Kurosawa was born on March 23, 1910 in Ohi-machi, a suburb of Tokyo. He was the youngest child of a family of three brothers and three sisters. His father, Isamu, was a gym teacher at a local junior high school, and his mother, Shima, was from the family of a merchant in Osaka. Since Kurosawa spent his childhood during the end of the Meiji Period and the early years of the Taisho Period in Japan, he was exposed to a wide variety of western influences; while in school, he read works by Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and many other authors whose ideas were to influence his work in later years.

In the following years, Kurosawa explored the possibilities of going into literature, music, and theatre. In 1935, he responded to an advertisement from the Photo Chemical Laboratories, a film company which was looking for new assistant directors. Applicants were to write an essay on the deficiencies of the Japanese film industry and ways to remedy them; Kurosawa did this with exuberance, and after a few more interviews and another essay, he was offered a job.

Movie poster for Sanshiro Sugata (1943). (image taken from The Akira Kurosawa Database)

Kurosawa was assigned to a production unit under the command of Kajiro Yamamoto, who was to become his mentor for the next several years. He became closely familiar with all the aspects of filmmaking, and was assistant director for Yamamoto's movie Horses in 1941. In 1943, Kurosawa directed his first movie, Sanshiro Sugata. From this point on, Kurosawa was to make twenty-nine more movies until his death in 1998.

In order to accomplish this, Kurosawa believed in having a certain kind of balance in his films. He did not want to create a film that only intellectuals were capable of viewing, but at the same time, as was prescribed by his fundamental philosophy, he wanted to make movies that caused people to reflect on themselves and their world. The solution was to create movies that were both enjoyable and thought-provoking. As Kurosawa himself said, "A film should appeal to sophisticated, profound-thinking people, while at the same time entertaining simplistic people. Even if a small circle of people enjoy a film, it will not do. A film should satisfy a wide range of people, all the people" (Prince, 36). In this way, Kurosawa's works were similar to those of authors such as Twain, Dante, and Homer, whose stories entertained and immersed on one level, yet were fully susceptible to intellectual analysis and reflection on another. I believe that it was this kind of belief that fostered many of the dialectic themes presented in his films.

One such dialectic was a synthesis between empathy and intellectualism. For a film to have social consequence, it had to strike the audience in a way that evoked reflection. Brecht, who was one of the first filmmakers to employ this philosophy, saw empathy as an opponent of this, since it often allowed the audience to respond to the film in an uncritical way by having an emotional attachment to the characters of the film. Such a relationship between the audience and the work would leave the viewer emotionally saturated, but intellectually unstimulated (a recent example of such a film might be Titanic). Going back to the previous paragraph, however, one must note that for an audience to be immersed in a film (that is, for them to be within the story-world of the film and understand its characters), they must be emotionally connected with it to some degree. As a result, unlike Brecht, Kurosawa strove to blend the emotional and the intellectual. His films can be seen as "an exploration and demonstration of how far film might go in the attempt to alter society without, at the same time, politically radicalizing its own forms" (Prince, 37), since such radicalization would undoubtedly alienate part of the audience and prevent them from identifying with and ultimately reflecting on--and enjoying--the film.

Akira Kurosawa. (image taken from The Akira Kurosawa Database)

Akira Kurosawa accomplished this by alternating between elements of humanism and formalism; using the former to evoke empathy in the audience, and the latter to limit it. Formalism was evident in his films by his attention to historical accuracy and process, such as the tactical detail present in the battles of Seven Samurai, or the police procedure in High and Low. The humanistic components draw the audience closer to the characters of the story so they can better understand the characters’ feelings and motivations. The formalist elements limit this by distracting the audience from the characters to a certain degree, keeping the audience from getting so emotionally saturated with the characters that they lose the meaning of the film as a whole and are unable to critically reflect upon it. The constant "switching" between these two modes of drama allows the audience to both enjoy the film and become intellectually stimulated by it. Such a vacillation between attention to detail and humanistic empathy sometimes alternated between subsequent films which focused on either one (for example, Throne of Blood was very humanistic, and was followed by The Bad Sleep Well, which had more formalist elements). But in some cases, such as Seven Samurai and Red Beard, both elements alternated within the film itself.

Another major concept evident in Kurosawa's work, which is a vehicle for social portrait and a catalyst for reflection, is the Western sense of individuality present in his films. Unlike many other Japanese films in which a traditional authority imposes ethics and morals upon an individual, most of Kurosawa's films are set in worlds with ambiguous morals. For example, most of his samurai films are set during the period of civil war in feudal Japan, when violence was rampant and no authority had a significant amount of power over the people. In his modern films, the ubiquitous urban and social entropy present in the setting provided a similar effect. As a result, the individuals in Kurosawa's films are not simply social products infused with social codes, but a set of distinct characters who have been affected and shaped by the individuals and circumstances surrounding them. In this way, the individual consciousness is at the center of the film's moral universe (Desser, 77). Characters are not simply "good" or "evil" but rather vulnerable and three-dimensional, and the developments that occur within and between these characters is part of what gives meaning and humanity to the film. Although today such a concept is essentially a "requirement" for a "good film," during the early development of the Japanese film it was not well-known; in such a way Kurosawa contributed helped evolve the medium into a more mature state of art.

