Johnny's Blog: "SUNSHINE THROUGH THE RAIN"

“SUNSHINE THROUGH THE RAIN”- Dreams by AKIRA KUROSAWA

Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese filmmaker. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, Kurosawa directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years. Kurosawa was most popular in America and European countries more than his native Japan.

DREAMS - A film based on eight of Kurosawa's dreams. They range from the lyrical to the apocalyptic.

Sunshine Through The Rain :

There is an old legend in Japan that states that when the sun is shining through the rain, the kitsune (foxes) have their weddings (this is a common theme globally – see sunshower). In this first dream, a boy defies the wish of a woman, possibly his mother, to remain at home during a day with such weather. From behind a large tree in the nearby forest, he witnesses the slow wedding procession of the kitsune. Unfortunately, he is spotted by the foxes and runs. When he tries to return home, the same woman says that a fox had come by the house, leaving behind a tantō knife. The woman gives the knife to the boy, implying that he must commit suicide. The woman asks the boy to go and beg forgiveness from the foxes, although they are known to be unforgiving, refusing to let him in unless he does so. The boy sets off into the mountains, towards the place under the rainbow in search for the kitsune's home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGyrdfXVOlA

Please open the above link to view the video of Sunshine Through the Rain – Dreams by Akira Kurosawa.

The most well-known of all Japanese directors, the great irony about Akira Kurosawa's career is that he is far more popular outside of Japan than he is in Japan. The son of an army officer, Kurosawa studied art before gravitating to film as a means of supporting himself. He served seven years as an assistant to director Kajiro Yamamoto before he began his own directorial career with Sanshiro Sugata (1943), a film about the 19th-century struggle for supremacy between adherents of judo and ju-jitsu that so impressed the military government, he was prevailed upon to make a sequel (Sanshiro Sugata Part II).

Following the end of World War II, Kurosawa's career gathered speed with a series of films that cut across all genres, from crime thrillers to period dramas -- among the latter, his Rashomon (1951) became the first postwar Japanese film to find wide favor with Western audiences, and simultaneously introduced leading man Toshiro Mifune to Western viewers. It was Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (1954), however, that made the largest impact of any of his movies outside of Japan. Although heavily cut on its original release, this three-hour-plus medieval action drama, shot with painstaking attention to both dramatic and period detail, became one of the most popular of Japanese films of all time in the West, and every subsequent Kurosawa film has been released in the U.S. in some form, even if many -- most notably The Hidden Fortress (1958) -- were cut down in length. At the same time, American and European filmmakers began taking a serious look at Kurosawa's movies as a source of plot material for their own work -- Rashomon was remade as The Outrage, in a western setting, while Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The Seven Samurai (1954) fared best of all, serving as the basis for John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (which had been the original title of Kurosawa's movie), in 1960; the remake actually did better business in Japan than the original film did. In the early 1980s, an un-filmed screenplay of Kurosawa's also served as the basis for Runaway Train (1985), a popular action thriller.

Kurosawa's movies subsequent to his period thriller Sanjuro (1962) abandoned the action format in favor of more esoteric and serious drama, including his epic length medical melodrama Red Beard (1965). In recent years, despite ill-health and the problems getting financing for his more ambitious films, Kurosawa has remained the most prominent of Japanese filmmakers. With his Westernized style, Kurosawa has always found a wider audience and more financing opportunities in Europe and America than he has in his own country. A sensitive romantic at heart, with a sentimental streak that occasionally rises forcefully to the surface of his movies his work probably resembles that of John Ford more closely than it does any of his fellow Japanese filmmakers.

Born in Tokyo in 1910, Akira Kurosawa began his career as an assistant director in the years leading up to World War II. In 1950, he gained international acclaim for the samurai tale Rashomon, which he followed with such influential films as The Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood and Yojimbo. After a difficult period during which he failed to find backing for his projects and also attempted suicide, his influence on a younger generation of directors led to the resurrection of his career with the films Kagemusha and Ran. Kurosawa died in 1998, leaving behind an impressive body of work that has earned him a place as one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century.

His well-to-do family can trace its lineage as far back as the 11th century, and the young Kurosawa was taught early on that he was a descendant of samurai. But despite this esteemed, distinctly Japanese background, Kurosawa’s father believed he and his siblings should be exposed to Western culture as well, so he frequently took them to see films.

