Before Akira Kurosawa became the most influential filmmaker in Japanese history, he failed the entrance exam at his first choice art school, spent years as an assistant director fetching props and translating the director's gibberish into something actors could use, and seriously contemplated suicide after his brother's death. The man who would give the world Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and the visual language that George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg would openly steal from was, for a long time, just a guy who could not catch a break. Then he caught one, and he did not let go for forty years.

Rashomon Broke the Rules of Storytelling in 1950

Rashomon was not supposed to change anything. The studio, Daiei, considered it uncommercial. The structure was disorienting: four witnesses describe the same crime, and their accounts contradict each other. There is no definitive version. The audience leaves the theater without knowing what actually happened. Film scholars at the British Film Institute have documented how this single structural choice influenced an entire century of cinema. The term Rashomon effect entered the social sciences to describe situations where eyewitnesses provide contradictory but equally plausible accounts. A film that a Japanese studio almost shelved won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and essentially introduced Japanese cinema to the Western world. What I keep coming back to is that Kurosawa was not trying to be experimental. He was trying to tell the truth about how unreliable human perception is. The innovation was a side effect of honesty.

He Made Samurai Films That Were Really About Poverty

Seven Samurai is routinely cited as one of the greatest films ever made. It is also, beneath its sword fights and heroic last stands, a film about class. The samurai are hired to protect a farming village. They are better fighters, but they are also rootless, masterless, and ultimately expendable. The farmers survive. The samurai do not. The final line of the film, delivered by the leader Kambei, is devastating: the victory belongs to the farmers, not to them. Researchers at the University of Tokyo's film studies department have analyzed how Kurosawa's samurai films consistently subvert the genre's glorification of warrior culture. His warriors are almost always losers, drunkards, or men past their prime. The nobility is in the effort, not the outcome. This is a profoundly Japanese sensibility, but it translates across every culture, which is why Hollywood has remade his films so many times.

The Emperor Who Lost His Throne

Kurosawa's later career was marked by difficulty. Japanese studios stopped funding his increasingly expensive visions. He attempted suicide in 1971. The scars on his wrists were visible for the rest of his life. He spent years unable to get projects made, and the films he did complete, like Dersu Uzala, were funded by Soviet studios because nobody in Japan or America would pay for them. Then George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola helped finance Kagemusha in 1980, and Kurosawa entered his final period, producing Ran, a King Lear adaptation set in feudal Japan, that many critics consider his masterpiece. He was seventy-five. I think about Kurosawa when people talk about creative careers as linear progressions. His was not linear. It was a series of collapses and reinventions, each one producing work that the previous version of himself could not have made. The failures were the material. The despair was the raw footage. He edited both into something extraordinary.