Akira Kurosawa: Obituary

From The Films of Akira Kurosawa by Donald Richie

Akira Kurosawa died on September 6, 1998. He was eighty-eight years old and had directed thirty feature films. Though he had - in his autobiography - said he wanted to end his life while at work, collapsing on the set, this was denied him.

A fall in 1995, hip problems, and other disabilities kept him from studio work. He was bedridden and his family, anxious for his health, discouraged visitors, including members of his staff. This meant he could not have unrestricted use of his future, something to which he was long accustomed.

More than most of us, Kurosawa lived in the future. The past meant little to him once its use was passed, and the present was but a step on the way of what was to be. The next picture, whatever this was, was Kurosawa's life. When there was no next picture life had little meaning.

The medical report said that the cause of death was a stroke and that is correct. Equally, however, it might be said that Kurosawa pined away, cut off from the work that was his life. He wrote in his autobiography that when he grew old the person he most wanted to resemble was John Ford. This was granted him. The American director had also been unable to work for a number of years before his death, and saw his last accomplishments unappreciated. Nonetheless he, like Kurosawa, continued until the end, to hope and to plan.

Kurosawa's last years were occupied with the new film, his thirty-first. It was to be called The Ocean Was Watching (Umi wa Mieta) and was based on two stories by Shugoro Yamamoto, with whom the director had worked on both Dodesukaden and Red Beard. The subject was the lives of prostitutes in the Edo period. One woman is money-mad, pretending that she has been married to a samurai; another falls in love with a customer, despite having been warned against it, and so on.

The director began working on this script as early as 1993, the year that Madadayo was released. In 1995 he had approached the actress Mieko Harada (with whom he had worked in Ran) to appear in the film. His long-time set designer Yoshiro Muraki had begun to sketch out the large set, a complete Edo-period prostitute quarter, and Kurosawa made a number of sketches, some sixteen in all.

Despite his immobility Kurosawa continued to work on, sketching the new film. As so often before, when he was prevented from actually filming, he made numerous notes for the costumes, the hair styles, the makeup and the presentation of the actors.

The film would have been in some respects a different kind of Kurosawa film in that, for the first time since the 1946 No Regrets for Our Youth, he would concern himself with female characters. In other ways, however, judging from the script, it would have been like his other Edo-period films, The Lower Depths and Red Beard, with their counterpoint of characters, with their variations on a single theme.

In it, perhaps, Kurosawa would have continued experimenting with what he in his autobiography defined as his "pet theory"- that "cinematic strength derives from the multiplier effect of sound and visual image being brought together." This would have been contained within the kind of structure he was evolving in his work

Though this he originally defined - in the production notes which now appear at the end of the autobiography - as "that of the symphony with its three or four different movements and differing tempos," he later said that he found more effective the three - part structure of the Noh - jo, ha, kyu (introduction, contrast, capitulation) found in such films as Ran.

Kurosawa would perhaps have directed with what he in his later films called his "detached gaze." This meant that the director's eye had to encompass every detail but this did not mean "glaring concentratedly at the set." Indeed, when the cameras were rolling, the later Kurosawa rarely looked at the actors. "I focus my gaze somewhere else and I sense instantly when something isn't right."

Watching, he believed, did not mean fixing the gaze upon the set, the actors, the action, but being more generally (and more accurately) aware of them. He once said this is what the Noh playwright and theorist Zeami meant by "watching with a detached gaze."

In his notes on film-making, Kurosawa also once wrote: "When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this which I take and work with... My films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time. The beginning of any film for me is this need to express something. It is to make it nuture and grow that I write my script - it is directing it that makes my tree blossom and bear fruit."

It was of this vital process that Kurosawa was deprived in his last years. He was not again to feel the fierce pleasure of his way of working. Once he wrote that he always felt "more loneliness at being separated from my crew than I did joy at being reunited with my family." Now his loneliness was permanent.

At the same time this superbly alone artist might have been a bit gratified by his funeral. He always said that he made films only for Japanese, for young Japanese, and some thirty thousand of these turned up for the final rites - along with over five thousand people from the film industry itself.

The great golden altar was modelled on the castle set for Ran and on it was a large photo of the director in cap and sunglasses, taken while directing. Tatsuda Nakadai made a speech, as did Kyoko Kagawa, and messages were read from Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Theo Angelopoulos, Abbas Kiarostami and many others. Kurosawa's eldest son, Hisao, expressed gratitude to everyone and said that in his heart he felt that this was a happy ending, that he would like to say goodbye to his father in a cheerful manner.

This accomplished, we are left with the achievements of Kurosawa, their permanence, their value. Though the director himself once said he had not read any evaluations of his pictures (including presumably those in this volume) which satisfied him, perhaps Kurosawa's salient quality was that he was never to be satisfied.

When three young Daiei assistant directors, assigned to work on Rashomon, approached the director and said they could not understand the script, wanted it explained to them, Kurosawa explained.

"Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves," he (here in Audie Bock's translation) said. "They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing... You say that you can't understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it."

With Kurosawa now gone, we will return again and again to his films, their living, coherent statement, the superb attempt of a single man to be honest with himself.

Extract from The Films of Akira Kurosawa by Donald Richie, courtesy of University of California Press. The Films of Akira Kurosawa by Donald Richie is on sale at the NFT, and is also available to buy online from amazon.co.uk