Initially, Kurosawa found himself drawn to art; after finishing high school, he studied at the Doshisha School of Western Painting. However, in 1936, his essay application to work at the Photo Chemical Laboratories film studio caught the eye of Kajirō Yamamoto, one of Japan’s biggest director’s at that time, who insisted on hiring Kurosawa. Employed as an assistant director for the next seven years, Kurosawa made about 24 films with Yamamoto and other directors, and learned, in particular, the importance of being able to write a good script.

Because he had been labeled unfit for military service after failing an earlier physical, when Japan entered World War II Kurosawa was able to stay in Tokyo and continue to work. Despite the inherent economic hardships of the conflict, it was during this time that Kurosawa was promoted to director and made his first film, Sanshiro Sugata. A martial arts picture set in 19th-century Japan, it was released in 1943 and showcased Kurosawa’s talents as both a writer and director. Kurosawa followed with the World War II–themed Ichiban utsukushiku in 1944, an achievement made even sweeter when he married its star, Yōko Yaguchi, the next year.

For a brief period after the war’s end, Kurosawa’s budding career was placed on hold by the occupying U.S. forces, but he returned to filmmaking with his own criticism of Japan’s pre-war militarism, No Regrets for Our Youth in 1946. Two years later, he made his first significant breakthrough with Drunken Angel, a melodrama set in post-war Tokyo that not only demonstrated Kurosawa’s range, but also marked his first collaboration with actor Toshirō Mifune.

Kurosawa followed his first domestic success with what would become his first international hit, Rashomon (1950), a samurai murder story told from the perspective of four different characters. It is now considered a masterfully innovative storytelling device for the time, but it was met with mixed reactions in Japan. However, its genius was not lost on the international circuit and it won both the Venice Film Festival’s top prize and the Academy Award for best foreign film. Working from a script by Kurosawa, Martin Ritt remade it as the 1964 Western The Outrage. It became the earliest of many of Kurosawa’s works adapted to this genre.

Now recognized as an important voice in cinema, over the course of the next decade, Kurosawa made some of his most influential and entertaining films. In 1952, he released the internationally acclaimed Ikiru and in 1954 the epic Seven Samurai, a homage to Westerns that would later come full circle when it was remade as The Magnificent Seven (1960). Once more demonstrating his range and flair for adaptation, in 1957 Kurosawa released Throne of Blood. A reimagining of Macbeth, it is widely considered to be one of the finest interpretations of Shakespeare’s works. Following on its heels was 1958's Hidden Fortress, the story of princess, her general and their two bumbling peasant companions on a quest to reach home. It marked a milestone as the first film in Japan to make use of the widescreen format, but it is arguably even more important for the influence it had on the young American filmmaker George Lucas, who names Hidden Fortress as a primary influence for Star Wars.

To gain greater artistic freedom in his work, in 1960, Kurosawa started his own production company. His first film from this new venture was Yojimbo (1961), which follows a nameless wandering samurai as he plays the middle between the two warring factions in a small town. Among his most popular and accessible films, Sergio Leone remade it as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), with Clint Eastwood starring as the archetypal “Man with No Name.”

However, despite Kurosawa’s continued successes, television’s negative impact on filmmaking and an economic depression in Japan led him to seek work in Hollywood. Unfortunately, none of his projects there came to fruition. His thriller Runaway Train failed to gain financial backing and personal differences caused Twentieth Century Fox to fire him from the Pearl Harbor film Tora! Tora! Tora! Compounding Kurosawa’s disappointment was the commercial failure of his 1970 comedy, Dodes’ka-den. Dejected, exhausted and suffering financially, Kurosawa attempted suicide in 1971. Although he eventually recovered, he resigned himself to the fact that he would never direct again.

On the verge of fading into obscurity, Kurosawa was approached by a Russian production company to make the adventure epic Dersu Uzala about a hermit. Shot on location in Siberia and premiering in 1975, international audiences enthusiastically received the film. However, the production took a toll on Kurosawa’s health. Although he was finding it increasingly difficult to win backing for his projects, Kurosawa persevered in his efforts to bring his vision to the screen.

