Akira Kurosawa: A Giant of World Cinema
- Amirul Mukmin
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
In this edition of Director Highlights, our Film writer Amirul turns to the legendary Akira Kurosawa of Japan — the mind behind Seven Samurai, and one of cinema’s most enduring influences.
It might be a personal opinion, but with every ounce of confidence in my body, I would say Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest filmmakers to have ever graced our silver screen. Think about all the great filmmakers today, there’s a very high possibility that Kurosawa himself is the favourite director of our favourite directors.
He is such a giant figure in cinema that his influence spans all kinds of filmmaking. Bending genres and sculpting how the audience should see a film is something of his specialty. His ideas and themes are so far ahead of their time that countless remakes and reimaginings of his film are being made to this day. Imagine if Star Wars didn't exist; it would probably be because George Lucas himself didn’t get his inspiration for the billion-dollar sci-fi franchise from watching Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress (1958). This is one of many instances that show Kurosawa was a rare type of filmmaker, for whom the possibility of making a bad film was a challenge. His films have been studied worldwide, and they have such unmatched longevity that they still find their way to our screens 50 years later and even 100 years from now.
It always stumps me why his films retain such relevance today. Few artists create work so iconic that the world feels unimaginable without it; cinema, like music without Beethoven, literature without Dostoevsky, or painting without Picasso, would be profoundly poorer without Akira Kurosawa.
Personally, I think the answer to why his films have such a canonical impact in our culture lies deep within his astonishing body of work. Dare I say that all his films are works of art themselves. That includes the visuals, the story, the screenplay, and countless elements that make a movie great. His work spans over 50 years and has produced an unbelievable number of amazing films across genres: two of the greatest samurai epics with Seven Samurai (1957) and Ran (1985), an intimate portrayal of mortality with Ikiru (1952), a sensational crime thriller in High and Low (1963), and a moving film about memory and trauma in Rhapsody in August (1991).
Looking through his filmography, Kurosawa never feels precious as a filmmaker. He doesn’t stick to one genre; instead, he chooses stories that are deeply human to him. In Ran (1985), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, lies a truly human story of a king whose life seems untouchable, yet a simple blunder of trusting his own sons would lead him to his own demise, or in Ikiru (1952), which tells a beautiful story about a regular Japanese salaryman who finds the meaning of life after he has life ending cancer. These are two different genres of movies, but they are tied together by a single, tight knot of what it feels like to be human, of inhabiting another person’s life. That is why I think his films embody the feeling of “breath of fresh air”, making him a deeply humanistic filmmaker, and also why the themes in his films strike a chord with us, humans. He once said, “In order to make a good film, you must first understand human beings.” Being human means having flaws. To feel your own mortality. To question morality. To care for your family. To be sad. To be happy. To Live (Ikiru).
With painting as his first love, Kurosawa understood the cinematic medium as a convergence of arts. Combined with his passion for literature and theatre, it permits him to conjure such fantastical visuals and narrative sophistication in filmmaking. The striking scene from Ran (1985) shown above would have been far more difficult to realise without Kurosawa’s remarkable ability to hand-paint his own storyboards.
He once said, “To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.” As the quote goes, the eyes are a window to the soul; whatever we bring close to our eyes is the things that fill up our souls. He teaches us not to diminish other arts, as they are as important as any other. I imagine it would be hard to paint the film’s storyboard, but what if I told you that you had to do it blindfolded? It would be unthinkable. That’s not the case with Kurosawa.
While making Ran (1985) and Dreams (1990), his eyesight was slowly deteriorating, and blindness was a possibility. But that never discouraged him from being even more imaginative in his work. It’s a convincing testament to how he is as an artist: to fill your soul with art and to give beautiful art back to the world. Ultimately, Kurosawa’s unwavering artistic vision and profound understanding of human nature enabled him to create art that transcends time and cultural boundaries, which is why his films still resonate with us. His unique synthesis of creativity and perseverance affirms his legacy as one of the most enduring and influential artists to ever exist.
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