Akira kurosawa essays

In Notes On The Auteur Theory In 1962 Andrew Sarris had said that 'a director spends most of his life on one film'. For Kurosawa that one film could be the period film, something he worked on time and time again. The backdrop of medieval Japan was the preferred setting for Kurosawa and something which was very personal to him:

Akira Kurosawa, who personified Japanese movies to most of the world and who grew into one of the handful of truly important directors that the cinema has produced, died yesterday at his home in Tokyo. He was 88. The cause was a stroke, his family said.

Federico Fellini, in a 1966 interview, said that Akira Kurosawa was 'the greatest living example of what an author of cinema should be' (Cardullo,2006,p.49) and in this essay I would like to explore the accuracy of this statement based on Kurosawa's period films and how meaningful the term auteur is.

Further examples of Kurosawa's own beliefs and personality lie in the themes of the films. When asked what he felt were the common themes in his films Kurosawa replied 'the only theme I can think of is really a question: why can't people be happier together' (Kurosawa, 2008, p.162).