For all that Kurosawa had contributed to the world of cinema, it is fitting that his profound influence would someday repaid. In the late ’70s, Kurosawa admirer George Lucas leveraged his massive success with Star Wars to bring Francis Ford Coppola and Twentieth Century Fox on board to produce Kagemusha, a medieval samurai story of epic proportions. Released in 1980, it won the Grand Prize at Cannes and was nominated for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards. Reinvigorated by the success of Kagemusha, Kurosawa followed it up in 1985 with Ran, his samurai adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Dreams

In 1990 the 80-year-old director returned with Dreams, an experimental offering brought to the screen with help from yet another of his admirers, Steven Spielberg. Though the film met with a lukewarm reception, at that year’s Academy Awards Spielberg and Lucas presented Kurosawa with an honorary Oscar by in recognition of his body of work.

The director made the mildly successful Rhapsody in August in 1990 and Madadayo in 1993. In 1995, he was working in his next project when he fell and broke his back. The injuries he sustained confined him to a wheelchair for the remainder of life and led to a rapid deterioration of his health. He died from a stroke on September 6, 1998, in Tokyo. He was 88. Since his passing, his impact on film continues to be felt through new interpretations of his work and the lasting influence he has had on some of the industry’s brightest lights.

Satyajit Ray Indian Filkmmaker with Akira Kurosawa

Kurosawa Akira, first Japanese film director to win international acclaim, with such films as Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), Kagemusha (1980), and Ran (1985).

After leaving secondary school, Kurosawa attended an art school and began painting in the Western style. Although he was awarded important art prizes, he gave up his ambition to become a painter and in 1936 became an assistant director in the PCL cinema studio. Until 1943 he worked there mainly as an assistant to Yamamoto Kajirō, one of Japan’s major directors of World War II films. During this period Kurosawa became known as an excellent scenarist. Some of his best scenarios were never filmed but only published in journals; yet they were noticed by specialists for their freshness of representation and were awarded prizes.

In 1943 Kurosawa was promoted to director and made his first feature film, Sanshiro Sugata, from his own scenario; this story of Japanese judo masters of the 1880s scored a great popular success. In 1944 he made his second film, Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful), a story about girls at work in an arsenal. Immediately thereafter, he married the actress who had played the leading part in the picture, Yaguchi Yoko; they had two children, a son and a daughter. In August 1945, when Japan offered to surrender in World War II, he was shooting his picture Tora no o fumu otokotachi (They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail), a parody of a well-known Kabuki drama. The Allied occupation forces, however, prohibited the release of most films dealing with Japan’s feudal past, and this outstanding comedy was not distributed until 1952.

Kurosawa’s Waga seishun ni kuinashi (1946; No Regrets for Our Youth) portrays the history of Japanese militarism from 1933 through the end of the war in terms of a person executed on suspicion of espionage during the war. Of the many postwar films criticizing Japanese militarism, this was the most successful, both artistically and commercially. It was Yoidore tenshi (1948; Drunken Angel), however, that made Kurosawa’s name famous. This story of a consumptive gangster and a drunken doctor living in the postwar desolation of downtown Tokyo is a melodrama intermingling desperation and hope, violence, and melancholy. The gangster was portrayed by a new actor, Mifune Toshirō, who became a star through this film and who subsequently appeared in most of Kurosawa’s films.

Kurosawa’s Rashomon was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and was awarded the Grand Prix. It also won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. This was the first time a Japanese film had won such high international acclaim, and Japanese films now attracted serious attention all over the world. An adaptation of two short stories written by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, the film deals with a samurai, his wife, a bandit, and a woodcutter in the 10th century; a rape and a murder are recollected by the four persons in distinctly different ways. This presentation of the same event as seen by different persons caught the imagination of the audience and advanced the idea of cinema as a means of probing a metaphysical problem.

Ikiru (“To Live”) is regarded by many critics as one of the finest works in the history of the cinema. It concerns a petty governmental official who learns he has only half a year until he will die from cancer. He searches for solace in the affection of his family but is betrayed, then seeks enjoyment but becomes disillusioned, and, in the end, is redeemed by using his position to work for the poor. In this film, which abounds in strong moral messages, Kurosawa depicts in an extremely realistic manner the collapse of the family system, as well as the hypocritical aspects of officials in postwar Japanese society. The picture was an outstanding document of the life and the spiritual situation of Japanese people, who were then beginning to recover from the desperation caused by defeat in the war.

