The Warrior's Camera

The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa - Revised and Expanded Edition

Stephen Prince

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691010465, 9780691031606
• eBook ISBN: 9780691214184
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of 88, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon, which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's films, Stephen Prince provides two new chapters that examine Kurosawa's remaining films, placing him in the context of cinema history. Prince also discusses how Kurosawa furnished a template for some well-known Hollywood directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas.


Providing a new and comprehensive look at this master filmmaker, The Warrior's Camera probes the complex visual structure of Kurosawa's work. The book shows how Kurosawa attempted to symbolize on film a course of national development for post-war Japan, and it traces the ways that he tied his social visions to a dynamic system of visual and narrative forms. The author analyzes Kurosawa's entire career and places the films in context by drawing on the director's autobiography--a fascinating work that presents Kurosawa as a Kurosawa character and the story of his life as the kind of spiritual odyssey witnessed so often in his films. After examining the development of Kurosawa's visual style in his early work, The Warrior's Camera explains how he used this style in subsequent films to forge a politically committed model of filmmaking. It then demonstrates how the collapse of Kurosawa's efforts to participate as a filmmaker in the tasks of social reconstruction led to the very different cinematic style evident in his most recent films, works of pessimism that view the world as resistant to change.

1 Viewing Kurosawa

Without knowing the unchanging, the foundation cannot be built, and without knowing the changing, style cannot be renewed.

— Basho¹

In the late 1960s, following a spectacularly successful career, Kurosawa faced the threat of its imminent disintegration. Plagued by ill health and no film work, in 1971 he slashed his wrists with a razor, aligning his personal despair with a recognized cultural practice of self-immolation. Yet this was a man who had never included a scene of ritual suicide in his films, a man whose regard for the worth and integrity of the self had always compelled his film characters to reject the codes of selfdestruction. Watanabe, the dying clerk of Ikiru, refuses suicide as the answer to his problems, reasoning that he cannot die yet because he does not know if his life has had meaning. Witnessing the horrible massacre of his retainers in Ran, the warrior Hidetora reaches for his sword to commit seppuku, but the scabbard is empty. Hidetora, too, is compelled to live. In a culture that emphasizes giri, or obligation, and ties of joint responsibility linking members of a group, Kurosawa has repeatedly broken with tradition to challenge the social determinants structuring the individual. Yet, during his most painful travail, he sought a solution he had never permitted his heroes. It was not quite the warrior’s chosen end, opted for as a sign of fealty when the clan leaders were defeated in battle. But the attempt did resonate with a tradition possessing a certain cultural legitimacy. In this small contradiction lies an important clue to the nature of the films. To explore this contradiction is to define the shape and focus of this study.

A convenient place to begin is with the dilemma Kurosawa faced in the 1970s, since in some ways it grew from the nature of his work. Since 1943, when he began directing, he had averaged at least a film a year, sometimes several annually. Occasionally, a year would lapse between releases, but in general he worked steadily and consistently. Following Red Beard in 1965, however, the work dried up. Since then he has completed only five films, as compared to twenty-three in the first two decades of his career (excluding Those Who Make Tomorrow, a studio-compelled production co-directed with Kajirō Yamamoto and Hideo Sekigawa, for which Kurosawa has denied responsibility²). (Kurosawa’s latest film, Dreams, consists of eight episodes based on memorable dreams extending back to his childhood. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were instrumental in helping the project get started. With George Lucas’s help, Kurosawa tries modern special effects for the first time.³)

1. Akira Kurosawa. (Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive)

The reasons for this sudden loss of work are generally, but insufficiently, understood as economic and sociological: the Japanese film industry was changing and had shut out directors like Kurosawa whose work it could not accommodate. Television arrived in the early 1950s, and, as in other countries, the audience and the motion picture industry changed forever. In 1953, according to Richie and Anderson, only 866 television sets operated in Japan, but by the late 1950s that number had greatly increased, nearing two million.⁴ By the mid-1960s, 60 percent of Japanese homes had television sets, and by the end of the decade, 95 percent of all households were tuned to the new medium.⁵ As in the United States, popular acceptance of television was swift and unswerving. The audience stayed at home, and annual movie attendance sharply dropped from a high in 1958 of 1,127 million to under 200 million after 1975.⁶

