The Director the West Kept Remaking

Kurosawa moved the camera and the weather like no one before him. Rain that falls in sheets and turns a battle to mud; wind that bends a whole field of grass; the famous multi-camera shooting that let him cut on motion so an action never stops; the "axial cut" that jumps straight down the lens toward a face. Seven Samurai choreographs an entire village war in this kinetic, weather-lashed grammar, and Rashomon shoots sunlight through leaves while four narrators contradict each other into the abyss. He was, on the pure level of craft, one of the great movers of the image — and that legibility, that muscular clarity, is exactly what let his films cross oceans.

Because Kurosawa was himself a translator first. He built Throne of Blood out of Macbeth and Ran out of King Lear, transposing Shakespeare into feudal Japan so completely that they stopped being adaptations and became Noh-inflected nightmares of their own. He loved the American Western and the films of John Ford, and he fed that love back into the samurai picture; High and Low is Ed McBain run through a Japanese class system, Ikiru is Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich in postwar Tokyo. Nothing about this is dilution — it is the opposite. By moving a Western form into a Japanese frame, he revealed what was universal in it and what was local, the way a great cover version exposes the bones of a song.

And then the current reversed, which is the part that makes his career a closed circuit rather than a one-way export. Sergio Leone remade Yojimbo — itself partly built from American hardboiled fiction — as A Fistful of Dollars, and invented the Spaghetti Western. John Sturges turned Seven Samurai into The Magnificent Seven. George Lucas took the structure and the squabbling-peasants'-eye-view of The Hidden Fortress and built Star Wars on it. The forms Kurosawa had imported from the West, Japanned, and perfected, the West then imported back and called its own — the Western, the blockbuster, the modern action film all carry his fingerprints, often without knowing it.

That round trip is the lesson, and it is larger than any one technique. A style is not weakened by translation; it is tested by it — the parts that survive being moved into a foreign frame are the parts that were essential, and Kurosawa, by moving forms back and forth across the Pacific, ran that test more deliberately than any director alive. He is the most influential filmmaker most of his inheritors never cite, the hidden fortress under a century of action cinema. The West kept remaking him because he had already shown that the things worth keeping are exactly the things that survive being remade.

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The line: Rashomon → Ikiru → Seven Samurai → Throne of Blood → Yojimbo → High and Low → A Fistful of Dollars → Star Wars → Ran

This line crosses:

• The Myth Made in Italy — Leone's Fistful of Dollars is a direct remake of Yojimbo; the Spaghetti Western is one whole branch of the Kurosawa round trip.
• The Ten Years the Directors Won — Star Wars, built on The Hidden Fortress, both ended New Hollywood and carried Kurosawa's structure into the blockbuster era.

Read through: Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa · Stephen Prince, The Warrior's Camera.

A note on the argument: the adaptations and remakes (Shakespeare in, Leone/Sturges/Lucas out) are documented record. The framing of Kurosawa's whole career as a two-way Pacific current — and of translation as the test that reveals what in a style is essential — is this essay's reading.