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Keiko McDonald
On September 7, 1998, Kurosawa Akira, one of Japan's greatest filmmakers, died of a stroke at his home in Tokyo. He was eighty-eight. The next day's New York Times obituary was one of the longest the paper had published in the last decade.
Kinema jumpo, Japan's foremost film journal, hastened to pay tribute to Kurosawa as a legend in his own time. A special issue followed, featuring an impressive array of contributors from all around the world. George Lucas was one, and rightly so. His money and marketing savvy helped launch Kagemusha (1980) as an international hit. Martin Scorsese joined the large number of film stars who had appeared in Kurosawa masterworks.
It was especially fitting that two of America's master filmmakers should join in this retrospective celebration. Their presence underscored Kurosawa's achievement as a director whose genius put him in touch with audiences East and West.
International acclaim came suddenly, in 1950, with the Venice Festival Grand Prize for Rashomon. It also won Kurosawa an Oscar for best foreign-language picture of 1951. Kurosawa's rise to fame gave world cinema more than his genius to wonder at. Rashomon ushered in an equally sudden, and astonished, awareness of Japan's rich heritage of cinematic art.
Kurosawa's long career enriched that heritage with thirty films made in sixty-two years. Many were accorded masterwork status when they appeared. From 1951 on, audiences at home and abroad could look to Kurosawa for films on the order of Ikiru (1952), Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), Dersu Uzala (1975), Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985).
It is scarcely surprising that Kurosawa has become the world's most widely discussed Japanese director. Works published in English could keep a Kurosawa scholar busy for a very long time.
Patricia Erens's bibliographical Akira Kurosawa: A Guide to References and Resources (1979) is well-nigh obsolete. One of the earliest and most influential works is still among the best: Donald Richie's The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1971). His 1996 edition has updated this clear-sighted and authoritative work. Other notable works include David Desser's Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa (1983), Steve Prince's The Warrior's Camera (1991), expanded in 1999, and Yohimoto Mitsuhiro's Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema.
Since Kurosawa's life was...