Stray Dogs and Samurai: Celebrating 100 Years of Akira Kurosawa

One hundred years since his birth legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa still remains a huge influence today. A prolific auteur and dedicated perfectionist, Kurosawa painstakingly created his artistic visions in collaboration with his leading man, the formerly unknown, non-professional Toshirô Mifune. A phenomenally expressive actor with immense gravitas, Mifune delivered larger than life characterisations that rendered Kurosawa’s storytelling unforgettable. In a catalogue of films brighter than the Land of the Rising Sun it is difficult to choose highlights. However for the initiated and the would-be Kurosawa followers alike, here are some proposed choice cuts to feast upon. Rest assured, you will be in good company, as the Kurosawa fan club boasts members as diverse and exalted as George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Werner Herzog.

STRAY DOG (1949)
Kurosawa’s film noir directly engages with the changing socioeconomic climate of post-war Japan and the confused ‘après-guerre’ generation. Mifune plays a young detective, racked with guilt due to the loss of his stolen gun, who feels gravely responsible for the violence subsequently committed through its use. Battling an unbearable heat wave in downtown Tokyo, his obsessive search leads him deeper into a seedy underworld of desperation and crime.

RASHÔMON (1950)
Through winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, the immense Rashômon effectively opened the floodgates to a wealth of Japanese cinema previously unknown to foreign eyes. Here Kurosawa investigates justice and memory altered by guilt, through differing accounts of a possible rape, murder or suicide amongst a bandit chancing upon a nobleman and his wife. In an iconic performance, Mifune embodies the feral physicality of a lion as the opportunistic bandit, pacing and snarling savagely throughout.

SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)
Kurosawa’s epic tells of seven masterless samurai courageously uniting in order to defend a desperate, poverty-stricken village against an inevitable onslaught of amoral bandits. Together with Rashômon, Seven Samurai is possibly the most influential and internationally celebrated of Kurosawa’s works. Many of its themes later became conceits within heroic narratives and spawned the spaghetti Western genre, through John Sturges’ remake The Magnificent Seven.

THRONE OF BLOOD (1957)
A favourite of literary royalty (T.S. Eliot included) and cinephiles alike, Throne of Blood is regularly cited as the best adaptation of Shakespeare to celluloid. No mean feat for a much changed, non-English language version which is as much Kurosawa’s as Shakespeare’s. Kurosawa employs the classical Japanese Noh theatre style, for a particularly eerie vision of Samurai Macbeth’s world. Mifune plays a fierce Macbeth, whose notorious death scene encapsulates terrifying authenticity, as expert archers fired real arrows mere centimetres away from the actor.

DREAMS (1990)
A series of shorts based on actual dreams Kurosawa had. Dreams involves climatic extremes, post nuclear visions of hell, humanist examinations of war and energy, ahead of its time environmentalism and a cameo by Martin Scorsese as a ‘lunatic’ Van Gogh. Kurosawa’s use of wobbling camera sights, artificial aesthetics and sudden changes of tone expertly communicate the surrealism and instability of a dreamlike experience.