu's work, was Mizoguchi's cameraman at the time.

Mizoguchi once said to his cameraman, Miyagawa "Movies are like picture scrolls." With the help of his roaming camera, exquisite imagery and haunting tones, Mizoguchi helped created a scroll of indelible images that have captured the minds of filmmakers and audiences alike.

The widescreen framing of High and Low

Akira Kurosawa is one of the few directors considered not to have made just one masterpiece, but 7. Even his lower works are films to be studied for their impeccable craft. The film that is not nearly sung on high as much as Seven Samurai, Rashomon or Ran is High and Low. Like Scorsese, who is sometimes seen as the master of gangster/crime movies, Kurosawa is seen as the guy who is the master of samurai movies. Which is unfair to both. Kurosawa was equally as interested in Japanese contemporary life. This translated into him making some seriously great dramas and thrillers alongside his noted samurai classics.

Today, I'm going to talk about how Kurosawa mastered the use of widescreen framing using the example of High and Low. A film that ranks alongside Rashomon as one of his best.  

High and Low is about a wealthy industrialist played by Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifine, whose family becomes the target of a kidnapper. Originally a book by Ed McBain, Kurosawa experimented with the structure going beyond the ending of the novel to create another section that allows High and Low to morph into a game of cat and mouse into a police procedural.

The first half takes places in a Gondo's (Toshiro Mifune) hilltop mansion. It's important to note the location as Kurosawa would later shoot the mansion as a house over looking all the villages below it. A place of wealth and importance. Throughout the first half, the frame is filled with up to eight to ten characters. How does one take that and turn it into something that isn't complete chaos? Blocking and choreography. A great director is also a great blocker and choreographer of character movement within the frame.

Yet none of these shots call attention to themselves. They are not flashy like the tracking shots in cinema that would later become masturbation material for film nerds later on.

Take a look at this frame and how Akira sets it up:

The protagonist, Gondo,  is receiving a call from the kidnapper. This takes us into the heart of the film's first section. Thus, Gondo is centered in the frame as to being to most important to this section. Gondo's wife to the right and one of his associates to the left. Structurally, the location of these shots are confined to the house because it becomes an expression of Gondo's isolation to society. 

Now let's take a shot when the police arrive:

Detective Tokura (dressed in black) is at the center of the frame. The frame is densely packed and is congested. This takes into account the suffocating pressure Gondo is feeling. Notice Gondo all the way to the far left of the frame sitting down. His place in the social hierarchy is also altered. He is now being used by the police to solve this crime. These compositions continue throughout this section and are used to show how he is responsible to everyone else in the room. No longer is he the powerful industrialist. He is constrained by the demands of everyone else. 

Notice how the kidnapper in the second half is shot unlike anyone else in the movie. Shot in tight closeups and is hemmed in. Or how the lower class is depicted throughout the second in contrast to the upper class. The dynamics of the frame and the importance of who is in it and how they are represented through their location inside of it are all traits that you want in a good film. 

These widescreen compositions are used to express the ideas of the film. High class and low class. Grand and mundane. Heaven and hell.

A Man Escaped: The importance of sound

Today, I'm going to tackle Robert Bresson's 1956 masterpiece A Man Escaped. Without even telling you the story, we already know the outcome of the film just by the title. So the question isn't why or when, but rather how. This question is explored through the use of sound. It serves a number of functions. Whether it is through sound effects, Fontaine's narration, through motifs, or through music. All contribute to the whole of the film.

Based on the story of a French Resistance leader captured by Germans during WWII, A Man Escaped marked Bresson's third movie. Bresson wisely chooses not to profile any German soldier unless absolutely necessary. Allowing us to experience the full subjectivity of Fontaine's experience. We see what he sees. We hear what he hears. It's being submerged in the routine of the prisoner and the patience of the process eventually pays off.

Fontaine's narration carries us through his experience. Yet, the images don't match up with his commentary. We are aware that he will escape his prison. So the question doesn't become whether or not he will escape but how he will escape. This allows us to train our mind on the ordinary objects he uses to break out.

Sound is also used to fill in our imaginations. For example, the opening scene shows Fontaine escaping out of car. The camera holds on the passenger who was sitting next to him and stays inside the car rather than follow Fontaine out. We hear feet running and then gunshots. We can guess how it went down because the sound guides our expectations. Even though the camera does not show them. This happens a few more times in the movie.



A Man Escaped, along with Hitchcock's The Birds and Scorsese's Raging Bull, is one of the key films to study in regards to the use of sound and how it shapes the process of storytelling.


For further reading, David Bordwell has a great analysis of how sound is used in the film:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/filmart/manescaped_soundanalysis_filmart_293.pdf

Criterion Collection also included excerpts of the essay on their blu ray:

Collage

New Discovery: Hirokazu Koreeda

Said to have picked up where Yasujiro Ozu (more on him this month) left off, Hirokazu Koreeda explores domestic situations and territory that was once explored by the legendary auteur. It's best to find a starting point to the emotional mazes of Koreeda's films. So let's start at Nobody Knows.

Based on the Sugamo Child Abandonment news story from the late 1980's, Nobody Knows tells the story of a mother and her four children and how one day she decides to abandon them. Survival thus becomes a crucial element to the children as the eldest boy, Akira (played by the immensely talented Yuya Yagira), ends up getting the rest of his siblings food and water just to make it through the day.

