Utilisateur:Guilainch/brouillon AK

Méthodes de travail, style et thèmes

Style

Une grande majorité des observateurs qualifie le style de Kurosawa comme audacieux et dynamique, et nombreux sont à le comparer au style narratif hollywoodien traditionnel qui met l'accent sur la pensée linéaire, chronologique, causale et historique. Mais il a aussi été écrit que, depuis son tout premier film, Kurosawa dégage un style très distinct du style classique et sans faille d'Hollywood : Kurosawa n'hésite pas à perturber la scène représentée à l'écran par l'utilisation de nombreuses prises de vues différentes, et s'oppose ainsi au traditionnel raccord 180° développé par Hollywood. Kurosawa, par l'utilisation de mouvements fluides de caméra plutôt que d'un montage conventionnel, tend également à intégrer une dimension spatiale dans la narration temporelle.

Le raccord dans l'axe

In his films of the 1940s and 1950s, Kurosawa frequently employs the "axial cut," in which the camera moves closer to, or further away from, the subject, not through the use of tracking shots or dissolves, but through a series of matched jump cuts. For example, in Sanshiro Sugata II, the hero takes leave of the woman he loves, but then, after walking away a short distance, turns and bows to her, and then, after walking further, turns and bows once more. This sequence of shots is illustrated on film scholar David Bordwell's blog. The three shots are not connected in the film by camera movements or dissolves, but by a series of two jump cuts. The effect is to stress the duration of Sanshiro's departure.

In the opening sequence of Seven Samurai in the peasant village, the axial cut is used twice. When the villagers are outdoors, gathered in a circle, weeping and lamenting the imminent arrival of the bandits, they are glimpsed from above in extreme long shot, then, after the cut, in a much closer shot, then in an even closer shot at ground level as the dialogue begins. A few minutes later, when the villagers go to the mill to ask the village elder's advice, there is a long shot of the mill, with a slowly turning wheel in the river, then a closer shot of this wheel, and then a still closer shot of it. (As the mill is where the elder lives, these shots forge a mental association in the viewer's mind between that character and the mill.)

Le raccord dans le mouvement

Plusieurs spécialistes ont souligné la tendance de Kurosawa à utiliser le raccord dans le mouvement. Par exemple, dans une séquence du film Les Sept Samouraïs, le samouraï Shichirôji, debout, tente de consoler le paysan Manzo, assis par terre. Shichirôji met alors un genou à terre pour lui parler. Kurosawa choisit de filmer cette simple action en deux prises au lieu d'une, raccordant les deux juste après que Shichirôji ait commencé à s'agenouiller, dans le but de mettre en avant l'humilité du samouraï. Les exemples sont nombreux dans ce même film. Couper l'action, la fragmenter, est un moyen très utilisé par Kurosawa pour créer de l'émotion..

Le volet

Kurosawa est un grand amateur du volet. Cette transition, qui se substitue au raccord direct classique et au fondu, est tellement employée par Kurosawa dans sa carrière qu'elle en devient une véritable signature. Dans L'Ange ivre, on compte pas moins de douze occurrences de cette technique de transition

A form of cinematic punctuation very strongly identified with Kurosawa is the wipe. This is an effect created through an optical printer, in which, when a scene ends, a line or bar appears to move across the screen, “wiping” away the image while simultaneously revealing the first image of the subsequent scene. As a transitional device, it is used as a substitute for the straight cut or the dissolve (though Kurosawa, of course, often used both of those devices as well). In his mature work, Kurosawa employed the wipe so frequently that it became a kind of signature. For example, one blogger has counted no less than 12 instances of the wipe in Drunken Angel.

There are a number of theories concerning the purpose of this device, which, as James Goodwin notes, was common in silent cinema but became considerably rarer in the more “realistic” sound cinema. Goodwin claims that the wipes in Rashomon, for instance, fulfill one of three purposes: emphasizing motion in traveling shots, marking narrative shifts in the courtyard scenes and marking temporal ellipses between actions (e.g., between the end of one character’s testimony and the beginning of another’s). He also points out that in The Lower Depths, in which Kurosawa completely avoided the use of wipes, the director cleverly manipulated people and props “in order to slide new visual images in and out of view much as a wipe cut does.”

