Kurosawa film music of akira kurosawa biography

Home / General Biography Information / Kurosawa film music of akira kurosawa biography

It is a foreigner’s simulacra of the country as understood from its exports, whether food—there is one transfixing scene that depicts the preparation of a poisoned bento box—or movies, particularly the more endemic corruption-obsessed films of Akira Kurosawa, though Anderson is more comfortable in the register of tart understatement than with Kurosawa’s guttural outrage.

But this is an inadequate way of summing up these odd films, especially the first and third, which can be described respectively as thoughtful and provocative hard-core porn (which has yet to show in Japan in undoctored form), and a bold foray into bilingual, crosscultural filmmaking that has often been compared to David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) but might now be viewed more interestingly as an anticipation of Clint Eastwood’s recent World War II diptych (though Oshima is more critical of Japan).

In The Ceremony, the obsession arguably has something to do with the film’s compulsive center framing, suggesting a kind of ongoing critique both of rituals (mainly weddings and funerals) and of symmetry within the orderly CinemaScope compositions that frame them—rituals and symmetry that are moreover constantly on the verge of capsizing in various perverse and grotesque ways.

In Boy, which uses ’Scope even more brilliantly, the flag figures in everything from the abstract design behind the credits—a variation on the credits of Sing a Song of Sex (a film featuring an alternate version of the national standard, with a black sun instead of a red one at the center of a white field)—to strategically placed Japanese flags and many rhyming images, such as the splatter of blood on a snow-covered ground and the title hero’s planting of a red boot in the center of a snowman.

In this film, moreover, Oshima creates a potent dialectic between the center framing suggested by the flag and a reverse compositional strategy.

. Tokyo Sonata (which opens in New York and Los Angeles on March 13) is a visually lyrical, narratively Fassbinderesque examination of a Japanese nuclear family in meltdown due to pressures both external (the downsizing of Japan’s middle-income workforce) and internal (failing codes of masculinity). Le Joli Mai was made with what was then the newly developed handheld sync-sound camera, and L’Ambassade (The Embassy, 1973) was shot on Super 8.

Shunning the spotlight, Marker rarely let himself be photographed. The 1977 production ends with a striking juxtaposition of jubilant scenes from postrevolutionary Portugal (in which people flash the V sign for “victory”) and a sequence of men with guns in helicopters methodically culling the wolf population.

Over six decades of filmmaking that ended with the trailer Kino (2012), made for that year’s Venice Film Festival, Marker produced more than fifty motion pictures. . (1932), Osaka Elegy (1936), and No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), respectively, and omitted Naruse entirely.¹ In covering the period that encompasses his own career, he obligingly switches from third to first person in his narration, and the eight titles he cites from his own filmography—Cruel Story of Youth (1960), Night and Fog in Japan (1960), Death by Hanging (1968), Boy (1969), The Ceremony (1971), In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Merry Christmas, Mr.

Lawrence (1983), and Max, Mon Amour (1986)—constitute (apart from the last item) a credible rundown of his greatest directorial achievements. It is characteristic of Oshima’s flexibility (or fickleness) that he can cheerfully jettison his own carefully established codes of realism at the drop of a hat, such as when he allows David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr.

Lawrence, Oshima’s most mainstream picture, to survive a firing squad without explanation. He directed from a wheelchair, and given his failing health, it seems unlikely that he will direct another feature. . 31-Dec.