Television also affected film content as the Japanese audience came to be divided into distinct groups of television viewers and cinema viewers.⁷ Kurosawa was recognized as a master of the period film, or jidaigeki, yet these films became a mainstay of television, where, as Anderson points out, their formulaic nature was easily accommodated to the demands of a weekly series: in 1982, more than a quarter of televised dramatic series were jidai-geki.⁸ Theatrical film responded by heavily promoting soft-core pornography, and the production firms themselves, like their counterparts in the United States, diversified into related leisuretime markets.

Kurosawa, long established as one of the most expensively budgeted Japanese directors, found himself unemployable in the new cost-conscious climate of the late 1960s. Sweeping historical epics of the kind he often specialized in had become too expensive to produce for an industry that was scaling itself down both economically and artistically. The result, for Kurosawa, was a long, deep freeze, and his reputation suffered following an abortive involvement with 20th Century Fox’s production of Tora! Tora! Tora!. Kurosawa claims to have quit the production, but other accounts suggest that he was fired because of a perfectionism some thought bordered on insanity.⁹ Dodeskaden (1970) was his response to the collapse of the Japanese industry and of his own reputation. “I made this film partly to prove I wasn’t insane; I further tested myself with a budget of less than $1 million and a shooting schedule of only 28 days.”¹⁰ But the film also signals the beginning of a progressive, steadily deepening pessimism that has characterized all his subsequent works and that marks them as radically different from the earlier films. This change is not entirely explainable by the collapse of the Japanese film industry.

Dodeskaden was not well received, and again Kurosawa’s career languished. Unable to obtain funding for further projects in Japan, he accepted an offer from Mosfilm to work in Russia and used the opportunity to realize a project he had long cherished, a film of the diaries of the Russian explorer Vladimir Arseniev. Dersu Uzala (1975), however, was not the remedy for the long hiatuses plaguing Kurosawa’s recent career. His next film, Kagemusha, would not appear until 1980, and Ran not until 1985, and both only as a result of financing obtained through international co-production.

Kurosawa has not been silent through these vicissitudes. He accuses the industry of greed and timidity and argues that filmmakers must fight to regain artistic control of their projects:

I feel that what’s wrong with the Japanese film industry today is that the marketing side has taken over the decision-making power on what film is going to be made. There’s no way that marketing-type people—at the level their brains are at—can understand what’s going to be a good film and what isn’t, and it’s really a mistake to give them hegemony over all this. The film companies have become defensive. The only way to compete with television is to make real films. Until this situation is corrected, it’s really going to be difficult for filmmakers in Japan.¹¹

Compounding the economic problems Kurosawa began to face in the late 1960s was a shift in ideological film practice among newer Japanese directors. The questioning and politicizing of film form and of the role of the audience, which was so common at this time in the European cinema, also typified the work of such directors as Nagisa Ōshima, Masahiro Shinoda, and the Japanese “new wave.”¹² The Art Theater Guild, a small circuit of theaters, provided an outlet for their independent productions, and for a time radical filmmakers explored, expanded, and evaluated the codes and values of the traditional Japanese cinema, of Kurosawa’s cinema.¹³ With Ozu and Mizoguchi gone, Kurosawa was condemned to be a symbol of reified tradition. In his commitment to linear narrative, his apparent lack of interest in Brechtian distancing devices, his refusal to develop a rigorous mode of political filmmaking, and his seeming inability to move beyond a method of social analysis centered on the individual, Kurosawa stood for the newer directors as the representative of all that was moribund and reactionary about the Japanese cinema.

