Akira kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa was all time great film director, producer, screenwriter and editor from japanese movie industry. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years.

Akira Kurosawa was born in Tokyo. His father, Isamu Kurosawa, was a veteran army officer who turned athletic instructor. His mother, Shima, came from an Osaka merchant family. She was forty years old when Kurosawa was born. Isamu took often his whole family to the movies, and later Kurosawa said, that his father's attitude toward film encouraged him to become a director. In 1923 Kurosawa entered Keika Junior High School. He began taking Japanese calligraphy lessons and became captain of the school's kendo club. For his father's disappointment, he was not interested in formal training in arts. He also failed to pass the entrance examination of an art school he applied. After joining the Proletarian Artists' League in 1929, he contributed to a radical newspaper, and worked as a commercial artist. Kurosawa's close association with Communists lasted a few years. His brother Heigo committed suicide in 1933. Little later his oldest brother, Masayasu, died. Kurosawa's youngest sister, Momoyo, had died in 1920. Not much is known of Kurosawa's dark years in 1933-35.

In 1936 Kurosawa began as an assistant and scriptwriter to one of the most successful director's of the country, Kajiro Yamamoto, at Photo Chemical Laboratories. P.C.L. had been founded in 1929. The company is better known as Toho Studios. Kurosawa's talents were soon noted. His scripts were awarded in contests and by 1941 he was directing whole sequences for Yamamoto's films. In Something Like an Autobiography (1982) Kurosawa wrote: "Yama-san said: 'If you want to become a film director, first write scripts.' I felt he was right, so I applied myself wholeheartedly to scripwriting."

During World War II Kurosawa did not serve in the army - he had been deemed physically unfit in his conscription examination in 1930. As a director Kurosawa made his debut in 1943 with Judo Saga, set in the 1880s. It was based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita, a judo master and writer. Tomita's novel depicted a skilled tough, Sanshiro, who learns the art of judo and self-realization under a guidance of a wise master. The film was well received in the war time Japan and shared the National Incentive Film Price. In the sequel of the story, Judo Saga II (1945), Sanshiro fights with an American boxer.

In the following works Kurosawa dealt with the effects of the war upon his country and changes in the post-war society. The Most Beautiful (1944) was about young women working in a lens factory, drafted to aid in the war effort. While making the film Kurosawa met Yoko Yaguchi, an actress, whom he married in 1945. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945) was banned by the American Occupation Forces due to ist alleged "pro-Feudalism."

Kurosawa's collaboration with the actor Toshiro Mifune started from Drunken Angel (1948). "A young man was reeling around the room in a violent frenzy," was Kurosawa's first impression when he saw Mifune's audition in 1946. "It was frightening as watching a wounded or trapped savage beast trying to break loose. I stood transfixed." Drunken Angel was about a gangster (Mifune), who suffers from tuberculosis and rises against a yakuza boss. An alcoholic doctor, who fight against disease in the vicinity of an oily sump, tries in vain to change his self-destructive way of life. "In this picture I finally found myself," Kurosawa confessed. In Stray Dog (1949) Mifune played a police detective who is plagued by feeling of guilt when his pistol is stolen and used in a robbery and a murder. Stray Dog was remade in 1973 by director Azuma Morisaki, starring Tetsuya Watari and Shinshuke Ashida.

Following his accident in 1995, Kurosawa's health began to deteriorate. While his mind remained sharp and lively, his body was giving up, and for the last half year of his life, the director was largely confined to bed, listening to music and watching television at home. On September 6, 1998, Kurosawa died of a stroke in Setagaya, Tokyo, at the age of 88.

Following Kurosawa's death, several posthumous works based on his unfilmed screenplays have been produced. After the Rain, directed by Takashi Koizumi, was released in 1998, and The Sea is Watching, directed by Kei Kumai, premiered in 2002. A script created by the Yonki no Kai ("Club of the Four Knights") (Kurosawa, Keisuke Kinoshita, Masaki Kobayashi, and Kon Ichikawa), around the time that Dodeskaden was made, finally was filmed and released (in 2000) as Dora-Heita, by the only surviving founding member of the club, Kon Ichikawa. To coincide with the 100th anniversary of Kurosawa's birth, an unfinished documentary about the Noh theater that the filmmaker had started in the 1980s, Gendai no No, is scheduled to be completed and released in 2010.