The epic Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai) is considered the most entertaining of Kurosawa’s films and also his greatest commercial success. It depicts a village of peasants and a few leaderless samurai who fight for the village against a gang of marauding bandits; although it was inspired by his admiration of Hollywood Westerns, it was executed in an entirely Japanese style.

Ikimono no kiroku (1955; I Live in Fear, or Record of a Living Being) is a deeply honest film portraying a Japanese foundry owner’s terror of the atomic tests conducted by the United States and the Soviet Union. Its pessimistic conclusion, however, made it a commercial failure.

Kurosawa was also noted for his adaptations of European literary classics into films with Japanese settings. Hakuchi (1951; The Idiot) is based upon Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same title, Kumonosu-jo (Throne of Blood) was adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Donzoko (1957; The Lower Depths) was from Maksim Gorky’s drama: each of these films is skillfully Japanized. Throne of Blood, which reflects the style of the sets and acting of the Japanese Noh play and uses not a word of the original text, has been called the best film of all the countless cinematized Shakespearean dramas.

Kurosawa’s pictures contributed a strong sense of style to the artistic Japanese film, which had been pursuing a naturalistic trend. The violent action of his more commercial works also exerted a powerful influence.

In 1960 he set up Kurosawa Productions, of which he became president, and began to produce his own works. As producer, however, he was continually embarrassed by economic difficulties. Throughout the 1960s, Kurosawa made a number of entertainment films, mainly with samurai as leading characters; Yojimbo (1961; “The Bodyguard”) is a representative work. Akahige (1965; Red Beard) combines elements of entertainment with a sentimental humanism. In the 1960s, however, Japanese cinema fell into an economic depression, and Kurosawa’s plans, in most cases, were found by film companies to be too expensive. As a result, Kurosawa attempted to work with Hollywood producers, but each of the projects ended in failure. At the Kyōto studio in 1968, for 20th Century Fox, he started shooting Tora, Tora, Tora!, a war film dealing with the air attack on Pearl Harbor. The work progressed slowly, however, and the producer, fearing an excess in estimated cost, dismissed Kurosawa and replaced him with another director. After a six-year interval, Kurosawa at last managed to present another of his films, Dodesukaden (1970; Dodeskaden). His first work in colour, a comedy of poor people living in slums, it recaptured much of the poignancy of his best works but failed financially. The period of personal despondency and artistic silence that followed ended in the mid-1970s when Kurosawa filmed Dersu Uzala (1975) in Siberia at the invitation of the Soviet government. This story of a Siberian hermit won wide acclaim.

Kagemusha (“The Shadow Warrior”), released in 1980, was the director’s first samurai film in 14 years. It concerns a petty thief who is chosen to impersonate a powerful feudal lord killed in battle. This film was notable for its powerful battle scenes. Kurosawa’s next film, Ran (1985; “Chaos”), was an even more successful samurai epic. An adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in 16th-century Japan, the film uses sons instead of daughters as the aging monarch’s ungrateful children. Ran was acclaimed as one of Kurosawa’s greatest films in the grandeur of its imagery, the intellectual depth of its screen adaptation, and the intensity of its dramatic performances. His last three films—Dreams (1990), Rhapsody in August (1990), and Madadayo (1993)—were not as well received.

Although other Japanese filmmakers acquired substantial international followings after the pioneering success of Rashomon, Kurosawa’s films continue to command great interest in the West. They represent a unique combination of elements of Japanese art—in the subtlety of their feeling and philosophy, the brilliance of their visual composition, and their treatment of samurai and other historic Japanese themes—with a distinctly Western feeling for action and drama and a frequent use of stories from Western sources, both literary classics and popular thrillers. Kurosawa was a recipient of numerous film and career honours, including a Golden Lion for Career Achievement at the 1982 Venice Film Festival, an Academy Award for lifetime achievement (1989), the Directors Guild of America’s lifetime achievement award (1992), and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theatre/film (1992).