Rassegna stampa di Akira Kurosawa

Kurosawa diventa famoso quando, nel 1950, vince il Leone d'oro alla Mostra Cinematografica di Venezia con Rashomon. Si tratta di una pellicola dal sapore pirandelliano che il regista trae dall'unione di due racconti di Ryunosuke Akutagawa, il più grande scrittore nipponico di inizio Novecento. É stato trovato un samurai morto in circostanze ignote: c'è una storia da ricostruire, ci sono testimoni, ma non si giunge alla verità giacché ciascuno ha una sua personalissima versione da raccontare. Kurosawa le mostra tutte per far vedere come la realtà assume connotati diversi mutando l'ottica dalla quale viene osservata. Il film si pone dunque come un'ennesima riconferma dell'impossibilità di giungere ad una verità assoluta, ma anche come una testimonianza impietosa sulla capacità dell'uomo di mentire e di convincersi della veridicità delle proprie menzogne.
Kurosawa aveva iniziato la propria carriera circa dieci anni prima dirigendo Sugata Sanshiro (1941), un film in costume sulle origini del judo. In realtà il regista, che come commentatore di film muti aveva avuto modo di conoscere le opere più interessanti dei maestri europei e americani, e che nel 1929 era entrato a far parte come pittore della "Lega degli artisti proletari", aveva in mente progetti d'altro genere, ma si dovette adattare ad un soggetto che nelle intenzioni dei produttori doveva celebrare lo spirito bellico del popolo giapponese e quindi fungere da sostegno per affrontare la guerra in corso. Kurosawa lo trasforma invece in un elogio dell'armonia e dell'equilibrio, attirandosi non poche noie dalla censura.

Ma il nome di Kurosawa è legato soprattutto a pellicole di genere avventuroso come I sette samurai (1954), La sfida del samurai (1961), Sanjuro (1962) e Kagemusha (1980), in cui il suo stile semplice ma estremamente spettacolare e la sua capacità di alternare toni lievi e grotteschi ad altri gravi e tragici, contribuiscono alla creazione di un cinema epico e privo di retorica, e dunque classico e innovativo allo stesso tempo.
Kurosawa è anche autore di favole popolari, come Quelli che camminavano sulla coda della tigre (1945) o La fortezza nascosta (1958), di trasposizioni di romanzi e opere teatrali (L'idiota, 1951, Il trono di sangue, 1957, Ran,1985, tratti rispettivamente dall'omonimo romanzo di Dostoevskij, da Macbeth e da "Re Lear" di Shakespeare) e soprattutto di numerosi film, dai tratti realistici, nei quali associa l'analisi sociale all'approfondimento psicologico dei caratteri. L'angelo ubriaco (1948), Cane randagio (1949), Barbarossa (1957), Dodès'ca-dén (1970) sono pellicole in cui i protagonisti sono esseri umani emarginati o derelitti costretti a soffrire, e spesso a far soffrire, per la loro natura debole o per la crudeltà del mondo. In Vivere (1952), ad esempio, si racconta di un meschino impiegato che solo dopo aver saputo che gli restano pochi mesi di vita trova la forza e il coraggio per ribellarsi alla colpevole passività della sua esistenza ipocrita e decide di fare qualcosa di utile per gli altri.
Al di là di questi differenti registri esiste uno sguardo che accomuna tutta l'opera di Kurosawa: l'attenzione rivolta al rapporto dell'uomo con il suo ambiente e quindi con la società. Il primo momento di osservazione è ovviamente la società giapponese, di cui ripercorre e analizza i miti, le tradizioni, la mentalità, al fine di vanificare i valori militari e di casta su cui si fonda. E contro questi valori si scontrano i suoi personaggi che, animati da una forza interiore e da solidarietà, faticano ad esprimersi.
All'inizio degli anni Settanta Kurosawa vive un periodo di gravissima crisi esistenziale (causato anche dal fallimento della propria casa di produzione), che lo spinge a tentare il suicidio. Si salva, e nel 1975, realizza uno dei film più belli della sua carriera, Dersu Uzala, il piccolo uomo delle grandi pianure, saggio straordinario sul rapporto armonioso che può intercorrere fra la natura e l'uomo quando questo considera la terra come propria casa e la rispetta anche quando si mostra crudele e inospitale. Negli ultimi anni Kurosawa, ormai più che ottantenne ma sempre attivissimo, realizza Sogni (1990) e Rapsodia in agosto (1991), nei quali approda ad una poesia cinematografica fatta di semplicità assoluta e di toni pacati. Il ritorno all'infanzia, l'antimilitarismo, la ricerca di una pace anche interiore e il ricordo della catastrofe atomica che ne scongiuri il pericolo per il futuro, sono alcuni dei suoi temi dominanti, trattati con una leggerezza che non rinuncia mai alla profondità, e affidati non più alla rigida struttura del racconto ma alla potenza evocativa di immagini affascinanti, nelle quali traspare il vecchio talento di pittore.