We empathize with these characters in a way that builds naturally and subtly. Koreeda's crisp compositions and shot selection elevate the material to the sublime. Where a simple pottery plant falling to the ground or a kid throwing up a bottle of water and catching it has such poignancy. The restraint shown here is extraordinary. As the realism of the situation is never sacrificed in favor of emotional gimmicks. Koreeda simply lets it play out.

The next Koreeda film I watched was Like Father, Like Son. Documenting the domestic situation again but this time from a different perspective. From that of two families and  two children caught in the middle. This film delves into the topic of babies being switched at birth and asks the question: If you raised a kid for 6 years and discovered it was not your biological son, would you switch it with the family that has the biological son.

Most movies would start and stop at the question. Koreeda wisely lets the story unfold and allows more question to be built on that one: How would each kid react? What led to the swap in the first place? What emotional burden would the parent carry who decided to swap the kid?

There's no melodrama to be found here. Emotions are internalized. Actions are hidden away. The portrayal of the characters lay upon the shoulders of truly gifted actors Masaharu Fukuyama, Yoko Maki, Jun Kunimura, Kirin Kiki, and Machiko Oko.

Both films establish Koreeda as a new director to be taken seriously and one whose filmography I will be going through.

Both Nobody Knows and Like Father Like Son are streaming on NetFlix Instant.

February 2015

FILMS AND TV SHOWS


2/1- Mon Oncle (1958, Jacques Tati) (A)

2/2- The Grey (2011, Joe Carnahan) (A-)

        The Crossing Guard (1995, Sean Penn) (D)

        Killing of A Chinese Bookie (1976, John Cassavetes) (B)

        L'Age D'Or (1930, Luis Bunuel) (A-)

2/3- Grand Hotel (1932, Edmund Goulding) (B)
       Last Days In Vietnam (2014, Rory Kennedy) (B-)
       Pariah (2011, Dee Rees) (B+)

2/4- A Most Violent Year (2014, J.C. Chandor) (B)
       4 Little Girls (1996, Spike Lee) (B+)
       A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson) (A+)

2/5- The Rain People (1969, Francis Ford Coppola) (B+)
       Black Sunday (1977, John Frankenheimer) (A-)
       I Remember Mama (1948, George Stevens) (B+)

2/6- Throne of Blood (1957, Akira Kurosawa) (A)
       You Can't Take It With You (1938, Frank Capra) (A-)
       Naqoyqatsi (2002, Godfrey Reggio) (C-)
       Meshes of the Afternoon (short) (1943, Maya Daren) (B+)

2/7- Possession (1981, Andrzej Zulawski) (A+)
       Louis CK: Live At the Comedy Store (2015) (B)
       Daisies (1966, Vera Chytilova) (A-)
       Coraline (2009, Henry Selick) (B)

2/8- The Ref (1994, Ted Demme) (B+)
        Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
        Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst

2/9- Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic (2013, Marina Zenovich) (B-)
       Better Call Saul (2 episodes)
       Army of Shadows (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville) (A+)
       Husbands and Wives (1992, Woody Allen) (B)

2/10- The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler) (A)
          The Mack (1973, Michael Campus) (B+)        

2/11- Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese) (A+)
         Petulia (1968, Richard Laster) (A+)

2/12- The Heiress (1949, William Wyler) (B+)
          The Fallen Idol (1948, Carol Reed) (B+)

2/13- Zodiac (2007, David Fincher) (A+)
         Beauty and the Beast (1946, Jean Cocteau) (A)
         Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz) (A+)

2/15- The Silence of the Lambs (1991, Jonathan Demme) (A+)
          Foxy Brown (1974, Jack Hill) (B+)
          Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater) (A+)
          Last Week Tonight With John Oliver

2/16- Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst
         The Fall
         Burnt Offerings (1976, Dan Curtis) (C+)
         Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky) (B+)

2/17- Opening Night (1977, John Cassavetes) (A)
         Birdman (2014, Alejandro G. Innaritu) (A+)

2/18- The Great Silence (1968, Sergio Corbucci) (A-)
          The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, Powell and Pressburger) (A+)

2/19- The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953, Roy Rowland) (B-)
         Judgment At Nuremberg (1961, Stanley Kramer) (A-)

2/20- Don't Look Now (1973, Nicolas Roeg) (A+)
         Mr. Death (1999, Errol Morris) (B)
         Life Itself (2014, Steve James) (A-)
         Jackie Brown (1997, Quentin Tarantino) (A+)

2/21- Three Women (1977, Robert Altman) (B+)
         Saturday Night Live: 40th Anniversary Special

2/22- The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton) (A+)
          The 87th Annual Academy Awards

2/23- Malcolm X (1992, Spike Lee) (A)
         Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

2/24- Abby (1974, William Girdler) (C)
         Better Call Saul
         Citizenfour (2014, Laura Poitras) (A-)
         The Thief of Baghdad (1940, Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, Tim Whelan) (B)

2/25- The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Isao Takahata) (B+)
         All That Jazz (1979, Bob Fosse) (A)

2/26- Killer of Sheep (1977, Charles Burnett) (B+)
         The Steel Helmet (1951, Sam Fuller) (A)
         The Searchers (1956, John Ford) (D+)

2/27- The Piano Teacher (2001, Michael Haneke) (B+)
          House of Cards (3 episodes)





BOOKS

2/8- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (A+)

2/13- Silver Screen Fiend by Patton Oswalt (B+)