An instance of the wipe used as a satirical device can be seen in Ikiru. A group of women visit the local government office to petition the bureaucrats to turn a waste area into a children’s playground. The viewer is then shown a series of point of view shots of various bureaucrats, connected by wipe transitions, each of whom refers the group to another department. Nora Tennessen comments in her blog (which shows one example) that “the wipe technique makes [the sequence] funnier—images of bureaucrats are stacked like cards, each more punctilious than the last.”

Image-sound counterpoint

Kurosawa by all accounts always gave great attention to the soundtracks of his films (Teruyo Nogami’s memoir gives many such examples). In the late 1940s, he began to employ music for what he called "counterpoint" to the emotional content of a scene, rather than merely to reinforce the emotion, as Hollywood traditionally did (and still does). The inspiration for this innovation came from a family tragedy. When news reached Kurosawa of his father's death in 1948, he wandered aimlessly through the streets of Tokyo. His sorrow was magnified rather than diminished when he suddenly heard the cheerful, vapid song "The Cuckoo Waltz", and he hurried to escape from this "awful music." He then told his composer, Fumio Hayasaka, with whom he was working on Drunken Angel, to use "The Cuckoo Waltz" as ironic accompaniment to the scene in which the dying gangster, Matsunaga, sinks to his lowest point in the narrative.

This ironic approach to music can also be found in Stray Dog, a film released a year after Drunken Angel. In the climactic scene, the detective Murakami is fighting furiously with the murderer Yusa in a muddy field. The sound of a Mozart piece is suddenly heard, played on the piano by a woman in a nearby house. As one commentator notes, "In contrast to this scene of primitive violence, the serenity of the Mozart is, literally, other-worldly" and "the power of this elemental encounter is heightened by the music." Nor was Kurosawa’s "ironic" use of the soundtrack limited to music. One critic observes that, in Seven Samurai, "During episodes of murder and mayhem, birds chirp in the background, as they do in the first scene when the farmers lament their seemingly hopeless fate."

Criticisms

Despite the extraordinary acclaim that Kurosawa’s work has received in Japan and abroad, his films, as well as Kurosawa as an individual, have also been subject to considerable criticism, much of it harsh. Below are summarized some of the more common criticisms of the director, both those made generally and those that are primarily voiced in Japan.

In general

In the early to mid-1950s, a number of critics belonging to the French New Wave championed the films of the older Japanese master, Kenji Mizoguchi, at the expense of Kurosawa’s work. New Wave critic-filmmaker Jacques Rivette, said: "You can compare only what is comparable and that which aims high enough... [Mizoguchi] seems to be the only Japanese director who is completely Japanese and yet is also the only one that achieves a true universality, that of an individual." According to such French commentators, Mizoguchi seemed, of the two artists, the more authentically Japanese. But at least one film scholar has questioned the validity of this dichotomy between “Japanese” Mizoguchi and “Western” Kurosawa by pointing out that "Mizo" had been as influenced by Western cinema and Western culture in general as Kurosawa, and that this is reflected in his work.

A criticism frequently directed at Kurosawa’s films is that the director’s preoccupation with ethical and moral themes led him at times to create what some commentators regard as sentimental or naïve work. Speaking of the postwar “slice of life” drama One Wonderful Sunday, for example, film scholar (and future politician) Audie Bock claimed that not even Kurosawa’s celebrated prowess as an editor could save one particular scene from bathos: “The last sequence... is an excruciating twelve minutes of the boy conducting an imaginary orchestra in an empty amphitheater while his girlfriend appeals directly to the camera for the viewer to join in. Angles and focal lengths change, details of leaves scattering in the wind are intercut, but nothing makes the scene go any faster."

Some controversy exists about the extent to which Kurosawa's films of the Second World War period could be considered fascist propaganda. The cultural historian Peter B. High sees Kurosawa’s wartime cinema as part of the propagandistic trend of Japan at war and as an example of many of these wartime conventions. High refers to his second film, The Most Beautiful, as a "dark and gloomy rendition of the standard formulas of the [home front] genre." Another controversy centers on his alleged refusal to acknowledge Japan's wartime guilt. In one of Kurosawa’s last films, Rhapsody in August, an elderly survivor of the atomic attack on Nagasaki is visited by her half-Japanese, half-American nephew, Clark (Richard Gere), who appears (at least to some viewers) to apologize, as an American, for the city’s wartime destruction. The New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote about this film: "A lot of people at Cannes were outraged that the film makes no mention of Pearl Harbor and Japan's atrocities in China... If Clark can apologize for bombing Nagasaki, why can't Granny apologize for the raid on Pearl Harbor?"