WHEN you think of Akira Kurosawa, you think, most likely, of swords and flags, of castles under siege, of men in dark armor and women in brilliant kimonos, of horses galloping to battle in driving rain. The movie that brought Kurosawa — and Japanese cinema as a whole — to the attention of the world, “Rashomon” (1950), was set in the distant past, and practically all the most celebrated films of the remaining 40-plus years of his career were historical dramas, too: “The Seven Samurai” (1954), “Throne of Blood” (1957), “Yojimbo” (1961), “Sanjuro” (1962) and “Ran” (1985). So it might seem a little strange that Film Forum’s centennial Kurosawa retrospective should begin (on Wednesday) with a nine-day run of the 1949 urban noir “Stray Dog,” in which there isn’t a horse or a castle in sight, and where the weapon of choice is a Colt pistol.
It shouldn’t. Of the 30 movies Kurosawa directed, better than half tell stories of present-day Japan, and a fair number of them, including “Stray Dog,” rank with his greatest works. “Stray Dog,” his ninth film, is a kind of police-procedural thriller, in which a young Tokyo homicide detective named Murakami ( Toshiro Mifune ) roams the crowded streets of the postwar city in search of his stolen gun. At first he merely feels humiliated, but before long much more painful emotions take hold. He learns, to his horror, that his gun is being used to commit robberies: one woman is seriously injured; the next dies. Murakami, crazed with grief and guilt, combs the seedier quarters of the sprawling city, where everybody looks hungry and desperate, wearied by an unrelenting summer heat. He trudges through this unwelcoming terrain with the grim persistence of a soldier making his way home after a lost campaign.

Murakami is in fact a veteran of his country’s disastrous recent war, and so, it turns out, is the criminal he’s tracking. His partner, a more experienced detective named Sato (Takashi Shimura), has to caution him not to feel too much sympathy for his prey. The young cop’s conflicted emotions generate an unusual sort of suspense, a heightened apprehensiveness. The world of “Stray Dog” is one in which anything can happen, in which people no longer know with any confidence how to act rightly: a world whose standards of behavior have become dangerously slippery. Murakami winds up wrestling with the killer, his criminal alter ego, in a muddy field, a place that doesn’t look like it belongs in a city — in civilization — at all. It looks a bit like the primeval forest in which the action of “Rashomon” takes place, that shadowy no man’s land of ambiguity and moral confusion.
And as in “Rashomon” the filmmaking in “Stray Dog” conveys an extraordinary sense of urgency, a fierce need to capture the complexities of human behavior while everything is still fresh and volatile. These are strikingly unsettled-looking movies, composed with care but betraying nonetheless a profound uncertainty about the forms society, and film, should take in the postwar world: nothing fixed or stable, everything at risk. You can feel Kurosawa’s excitement at the prospect of reinventing the conventions of his national cinema, and at the larger idea that the Japanese might have a chance, after long catastrophe, to reimagine themselves.
In a way Kurosawa’s modern-day films (the Japanese call them gendai-geki, to distinguish them from jidai-geki, historical films) reveal more of that almost messianic streak in his nature, his serene determination to remake the world — or at least to show the strange, turbulent process of its remaking. In “No Regrets for Our Youth” (1946), he had even allowed himself to entertain the possibility of a kind of back-to-the-land redemption for his shamed nation, and trotted out an impressive array of heroic Soviet-style cinematic techniques to drive the message home.
“No Regrets” is a surprisingly affecting film, but it’s clear that Kurosawa isn’t wholly comfortable with either its simple moral solutions or its borrowed aesthetic. It took him only a couple more years to figure out a better way. In “Drunken Angel” (1948), which Kurosawa often referred to as his breakthrough, he devised a style that somehow combined the formal restraint of traditional Japanese cinema with the irreverence and nervous energy of Hollywood movies: it looked entirely new, like nothing else Eastern or Western.
The drunken angel of the title is a gruff neighborhood doctor named Sanada (Shimura), who does bend the elbow rather too enthusiastically but is utterly dedicated to his patients’ health: a man who goes to great lengths to save even those who don’t seem worth saving, like the consumptive yakuza Matsunaga (Mifune, in his first film for Kurosawa). Although Matsunaga is a nightmarishly bad patient, with about as much respect for doctor’s orders as he has for the law, Sanada gives it his all anyway, scolding and cajoling and making rude remarks (putting his own well being, at times, in some peril). “Drunken Angel” is an unlikely mixture of soap opera and gangster movie, and although it’s less consistently electrifying than “Stray Dog,” it’s a very satisfying picture: Kurosawa’s style feels appropriate for the time and the place and characters, and redemption is achieved, believably.
The great jidai-geki are all represented in the Film Forum series, which ends with a two-week run of Kurosawa’s spectacular 1985 “King Lear” adaptation, “Ran,” and they are among the most thrilling movie experiences a viewer can have. But the gendai-geki, less picturesque, contain some of Kurosawa’s most inventive filmmaking, and some of his most provocative reflections on the human condition in the last, violent century. “Ikiru” (1952) and “The Bad Sleep Well” (1960) are remarkably trenchant examinations of the mid-century ills of bureaucracy and big business. And as much as I love “The Seven Samurai,” there are times when I think that the Kurosawa movie I’d take to the proverbial desert island would be his 1963 kidnapping thriller “High and Low.”
That film, which is based on, of all things, one of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, is also a police procedural, but to an even greater extent than in “Stray Dog” Kurosawa blows up the genre and puts the pieces back together in a completely new way. He begins with the moral dilemma of a businessman (inevitably, Mifune) deciding whether to pay the ransom for his chauffeur’s abducted son — an amount of money that would effectively wipe out his assets. This first part of the movie has a claustrophobic chamber-drama feel to it, with the camera roving through a single set, in long, long takes.
But when “High and Low” finally gets out of the house, it’s there to stay, as the police track the kidnapper through hot, bustling Yokohama and take us into a real world that is, if anything, even more disturbing than the devastated Tokyo of “Stray Dog.” Although there’s more prosperity in evidence — the businessman’s modern house sits complacently on a hill — there’s more disappointment too, more class resentment and festering envy. The movie’s construction is eclectic, radical, counterintuitive: it changes focus as swiftly, and as exhilaratingly, as the climactic battle of “The Seven Samurai.” And like that film, “High and Low” is for all its jangly modernity about the struggle to survive. Some do, some don’t, in every time and every place. The movie ends with a scream that sounds almost primal. Even without the armor and the horses and the swords, Kurosawa always made films about history, because he knew that we were living it.
Da The New York Times, 3 gennaio 2010

