Kurosawa

Kurosawa PDF

Author: Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 9780822325192

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This work will become not only the newly definitive study of Kurosawa, but will redefine the field of Japanese cinema studies, particularly as the field exists in the west.

Something Like An Autobiography

Something Like An Autobiography PDF

Author: Akira Kurosawa

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-07-27

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 030780321X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Translated by Audie E. Bock. "A first rate book and a joy to read.... It's doubtful that a complete understanding of the director's artistry can be obtained without reading this book.... Also indispensable for budding directors are the addenda, in which Kurosawa lays out his beliefs on the primacy of a good script, on scriptwriting as an essential tool for directors, on directing actors, on camera placement, and on the value of steeping oneself in literature, from great novels to detective fiction." --Variety "For the lover of Kurosawa's movies...this is nothing short of must reading...a fitting companion piece to his many dynamic and absorbing screen entertainments." --Washington Post Book World

Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa PDF

Author: Eric San Juan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-12-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1538110903

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This is an accessible look at the films of Akira Kurosawa, whose movies are works of art and popular culture touchstones, influencing such directors as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The author examines all of the director’s works and explains why that film is culturally significant and what makes it an enjoyable viewing experience.

Compound Cinematics

Compound Cinematics PDF

Author: Shinobu Hashimoto

Publisher: Kodansha USA

Published: 2015-03-31

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1939130581

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Any list of Japan's greatest screenplay writers would feature Shinobu Hashimoto at or near the top. This memoir, focusing on his collaborations with Akira Kurosawa, a gifted scenarist in his own right, offers indispenable insider account for fans and students of the director's oeuvre and invaluable insights into the unique process that is writing for the screen. The vast majority of Kurosawa works were filmed from screenplays that the director co-wrote with a stable of steller writers, many of whom he discovered himself with his sharp eye for all things cinematic. Among these was Hashimoto, who caught the filmmaker's attention with a script that eventually turned into Roshamon. Thus joining Team Kurosawa the debutant immediately went on to paly an integral part in developing and writing two of the grandmaster's most impressive achievements, Ikiru and Seven Samurai.

All the Emperor's Men

All the Emperor's Men PDF

Author: Hiroshi Tasogawa

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 155783850X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

(Applause Books). When 20th Century Fox planned its blockbuster portrayal of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, it looked to Akira Kurosawa a man whose mastery of the cinema led to his nickname "the Emperor" to direct the Japanese sequences. Yet a matter of three weeks after he began shooting the film in December 1968, Kurosawa was summarily dismissed and expelled from the studio. The tabloids trumpeted scandal: Kurosawa had himself gone mad; his associates had betrayed him; Hollywood was engaged in a conspiracy. Now, for the first time, the truth behind the downfall and humiliation of one of cinema's greatest perfectionists is revealed in All the Emperor's Men. Journalist Hiroshi Tasogawa probes the most sensitive questions about Kurosawa's thwarted ambition and the demons that drove him. His is a tale of a great clash of personalities, of differences in the ways of making movies, and ultimately of a clash between Japanese and American cultures.

Kurosawa's Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Iconic Films

Kurosawa's Rashomon: A Vanished City, a Lost Brother, and the Voice Inside His Iconic Films PDF

Author: Paul Anderer

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2016-10-11

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1681772779

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A groundbreaking investigation into the early life of the iconic Akira Kurosawa in connection to his most famous film—taking us deeper into Kurosawa and his world. Although he is a filmmaker of international renown, Kurosawa and the story of his formative years remain as enigmatic as his own Rashomon. Paul Anderer looks back at Kurosawa before he became famous, taking us into the turbulent world that made him. We encounter Tokyo, Kurosawa’s birthplace, which would be destroyed twice before his eyes; explore early twentieth-century Japan amid sweeping cross-cultural changes; and confront profound family tragedy alongside the horror of war. From these multiple angles we see how Kurosawa’s life and work speak to the epic narrative of modern Japan’s rise and fall. With fresh insights and vivid prose, Anderer engages the Great Earthquake of 1923, the dynamic energy that surged through Tokyo in its wake, and its impact on Kurosawa as a youth. When the city is destroyed again, in the fire-bombings of 1945, Anderer reveals how Kurosawa grappled with the trauma of war and its aftermath, and forged his artistic vision. Finally, he resurrects the specter and the voice of a gifted and troubled older brother—himself a star in the silent film industry—who took Kurosawa to see his first films, and who led a rebellious life until his desperate end. Bringing these formative forces into focus, Anderer looks beyond the aura of Kurosawa’s fame and leads us deeper into the tragedies and the challenges of his past. Kurosawa’s Rashomon uncovers how a film like Rashomon came to be, and why it endures to illuminate the shadows and the challenges of our present.

Rashomon Effects

Rashomon Effects PDF

Author: Blair Davis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-06

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1317574648

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Akira Kurosawa is widely known as the director who opened up Japanese film to Western audiences, and following his death in 1998, a process of reflection has begun about his life’s work as a whole and its legacy to cinema. Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon has become one of the best-known Japanese films ever made, and continues to be discussed and imitated more than 60 years after its first screening. This book examines the cultural and aesthetic impacts of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, as well as the director’s larger legacies to cinema, its global audiences and beyond. It demonstrates that these legacies are manifold: not only cinematic and artistic, but also cultural and cognitive. The book moves from an examination of one filmmaker and his immediate social context in Japan, and goes on to explore how an artist’s ideas might transcend their cultural origins to ultimately provide global influences. Discussing how Rashomon’s effects began to multiply with the film being re-imagined and repurposed in numerous media forms in the decades that followed its initial release, the book also shows that the film and its ideas have been applied to a wider range of social and cultural phenomena in a variety of institutional contexts. It addresses issues beyond the realm of Rashomon within film studies, extending to the Rashomon effect, which itself has become a widely recognized English term referring to the significantly different interpretations of different eyewitnesses to the same dramatic event. As the first book on Rashomon since Donald Richie's 1987 anthology, it will be invaluable to students and scholars of film studies, film history, Japanese cinema and communication studies. It will also resonate more broadly with those interested in Japanese culture and society, anthropology and philosophy.

Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa PDF

Author: Akira Kurosawa

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9781578069972

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This work includes the collected interviews with the first Japanese film director to become widely known in the West when his film "Rashomon" won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.

Waiting on the Weather

Waiting on the Weather PDF

Author: Teruyo Nogami

Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, Inc.

Published: 2006-09-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9781933330099

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A revealing memoir about the director and his films, by his first assistant for fifty years.

The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Third Edition, Expanded and Updated

The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Third Edition, Expanded and Updated PDF

Author: Donald Richie

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0520341783

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In an epilogue provided for his incomparable study of Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), Donald Richie reflects on Kurosawa's life work of thirty feature films and describes his last, unfinished project, a film set in the Edo period to be called The Ocean Was Watching. Kurosawa remains unchallenged as one of the century's greatest film directors. Through his long and distinguished career he managed, like very few others in the teeth of a huge and relentless industry, to elevate each of his films to a distinctive level of art. His Rashomon—one of the best-remembered and most talked-of films in any language—was a revelation when it appeared in 1950 and did much to bring Japanese cinema to the world's attention. Kurosawa's films display an extraordinary breadth and an astonishing strength, from the philosophic and sexual complexity of Rashomon to the moral dedication of Ikiru, from the naked violence of Seven Samurai to the savage comedy of Yojimbo, from the terror-filled feudalism of Throne of Blood to the piercing wit of Sanjuro.