Word: kurosawa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After a visit to Japan last year and exposure to Kurosawa's film Kagemusha, Armani has given a new look to his more exotic clothes: smocked leather samurai jackets, ballooning silk pants, kimono-inspired collars, obi sashes and details taken from ceremonial robes. "It's true I was influenced by Japan," says Armani. "But the real inspiration is born when you examine what you did last season and try to sharpen your focus, softening a line that was too rigid, changing a color that was too hard." As a former fabric designer, Armani starts every collection by putting...
...director also breaks down the one-to-one relationship between killer and killed. In a terrific battle scene, Kurosawa doesn't even show a gun going off--shots from the dark pick off one soldier after another, and the soundtrack is filled with clinking spears and screams. In the final battle we see volley after volley of an immense line of rifles, and we hear men shrieking, horses whinnying and bodies falling, but only after the last shot is fired does Kurosawa cut to the battlefield itself. Then he gives us, in slow motion with hollow trumpets ironically restating...
...KUROSAWA SAID he was making an antiwar film with Seven Samurai as well; he tacked on a coda where the survivors bitterly realized that their fellow samurai had died for nothing. But we go back to that film for the kinetic charge of the battle scenes, for the lyrical action. Like Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch, Kurosawa inadvertently ended up affirming the violence he set out to condemn. Now, he has made a true anti-war film, with all the horror of battle and none of the thrill...
...powerful is Shingen's spirit that merely by acting naturally the thief begins to duplicate his actions, almost to think his thoughts. When Shingen's son, Katsuyori, eager to assume his dead father's power by exposing the double, challenges the compulsorily silent double at a large meeting, Kurosawa doesn't cut to the double's face for the comic reaction of a man stuck in the spotlight who doesn't know what to say. Instead, he shoots from behind the double; there is a silence and then he responds, surely as Shingen would have, and you feel the presence...
...KUROSAWA, at age 70, displays a simple and confident technique; the camera is always placed for maximum poetic and dramatic effect, and he rarely resorts to flashy editing. He wrings remarkable comedy from a stock situation (the impersonator), but because the characters have such depth, and because the story accumulates meaning as it goes along, every laugh is fresh, every sentiment unforced. Epic in scope, dexterous in execution, almost Shakespearean in its authority, Kagemusha affirms Kurosawa's reputation as one of our few world-class directors...