A number of critics have reacted negatively to the female characters in Kurosawa’s movies. Joan Mellen, in her examination of this subject, has maintained that, by the time of Red Beard (1965), "women in Kurosawa have become not only unreal and incapable of kindness, but totally bereft of autonomy, whether physical, intellectual, or emotional... Women at their best may only imitate the truths men discover." Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince concurs with Mellen's view, though less censoriously: "Unlike a male-oriented director like Sam Peckinpah, Kurosawa is not hostile to women, but his general lack of interest in them should be regarded as a major limitation of his work."

In Japan

In Japan, both critics and other filmmakers have sometimes accused his work of elitism, because of his focus on exceptional, heroic individuals and groups of men. In her commentary on the deluxe DVD edition of Seven Samurai, Joan Mellen maintains that certain shots of the samurai characters Kambei and Kyuzo, which to her reveal Kurosawa "privileging" these samurai, "support the argument voiced by several Japanese critics that Kurosawa was an elitist... Kurosawa was hardly a progressive director, they argued, since his peasants could not discover among their own ranks leaders who might rescue the village. Instead, justifying the inequitable class structure of their society and ours, the peasants must rely on the aristocracy, the upper class, and in particular samurai, to ensure their survival... Kurosawa defended himself against this charge in his interview with me. 'I wanted to say that after everything the peasants were the stronger, closely clinging to the earth... It was the samurai who were weak because they were being blown by the winds of time.'"

Because of Kurosawa’s popularity with European and American audiences from the early 1950s onward, he has not escaped the charge of deliberately catering to the tastes of Westerners to achieve or maintain that popularity. Joan Mellen, recording the violently negative reaction (in the 1970s) of the left-wing director Nagisa Oshima to Kurosawa and his work, states: "That Kurosawa had brought Japanese film to a Western audience meant [to Oshima] that he must be pandering to Western values and politics." Kurosawa always strongly denied pandering to Western tastes: “He has never catered to a foreign audience” writes Audie Bock, “and has condemned those who do.”

Kurosawa was often criticized by his countrymen for perceived "arrogant" behavior. It was in Japan that the (initially) disparaging nickname "Kurosawa Tennō"—"The Emperor Kurosawa"—was coined. "Like tennō," Yoshimoto claimed, "Kurosawa is said to cloister himself in his own small world, which is completely cut off from the everyday reality of the majority of Japanese. The nickname tennō is used in this sense to create an image of Kurosawa as a director who abuses his power solely for the purpose of self-indulgence."

Worldwide impact

Reputation among filmmakers

Many celebrated directors have been influenced by Kurosawa and/or have expressed admiration for his work. The filmmakers cited below are grouped according to three categories: a) those who, like Kurosawa himself, established international critical reputations in the 1950s and early 1960s; b) the so-called "New Hollywood" directors, that is, American moviemakers who, for the most part, established their reputations in the early to mid-1970s; and c) other Asian directors.

Robert Altman was so impressed that Kurosawa had his cinematographer on Rashomon shoot directly into the sun that he immediately began to incorporate such shots in his own television work.

Ingmar Bergman called his own film The Virgin Spring "touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa," and added, "At that time my admiration for the Japanese cinema was at its height. I was almost a samurai myself!" Federico Fellini in an interview declared the director "the greatest living example of all that an author of the cinema should be"—despite admitting to having seen only one of his films, Seven Samurai. Roman Polanski in 1965 cited Kurosawa as one of his three favorite filmmakers (with Fellini and Orson Welles), singling out Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and The Hidden Fortress for praise. Bernardo Bertolucci considered the Japanese master's influence to be seminal: "Kurosawa's movies and La Dolce Vita of Fellini are the things that pushed me, sucked me into being a film director."

Kurosawa's "New Hollywood" admirers have included Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and John Milius. Robert Altman, when he first saw Rashomon (during the period when he worked regularly in television rather than feature films), was so impressed by its cinematographer's achievement of shooting several shots with the camera aimed directly at the sun—allegedly it was the first film in which this was done successfully—that he claims he was inspired the very next day to begin incorporating shots of the sun into his television work. It was Coppola who said of Kurosawa, "One thing that distinguishes [him] is that he didn't make one masterpiece or two masterpieces. He made, you know, eight masterpieces." Both Spielberg and Scorsese have praised the older man's role as teacher and role model—as a sensei, to use the Japanese term. Spielberg has declared, "I have learned more from him than from almost any other filmmaker on the face of the earth", while Scorsese remarked, "Let me say it simply: Akira Kurosawa was my master, and... the master of so many other filmmakers over the years." As already noted above, several of these moviemakers were also instrumental in helping Kurosawa obtain financing for his late films: Lucas and Coppola served as co-producers on Kagemusha, while the Spielberg name, lent to the 1990 production, Dreams, helped bring that picture to fruition.

