After graduating from high school, Akira Kurosawa, born in 1910, decided he wanted to become a painter and he was not lacking in talent. Yet his career did not really take off. It by no means meant the end of his artistic dreams. In 1936, he rolled into the Japanese film industry, first as an assistant director and screenwriter. In 1943, he made his directorial debut with the martial-arts film Sanshiro Sugata, popular in Japan, the beginning of a career as a director that would span sixty years.
It is mainly the films he made in the 1950s and 1960s that made him immortal. Whether it was a psychological drama, or a crime story or a samurai adventure, in all genres Kurosawa showed himself a master at innovating the cinematic language and telling a compelling story. For those stories, he drew inspiration from writers such as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, while the work of directors such as John Ford, Fritz Lang and Sergei Eisenstein also strongly influenced him.
In turn, Kurosawa and his films were a source of inspiration for countless directors after him, while even more directors consider him one of the best filmmakers ever, including Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci , Steven Spielberg and Werner Herzog. Director Sidney Lumet put it succinctly and aptly: ‘Kurosawa is the Beethoven of film directors.’
When Kurosawa was still in high school, military training was mandatory for boys between 12 and 17. He hated marching and parading around with weapons; he categorically refused to participate in live-fire exercises. It is typical of a man who always put the good of man at the centre of his films, who always showed what it means when someone does something good for another. In 1998, five years after his last film, Kurosawa died of a stroke at the age of 88.
Eye Filmmuseum has restored and re-released four of his finest films: Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961) and High and Low (1963) - four masterpieces that can also be seen at Rialto De Pijp and Rialto VU.