The denunciations of Kurosawa were often extreme and painful. Shinoda, for example, cast his criticisms of Kurosawa in terms of an explicit generational revolt: “My generation has reacted against the simplistic humanism of Kurosawa in, for example, Rashōmon, The Bad Sleep Well, and Red Beard. Kurosawa has also been resented by the younger people not only because they were looking for a new metaphysic, but also because he had the advantage of large sums of money to spend on his films and they did not. . . . Kurosawa has exhausted himself pursuing the traveling camera.”¹⁴

Shūji Terayama described his relations to Kurosawa’s work with greater equanimity but indicated that Kurosawa’s kind of cinema was no longer compelling: “At twenty-four I liked the work of Kurosawa very much. Now I don’t hate it, but I felt pity when I saw Dodeskaden. Ōshima and Shinoda say they hate Kurosawa, but I don’t hate Akira Kurosawa.”¹⁵

Eventually, the newer filmmakers would be caught in the same economic contradictions that Kurosawa faced, though for different reasons. With the collapse of a lively audience for motion pictures as well as the general formal and political retreat of the industry, it became harder for directors like Ōshima to maintain the stylistic and political aggressiveness that typified their earlier work. Ōshima has more recently described the contemporary industry with a disillusionment very close to Kurosawa’s: “Filmmaking here has become very hard since the 60s. In the 60s, there were students and other young people who were interested in seeing serious films. In the 70s, the film industry lost that audience, and the general public looked for entertainment in films rather than seriousness. In the 70s, the public stopped pursuing any idea of revolution. That has altered the industry significantly.”¹⁶

As with Kurosawa, Ōshima’s political outlook has darkened at the same time the industry changed: “In 1960, when I made Night and Fog in Japan, my hope was that the movements on the left would grow and strengthen. Now, as you can read in the newspapers today, only the worst has remained. The rest has vanished. Nothing has improved since the 1960s.”¹⁷

It is ironic that Ōshima, representative of the countercurrent to Kurosawa, should have found himself with similar problems (even to the necessity of seeking out international financing for his projects). But what both filmmakers were facing is the same: the decline of the auteur and the ascendancy of teams of producers and market researchers. Kurosawa, in particular, is the exemplar of an earlier mode of filmmaking that surfaced in the industrial countries following World War II. That mode has been termed the “art” film, and its practitioners—Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini, Ray—caused a great deal of excitement in the film world of the 1950s. They helped make film an acceptable object of culture and study at a time when it was regarded much as television is today. In the halcyon days of Rashōmon, Bicycle Thieves, La Strada, and The Seventh Seal, filmmaking became firmly established as an expression of national culture capable of international reception, and at the core of this new recognition stood a handful of directors. They were thrown forward by their era: authors functioning as codes legitimizing the seriousness of film and its identity, not as a machine or an industry, but as sensuous human expression, like the other arts. They were romantic times but exciting ones, and Kurosawa’s contemporary plight symbolizes the final eclipse of this cinema, of the director as superstar. When he speaks, a nostalgia for those days is expressed. Describing earlier decades of the Japanese cinema, he says:

It was the springtime of Japanese film-making. There was growth and optimism. The top management of the film companies were also film directors and they didn’t try to restrict you for commercial reasons. But in the late 1950s and 1960s the climate changed: it was tragic when people like Mizoguchi, Ozu and Naruse all died—we began to lose our stand as directors and the companies took over the power. After that came the Dark Ages.¹⁸

Referring to the decline of the kind of director who made the art cinema possible—the “auteur”—Kurosawa has observed: “In today’s Japanese films, it would be possible to interchange titles, names of directors, without anyone noticing it. Anyone would be ab...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Viewing Kurosawa
• 2. The Dialectics of Style
• 3. Willpower Can Cure All Human Ailments
• 4. Experiments and Adaptations
• 5. Form and the Modern World
• 6. History and the Period Film
• 7. Years of Transition
• 8. The Final Period
• 9. The Legacy
• Notes
• Films Directed by Akira Kurosawa
• Bibliography
• Index