'Long Take' by Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese director whose influence was planetary. His Seven Samurai (1954) was inspired by American westerns and inspired that genre in turn. Elements from The Hidden Fortress (1958) turned up in the Star Wars saga. Rashomon (1950) became a watchword for the multiple perspectives people can bring to the same event.
Kurosawa wasn’t a theorist, and seldom wrote about film, but thought about movies constantly. His occasional essays and long-form interviews, along with reminiscences of his daughter-assistant Kurosawa Kazuko, are collected in a new book, Long Take.
Kurosawa groused about money and what he saw as the sad state of a Japanese film industry run by profit-driven salarymen. On the other hand, he dismissed didactic or deliberatively arty filmmakers. Directors, he insisted, “should remember that viewers pay good money to come to theaters, and they come to have a good time.” He meant films to be accessible, not dumbed down, and considered himself an artisan, not an artist.
One reason Kurosawa’s films traveled so well across language barriers was his insistence that cinema was principally visual. He sometimes rued the advent of talking pictures with their incessant chatter. A face can say more than words.
Working from memories of their conversations, Kurosawa’s daughter compiled a list of his 100 favorite films. The chronological rundown begins in 1919 with D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms and concludes in 1997, one year before Kurosawa’s death, with Japanese director Kitano Takeshi’s Fireworks. In between are films in many modes by directors as varied as Fritz Lang, Charlie Chaplin, Luis Bunuel, Jean Renoir, Ernst Lubitsch and Serge Eisenstein. He loved The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and It’s a Wonderful Life, Breathless along with Lawrence of Arabia, and took a granular interest in John Ford.
Translator Anne McKnight gives a good summation in her introduction, highlighting the influence of Japanese culture and Russian literature on Kurosawa as well as the complexity of translating meaningful ideas from one language to another. Long Take is published by University of Minnesota Press.
