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Once you start trying to pigeonhole Akira Kurosawa, you immediately start to lose him again. If you think he’s a director of just samurai movies, you miss his outstanding noirs and contemporary works. If you think he’s simply about tenderhearted, melancholy tales, you miss the fatalistic edge of his later works. The sole major consistency across his entire filmography is that meaning can only be created by what we do for others, even if it costs us dearly in the process.
His movies frequently depict class consciousness, where Kurosawa moves across the slums to highlight brutal living conditions, never using the impoverished as props, but chastising those who would easily dismiss the poor as criminal or irredeemable. Through the stunning cinematography and editing of his collaborators, Kurosawa always weaves a rich, complex tapestry of characters, whether they inhabit small hamlets during the Edo period or the cities of mid-20th-century Japan.
With 30 features over a career spanning six decades, it can be difficult to know where to start with the brilliant filmmaker whose impact is so diverse and far-ranging that his influence is felt from small character dramas to the very concept of “Let’s get a group of guys together for a job.” The invention of the latter is probably the best place to begin.
