Zhao Xiaolan
The 2019 Beijing International Film Festival launched the "Ferry West and East: Tribute to Kurosawa" film screening. These films are hard to get a ticket, and they quickly set off an upsurge of watching movies among fans in Beijing. It can be seen that the masterpieces are still very attractive.
Compared to Akira Kurosawa, Japanese audiences seem to prefer directors such as Ozu Yasujiro and Mizoguchi Kenji because their works are more localized. But in terms of world influence, no one can compare with Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa's creation was influenced by American Western films, and his return has deeply influenced the creation of Western films. For example, the American western film "The Heroic Seven Dragons" was remake of Kurosawa Akira's "Seven Samurai"; another Italian "Macaroni Western" masterpiece "Red Dead Redemption" was remake of Kurosawa Akira's "Intentional Stick" ".
Kurosawa is also good at drawing materials from Western literature. He took Shakespeare's "King Lear" into "Chaos" and "Macbeth" into "Spider's Nest City." He also loves Russian literature very much, and remakes Gorky's play "Lower Class" and Dostoyevsky's "Idiot". But his adaptations are very subtle, and the film presents unique Japanese aesthetics.
Kurosawa Akira's works belong to "Flowers inside the wall and fragrance outside the wall". His masterpiece "Rashomon" was too advanced in technique. When it was released in Japan in 1950, the box office was bleak and nobody was interested. But the following year, he won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival and gained countless friends in a foreign country. Pay attention. His film career was not all smooth sailing, even desperate to commit suicide in 1971. The trough of his life and career was also the age of the decline of Japanese movies, and it was the olive branch from abroad that helped him come back to life. He was invited to shoot "Delsu Uzala" in the Soviet Union and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, regaining his reputation. Later in his creative career, he filmed "Shadow Warrior" with foreign funds and regained commercial success.
fans use "the emperor of the movie" to describe Akira Kurosawa's domineering and perfectionism on the set. When filming "Seven Samurai", he stood in the cold muddy ground for one day, and he was highly concentrated. In order to pursue the effect of the lens, he would rather spend a few days with the crew waiting for a cloud to arrive. Because of this, he burns money for filming, which makes the producer a headache.
Akira Kurosawa has made 31 films in his lifetime, and he has also written many scripts, and his influence has surpassed his time. He is the teacher of countless directors, and the unique aesthetic style of his works has been imitated even now. "If you subtract the movie from my life, it would be zero." He once said. And the reason why he holds the supreme position in the film industry is not only because of the classics he created, but also because of his madness and enthusiasm for investing his life in movies.
At the 1990 Oscar awards ceremony, Akira Kurosawa received the Oscar Lifetime Achievement Award from the two directors of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. In his acceptance speech, he said that he Although I have been making movies for many years, I still don't understand the true meaning of movies. In the autobiography "The Oil of the Toad", he compares himself to a kind of toad, and occasionally sees his ugly appearance, scared to secrete a layer of oil. The master has struggled to climb throughout his life, reaching a height that is difficult for ordinary people, but he is still cautious when examining himself. "Toad's oil" is said to have medicinal value, and the works he produced are still nourishing fans all over the world.
