The career of acclaimed filmmaker Akira Kurosawa spanned more than five decades, during which he directed more than thirty movies, many of them indisputable classics: Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Throne of Blood, and Yojimbo, among others. During the height of his creative output, Kurosawa became one of the most influential and well-known directors in the world, inspiring filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and movies such as The Magnificent Seven; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; and Star Wars. In Akira Kurosawa: A Viewer’s Guide, Eric San Juan provides a comprehensive yet accessible examination of the artist’s entire cinematic endeavors. From early films of the 1940s such as Sanshiro Sugata and No Regrets for Our Youth to Oscar winner Dersu Uzala—the author helps readers understand what makes Kurosawa’s work so powerful. Each discussion includes a brief synopsis of the film, an engaging analysis, and thoughtful insights into the film’s significance. All of Kurosawa’s works, from 1943 to 1993, are analyzed here, including the overlooked television documentary Song of the Horse, produced in 1970. In addition to more than twenty photos, Akira Kurosawa: A Viewer’s Guide provides rich discussions that will appeal to students of cinema as well as anyone who wants to learn more about Japan’s greatest director.

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 indispensable 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 stellar 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 Rashomon. Thus joining Team Kurosawa the debutant immediately went on to play an integral part in developing and writing two of the grandmaster's most impressive achievements, Ikiru and Seven Samurai.

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

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.

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.

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

The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of 88, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon, which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's films, Stephen Prince provides two new chapters that examine Kurosawa's remaining films, placing him in the context of cinema history. Prince also discusses how Kurosawa furnished a template for some well-known Hollywood directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Providing a new and comprehensive look at this master filmmaker, The Warrior's Camera probes the complex visual structure of Kurosawa's work. The book shows how Kurosawa attempted to symbolize on film a course of national development for post-war Japan, and it traces the ways that he tied his social visions to a dynamic system of visual and narrative forms. The author analyzes Kurosawa's entire career and places the films in context by drawing on the director's autobiography--a fascinating work that presents Kurosawa as a Kurosawa character and the story of his life as the kind of spiritual odyssey witnessed so often in his films. After examining the development of Kurosawa's visual style in his early work, The Warrior's Camera explains how he used this style in subsequent films to forge a politically committed model of filmmaking. It then demonstrates how the collapse of Kurosawa's efforts to participate as a filmmaker in the tasks of social reconstruction led to the very different cinematic style evident in his most recent films, works of pessimism that view the world as resistant to change.

(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.

This is the first and only illustrated book on the work of the master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa timed for the centennial of his birth. By looking at the full range of Kurosawa's films, this book captures the meticulously crafted visual style of one of the world's great directors in more than 200 images, many never before published. Akira Kurosawa is arguably the greatest of all Japanese film directors and is respected around the world as one of the masters of the art form. This is the first illustrated book to pay tribute to his unmistakable style-with more than two hundred images, many never before published. The filmmaker is also famous for his attention to detail, and fans will delight in seeing annotated script pages, sketches, and storyboards that reveal the meticulous craft behind Kurosawa's genius. Peter Cowie examines how Kurosawa took the samurai genre to its apogee in such films as Yojimbo and Seven Samurai; his literary influences in such films as Throne of Blood [Macbeth] and Ran [King Lear]; and in his take on our relationship to the modern world in such films as High and Low and Dreams.

“Most directors have one film for which they are known or possibly two,” said Francis Ford Coppola. “Akira Kurosawa has eight or nine.” Through masterpieces such as Kagemusha, Seven Samurai, and High and Low, Akira Kurosawa (1910–98) influenced directors from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to Martin Scorsese, and his groundbreaking innovations in cinematography and editing, combined with his storytelling, made him a cinematic icon. In this succinct biography, Peter Wild evaluates Kurosawa’s films while offering a view of the man behind the camera, from his family life to his global audience. After discussing Kurosawa’s childhood in Japan, Wild explores his years as an assistant director at a new film studio and his early films during and after World War II before he won international acclaim with Rashomon. While surveying Kurosawa’s impressive career, Wild also examines the myriad criticisms the director faced both within his own country and abroad—he was too influenced by Western cinema; not authentically Japanese; and he was too sentimental, naïve, arrogant, or out of touch. By placing Kurosawa and his films in the context of his times, Wild helps us to understand the director and the reproaches against him. Cogent and concise, Akira Kurosawa will be essential reading for anyone interested in the work of this masterful filmmaker.