On the occasion of the late director Akira Kurosawa's birthday, we present this video of George Lucas and the influence the cinema master had on his Star Wars.
Kurosawas was born March 23, 1910 and died in 1998. He is credited with bringing Japanese cinema to the attention of the Western world.
His first film, Drunken Angel (1948) was critically acclaimed introduced a young, up-andcoming actor, Toshiro Mifune, who went on to act in many more of Kurosawa's films.
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Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) was screened at the Venice Film Festival, where it won a Golden Lion (the highest prize given to a film at the festival) in 1951. It has become a classic in film classes. Mifune's spectacular acting skills in the film, paired with the mesmerising portrayal of nature -- rain pouring in endless streams and sunlight escaping through the wooden canopy -- made it a work of art.
Nature and its role was a recurring element in Kurosawa's work. Amidst the violence depicted in some of his samurai movies, he included quiet scenes as a contrast to man's violence, o-- a bubbling brook flowing through a garden, the click-clock of a bamboo mill, the wind rushing through the reeds -- would often precede a bloody fight.
One of his most commercially successful films and what many critics call Kurosawa's masterpiece, Seven Samurai, drew inspiration from Hollywood westerns. The 3-hour and a half movie, in turn, inspired the Hollywood to make the western The Magnificent Seven.
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SEVEN SAMURAI
The final battle in Seven Samurai was fought in a torrential rainstorm. |
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