Word: kurosawa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...veteran star of 126 films and Japan's most famous actor, but Toshiro Mifune, 63, is still known to American audiences by only a handful of movies, among them Kurosawa's Rashomon and the TV mini-series ShŌgun. In spite of his relatively low profile in the U.S.-or perhaps because of it-Mifune was honored last week at the Japan Society in Manhattan, which was beginning an eight-week-long, 40-film retrospective of his work. He surprised his New York audience by appearing at the gala opening in the costume yabusame, a centuries...
...1950s Japan could boast not only a robust film industry but also a vibrant national cinema, with three directors-Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa-who could be counted among the handful of film-making giants. Mizoguchi died in 1956, Ozu in 1963, and no younger director has since achieved nearly their stature. As for Kurosawa, he has been able to realize only three films since 1965-all outside the studio system-and in 1971, frustrated by the industry's intransigence, attempted suicide. His latest project, a retelling of King Lear set in medieval Japan, was recently postponed...
...neither flukes nor mutants," says Tadao Sato, a respected Japanese film critic, of their success. "They are part of a new tendency among Japanese directors to visualize the 'irrational' elements of the Eastern world through Western-style intelligence. Once, when a Westerner looked at Japanese movies-at Kurosawa's kamikaze-type warriors in The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, or Ozu's gentle heroines in Tokyo Story and The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, or Mizoguchi's evocations of Kabuki drama in Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff-he, could tell himself, 'This is Japan...
After nearly two decades of depression, the Japanese art film has returned to the status of a cottage industry. But it has not seized the world imagination as it did in the 1950s, when the Western success of Kurosawa's Rashomon unlocked a trove of tantalizing, hitherto unknown masterpieces. Part of the appeal of these films lay in their strangeness: Japan seemed not just another country but a different world, full of mystery, elegance, violence, surprise...
...outline suggests a standard scenario of Armageddon aftershock. Bikers have terrorized many a decent citizen in movies over the past three decades. And the sociopathic superman has emerged to defend them in distinguished westerns (John Ford's The Searchers) and easterns (Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo). What Miller has done here is create a milieu as dense and tangy as Tolkien's Middle Earth or Céline's demimonde. This is Australia as the Down Underworld, where character is revealed in the gradations between good and awful. Drawn in vivid cartoon strokes, this menagerie...