“Emperor” Akira Kurosawa

“Emperor” Akira Kurosawa—Perfectionist Film Auteur

The satiric word “emperor” was once used to describe the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa as a difficult, stubborn perfectionist who has a dictatorial directing style. However, the word “emperor” also reflects that Kurosawa is a responsible film auteur who sticks to his desired visual effects. Akira Kurosawa, a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor, is widely regarded as one of the most influential and important filmmakers in movie history. In a career that spanned 57 years, Kurosawa directed 30 films and most of his films are categorized as Jidaigeki (period drama) including Yojimbo, Seven Samurai, Ran and Rashomon— surprise winner of the Golden Lion at 1951 Venice Film Festival, which consequently brought Japanese films into the sight of European and North American audience. According to “The Warrior’s Camera”, “without Kurosawa, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese would have been without the most intense cinema experiences of their early years, experiences that showed them what the medium could accomplish (340).” In this sense, Akira Kurosawa has influenced many well-known auteur in western world with his stylistic directorial approaches. Akira Kurosawa deserves to be titled as an “auteur” seeing that he possessed unique constant themes of humanism and heroism as well as a visual style in film-directing, focusing on realism and hyper-stylistic filming.

Realism in Kurosawa’s Films

To begin with, Akira Kurosawa always dedicates himself to be faithful to realism when directing a film through applying thorough historical research and gritty realism, which leads to his perfectionist film-directing auteurism. Firstly, as for Kurosawa, detailed historical research is considered as an essential component of the preparation before shooting films, which is one of the significant characteristics of Jidaigeki. One example is that the history of Warring States...