Akira Kurosawa was a filmmaker who dedicated his life to filmmaking, and this dedication led him to make 30 feature films.
He was a painter before coming to the film world, which gave him an excellent grasp of using the image to tell a story.
His understanding of composition and framing led to filling the frames with beautiful backgrounds and the movement of both his actors and his camera.
Best known for his samurai films, such as Seven Samurai, which would set a standard for action cinema, it was Rashomon which catapulted him into the western arthouse world.
However, his film with the biggest impact on Western cinema is The Hidden Fortress, which served as the base for what would become the cultural juggernaut Star Wars.
Kurosawa was more than a Samurai movie director; he was a master filmmaker, and his other films are masterpieces that everyone should see.
Drunken Angel (1948)
A young Yakuza drunk, Matsunaga, played by Toshiro Mifune, contracts tuberculosis but refuses to listen to his doctor’s instructions, instead ignoring him and going back to his life of crime.
This is the first of fifteen movies Kurosawa would work on with Mifune.
Mifune’s performance infuses his character with humanity and charisma.
Drunken Angel is often overlooked, but it is one of Kurosawa’s best films.
Ikiru (1952)
Kanji Watanabe, played by Kurosawa mainstay Takashi Shimura, plays a bureaucrat who hasn’t done much with his life and learns he has cancer.
Watanabe begins a search for meaning in his life.
Now, on the opposite side of Drunken Angel, where we run to our destruction, we are given a story about what to do with the time we have.
Kurosawa masterfully uses his camera’s movement through this world to convey all the information you need.
High and Low (1963)
Mifune returns and plays Kingo Gondo, an executive who gets caught up in a kidnapping mix-up where the kidnappers grab his chauffeur’s son instead of his and has to make a hard choice and play a game of cat and mouse with the kidnapper.
An excellent tale of hard choices brilliantly illustrated by Kurosawa’s perfect blocking.
Kurosawa uses his actors in a way that, by a single look at the screen, you know where everyone’s minds are in the situation without a single word being spoken.
There are many videos you can find online about these things, but there is no better way to learn them than by seeing them for yourself.
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