SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) After the international successes of Rashomon and Ikiru, Kurosawa had an enormous amount of clout and turned to a historical epic for his next work. In a line that was characterized as arrogant, Kurosawa said “jidai-geki (the samurai genre) faces a dead-end, there are no talented jidai-geki producers”. Well, it’s not arrogance …
IKIRU (1952) The Idiot didn’t do well, but after the international success of Rashomon it didn’t matter. Kurosawa had an unprecedented amount of clout for a Japanese director. However, he wasn’t quite satisfied that he had made his name with a period piece and explicitly said in his acceptance of the Venice Film Festival Prize …
SCANDAL (1950) By 1950, the post-war occupation of Japan was running its course, and restrictions and censorship by the occupying authorities slackened. That was a good thing for the people of Japan as they moved towards a modern democracy. However, the rise of yellow journalism and the scandal sheet were not necessarily good things. Kurosawa …
STRAY DOG (1949) Kurosawa had the cinematic chops to create compelling movies out of scenarios that weren’t on their surface cinematic or were just flat out abstract. The subjectivity of truth. Meeting a production quota. Battles with disease. How one deals with the difficult realities of post-war Japan. How one deals with one’s own mortality. …