Kurosawa Dies: Cinema's Master Storyteller at 88

Akira Kurosawa made his first film in 1943 and his last in 1993. Fifty years and thirty films. His influence on world cinema is so deep that directors who have never watched his work have been shaped by directors who have. Born in Tokyo on March 23, 1910, the youngest of eight children, Kurosawa trained as a painter before entering the film industry as an assistant director at PCL Studios (later Toho) in 1936. His directorial debut, Sanshiro Sugata, came in 1943. His early films explored contemporary Japanese society, but it was his period films, jidaigeki, that made him internationally famous. Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1950 and introduced Japanese cinema to Western audiences. The film told the same story from four contradictory perspectives, suggesting that objective truth might be inaccessible. The "Rashomon effect" became a term used in psychology and law to describe the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Seven Samurai in 1954 was three hours and twenty-seven minutes of masterful storytelling: seven warriors hired to defend a farming village against bandits. It set the template for the ensemble action film that every subsequent heist, mission, and team-up movie has followed. John Sturges remade it as The Magnificent Seven in 1960. Yojimbo in 1961, about a ronin playing two criminal gangs against each other, was remade almost shot-for-shot by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars in 1964. George Lucas has acknowledged that Star Wars drew directly from The Hidden Fortress in 1958. His influence was structural, not stylistic. Directors who worked in completely different genres adopted his techniques: the wipe transition, the use of weather as emotional punctuation, the deep-focus ensemble staging, the slow reveal of character through action rather than dialogue. He struggled to find funding for his later films in Japan. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas helped finance Kagemusha in 1980 and Dreams in 1990. He died on September 6, 1998, at eighty-eight, having changed every genre he worked in.