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Akira Kurosawa Throne of Blood. 1957. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Japan. Toho Studios; The Bad Sleep Well. 1960. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Japan. Toho Studios, Kurosawa Production Company; Ran. 1985. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Japan and France. Herald Ace, Nippon Herald, and Greenwich Film Productions.
Like Kurosawa I make mad films / Okay I don't make films / But if I did they'd have a samurai
-Barenaked Ladies, "One Week" (1998)
Akira Kurosawa's films are mad. And not only in the way 1990s American pop slang meant it: "extreme" or "extraordinary," of utmost skill and ability. Over a fifty-year career that produced thirty films (though only seven after 1970), Kurosawa (1910-1998) returns often to madness in all its myriad significations as a primary element of the human condition. From the stark narrative unreliability of Rashomon (1950) to the surreal wanderings of Dreams (1990), Kurosawa's art gravitates towards the incoherent, the indeterminate, the unknowable, even as it is animated by irrepressible moments of stability and lucidity. When he was presented with an Honorary Oscar by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas in 1989, he remarked humbly in his acceptance speech, "I don't feel that I understand cinema yet." The Academy audience took it mirthfully, but fans of Rashomon-the film most responsible for introducing Kurosawa to Western audiences-would have heard an echo of its famous opening lines, when an overawed woodcutter crouched in torrential rain repeats to himself, "I don't understand. I just don't understand." It is an interestingly unstable epistemology for a director widely hailed for the boldness of his design, the continuity of his stylistic and technical signatures, and, in general, as Mark Thornton Burnett puts it, the "consistency of [his] auteurial vision" (55). Rashomon, with its competing tales and dappled mixture of truth and lies, never drops its demands upon an audience's negative capability, though it ends on a grace note of hope. Kurosawa's best films, including three that adapt Shakespeare directly-Throne of Blood (1957), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), and Ran (1985)-all delve deeply into madness, and never land too heavily on uplifting closure. Rather these films suggest an ongoing fascination with incertitude and displacement, even as they emerge out of a seemingly consistent "auteurial vision" and Kurosawa's professedly determinist approach to filmmaking.
In his autobiography, Kurosawa...