It is also important to note that, although Kurosawa did use western concepts like individuality in his films, he often used them in Japanese contexts. For example, all of his jedai-geki deal with traditional and historical Japanese cultural conflicts—the class friction between Samurai and Farmer in Seven Samurai, the internal conflict between giri and ninjo in his characters, the Confucian relationship of loyalty between a parent and child, master and servant. But in Kurosawa’s movies, these conflicts are seen from a different perspective than in traditional Japanese stories. As mentioned earlier, the characters have Japanese ethics and beliefs but are portrayed in a Western light—as individuals who affect and shape one another, not as individuals who are simply "infused" with a priori societal values. As a result, it is the individual characters in Kurosawa’s films that ultimately carry and create culture and meaning.

Movie poster for The Idiot (1951). (image taken from The Akira Kurosawa Database)

Kurosawa's films spanned a wide variety of genres as well. Many of his works such as Rashoman, Ran, and Seven Samurai were jedai-geki, or period films (films set before the Meiji Restoration of 1868). Other films of his, such as High and Low and No, Not Yet on the other hand, are gendo-mono, or modern stories. Unlike many directors who focus on one particular genre or theme, Kurosawa had a taste for a plethora of styles, from violent samurai films such as Sanjuro, to modern detective stories such as Stray Dog, to modern remakes of classics such as Dostoevsky's The Idiot. During his career, Kurosawa experimented with several different genres, trying to change their standard formulaic structure and break from Japanese traditions of storytelling in his films. In such a way, he contributed to the Japanese film industry in nearly all aspects, unlike many other innovators who pushed the film industry in one general direction (Desser, 59). At the beginning of his career, Kurosawa at first alternated between making more formulaic and more artistic or avant-garde films, but as he matured he became more adept at making movies which were both part of a genre and transcended a genre at the same time. Formulaic or not, however, Kurosawa had always put his personal mark on his work; any movie of his was distinctly unique and personal, as he put his views, thoughts, and ideas into the writing and direction of each film.

It was for this reason that Kurosawa was very well respected by the international film scene as an auteur, or art film director, in the 1940's and 50's. During this time, film critics wanted to prove that films weren't a manufactured commodity; rather, they were an art form and an expression of national culture. Auteurs were those directors who helped motivate this movement by personalizing their films, making a film a work of art which could be identified by the unique "signature" of the director's particular style and philosophy. Such auteurs were rare in Japan not because filmmakers were repressed; in fact, they had a good deal of freedom, but many refused to innovate the industry because they regarded the formulaic genres of Japanese film as traditions to be upheld. Kurosawa was one of the few who broke this trend and brought the film closer to an art form, and his efforts were recognized worldwide when Rashoman won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1950.

However, by the late 1950's, conditions had changed in Japan, and the art-film industry slowly began to wane. In 1953, only 866 television sets were in operation in Japan, but by the late 1950's there were nearly two million. By the end of the 1960's, 95 percent of all Japanese households owned at least one TV, and they were watching it instead of going to movies at the theatre; in 1958, 1,127 million had attended the theatre, and by 1975 that number dropped to under 200 million.

The difference in content between film and television became very stratified as a result of this. One of Kurosawa's best talents was the epic high-budget jidai-geki; however, the genre's formulaic nature was well-suited to the demands of a weekly series (Anderson and Richie 1982). Because of this, the television industry began to specialize in making low-budget jidai-geki series, and the film industry began to specialize in making leisure films involving soft-core pornography. By the early 1960's, there was very little room for Kurosawa's epic high-budget films because the industry was so cost-conscious. In the 1940's and early 1950's, the executives of film companies were directors themselves, and they knew the difference between a good and a bad movie; but by the late 1950's, new executives and other companies that didn't know anything about movies had taken over, and movie directors were given less voice and less freedom. It was this period of the film industry that Kurosawa called "The Dark Ages" (Prince, 8).

Movie poster for Ran (1985). (image taken from The Akira Kurosawa Database)

In addition, the new directors entering the film industry had entirely different ideologies than Kurosawa. Called "The New Wave," they were filmmakers who strove to question the role of the audience in the film and politicized its aesthetic in the way of Brecht and other post-modernists. Upon analyzing Kurosawa's films, they condemned him for his strict use of linear narrative and non-political filmmaking; some young filmmakers were even said to have hated him.

Yet other misfortunes struck Kurosawa during this time. In 1965, he was left both physically and mentally exhausted after completing Red Beard, one of his most involved projects ever. His philosophy of changing Japanese society through his movies seemed did not seem to be working. The country, though active economically, was still in the same state of social decay as it was in the 1940's, in Kurosawa's opinion, and this left him very discouraged. He was also diagnosed with an unknown illness. In 1970, he obtained a position as director at Twentieth Century Fox for Tora! Tora! Tora!, but was forced to quit, as many sources said that he was obsessed with "a perfectionism some thought bordered on insanity" (Prince, 5). He also released Dodeskaden the same year, which was not well received. Following such disappointments and misfortunes, Kurosawa attempted suicide--one of the acts many of his characters had contemplated, but never actually performed. He slashed his wrists with a razor, but the attempt failed. After this point, he released only six more movies before his death on September 9, 1998: Dersu Uzala, Kagemusha, Ran, Dreams, Rhapsody in August, and No, Not Yet. They were all well-received, however, and according to interviews, Kurosawa had become very content with himself and his work well before his death.