As the first Asian filmmaker to achieve international prominence, Kurosawa has naturally served as an inspiration for other Asian auteurs. Of Rashomon, the most famous director of India, Satyajit Ray, said: "The effect of the film on me [upon first seeing it in Calcutta in 1952] was electric. I saw it three times on consecutive days, and wondered each time if there was another film anywhere which gave such sustained and dazzling proof of a director's command over every aspect of film making." Other Asian admirers include the Japanese actor and director Takeshi Kitano, Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo and mainland Chinese director Zhang Yimou, who called Kurosawa "the quintessential Asian director."

Legacy

Kurosawa Production Co., established in 1959, continues to oversee much of Kurosawa's legacy. The director's son, Hisao Kurosawa, is the current head of the company. Its American subsidiary, Kurosawa Enterprises, is located in Los Angeles. Rights to Kurosawa's works are held by Kurosawa Production and the film studios under which he worked, most notably Toho. Kurosawa Production works closely with the Akira Kurosawa Foundation, established in December 2003 and also run by Hisao Kurosawa. The foundation organizes an annual short film competition and spearheads Kurosawa-related projects, including a recently shelved one to build a memorial museum for the director.

In 1981, the Kurosawa Film Studio was opened in Yokohama; two additional locations have since been launched in Japan. A large collection of archive material, including scanned screenplays, photos and news articles, has been made available through the Akira Kurosawa Digital Archive, a Japanese website maintained by Ryukoku University Digital Archives Research Center in collaboration with Kurosawa Production. Anaheim University's Akira Kurosawa School of Film] was launched in spring 2009 with the backing of Kurosawa Production. It offers online programs in digital film making, with headquarters in Anaheim and a learning center in Tokyo.

Two film awards have also been named in Kurosawa's honor. The Akira Kurosawa Award for Lifetime Achievement in Film Directing is awarded during the San Francisco International Film Festival, while the Akira Kurosawa Award is given during the Tokyo International Film Festival. In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Kurosawa's birth in 2010, a project called AK100 was launched in 2008. The AK100 Project aims to "expose young people who are the representatives of the next generation, and all people everywhere, to the light and spirit of Akira Kurosawa and the wonderful world he created."

Filmography

On home video

All thirty films directed by Kurosawa are available on DVD worldwide, most of them from more than one distributor and in more than one region code. His films have begun to be released on Blu-ray.

See also

• Gendai-geki
• List of Japanese actors
• List of Japanese actresses
• List of Japanese film directors
• Samurai cinema

Further reading

• Buchanan, Judith (2005). Shakespeare on Film. Pearson Longman. (ISBN 0582437164).
• Burch, Nöel (1979). To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. University of California Press. (ISBN 0520036050). Available online at the Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan
• Cowie, Peter (2010). Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema. Rizzoli Publications. (ISBN 0847833194).
• Davies, Anthony (1990). Filming Shakespeare's Plays : The Adaptions of Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Peter Brook and Akira Kurosawa. Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0521399130).
• Desser, David (1983). The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa (Studies in Cinema No. 23). UMI Research Press. (ISBN 0835719243).
• Kurosawa, Akira (1999). Complete Drawings (Japanese Text). Shogakukan. (ISBN 4096996114).
• Leonard, Kendra Preston (2009). Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press. (ISBN 0810869462).
• Sorensen, Lars-Martin (2009). Censorship of Japanese Films During the U.S. Occupation of Japan: The Cases of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa. Edwin Mellen Press. (ISBN 0773446737).

External links

• « Guilainch/brouillon AK » (présentation), sur l'Internet Movie Database
• (en)Guilainch/brouillon AK sur la TCM Movie Database
• Akira Kurosawa at the Criterion Collection
• Akira Kurosawa: News, Information and Discussion
• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• Great Performances: Kurosawa (PBS)
• CineFiles: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Kurosawa search)
• Akira Kurosawa at Japanese celebrity's grave guide Modèle:Ja icon
• (ja) Akira Kurosawa sur la Japanese Movie Database