Intro to a master

To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.
- Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa, the Japanese director and screenwriter, made thirty films over fifty-five years before dying in 1998 at the age of eighty-eight. One of the giants of the cinema, he influenced filmmakers worldwide as few others have. Steven Spielberg considered him "the pictorial Shakespeare of our time." Martin Scorsese spoke of his "Passion. Dynamism. Force. Exhilaration. Speed. Terrible Beauty." Francis Ford Coppola thought he should be the first filmmaker to be awarded a Nobel Prize...Kurosawa was a humanist who through his existential depiction of life fought to retain a sense of hope in a world he perceived to have become meaningless in the midst of great social change.

A master of the two most popular kinds of Japanese movies during his era, the jidai-geki (the costumed samurai films set in medieval times) and the gendai-geki (the realistic, domestic dramas set in contemporary Japanese life), Kurosawa anchored his movies in the Japanese culture and spirit. Nevertheless, Japanese critics thought him "too Western," for in giving shape to his stories, Kurosawa often borrowed from Western literary sources (Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Goethe, Dostoyevsky)...Rather than being Eastern or Western, his films possess a universality that is rooted in what one of his literary mentors, Dostoyevsky, called "the eternal questions--those of humans in their relations to themselves, their society, and their universe."

Robert K. Johnston, Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary Film