THE most imposing DVD gift set of this holiday season is “AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa,” which, in commemoration of Kurosawa’s coming centennial, the Criterion Collection has released at the equally imposing retail price of $399.
Elegantly packaged in a shoebox-size container covered in red and black linen, it contains 25 of the 30-odd features directed by Kurosawa, the Japanese filmmaker most famous for “Rashomon” (1950) and “Seven Samurai” (1954). For the most part these are titles that have already been issued by Criterion in stand-alone editions; they’ve been remastered here with a new menu design but without the extensive supplementary features for which Criterion has become justly famous. This time around it’s just the movies, though the set comes with an abundantly illustrated 96-page book with an introductory essay and notes on each film by the Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince, as well as a personal reminiscence by Donald Richie, who was among the first critics to present Kurosawa to Western audiences.
With surprisingly few exceptions Japanese movies were virtually unknown outside of Japan until “Rashomon” won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, touching off a vogue for Japanese cinema that lasted through the decade. Kurosawa, who died in 1998, was never forgiven for his early success by the Western critics who came to prefer the more stylistically refined films of Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and other directors whose work was discovered in Kurosawa’s wake, or by the Japanese critics who considered Kurosawa too Western in his cultural references and aesthetic choices.

Today these debates seem provincial and pointless. As the great French critic André Bazin wrote in a letter to his pupil François Truffaut, “Unquestionably anyone who prefers Kurosawa must be incurably blind, but anyone who loves only Mizoguchi is one-eyed.” There is no denying the surging vitality of a “Seven Samurai” or a “Yojimbo” (1961), just as there is no denying the blunt thematic statements and stylistic jumble of films like “Ikiru” (1952) and “I Live in Fear” (1955). And we now know that Mizoguchi and Ozu were influenced just as much by Western films as by Kurosawa, if not more so, with no apparent cost to their Japaneseness, itself a concept rendered suspicious by our postmodern distrust of essentialism.
“AK 100” includes four films that haven’t previously been available in the United States, all from the beginning of Kurosawa’s career, which happened to coincide with World War II. This was not a moment for an ambitious young filmmaker to appear too Western, and rather than seeking his source material in Shakespeare ( “Throne of Blood,” 1957), Dostoevsky ( “The Idiot,” 1951) or Ed McBain ( “High and Low,” 1963), as he would do later, Kurosawa stayed close to home.
His first film, “Sanshiro Sugata,” was drawn from a popular novel based on the exploits of a 19th-century martial arts champion. The film, at least in its present state (some 17 minutes had disappeared from Kurosawa’s original cut by the time it was rereleased in 1952), contains no overt propaganda, but its story of an undisciplined young drifter (Susumu Fujita) who becomes a judo master would not have displeased the authorities with its themes of dedication, self-sacrifice and focused aggression.
Kurosawa’s hero triumphs by pursuing the new methods of judo over the old-fashioned techniques of jujitsu, and the director seems to be following a similar strategy. The accelerated camera movements, spatially disruptive editing and occasional lyrical touches (like a shift into slow motion to depict a character’s death) all seem to announce there’s a new sheriff in town. Audiences responded so enthusiastically to the hero — whose initial rebelliousness anticipates the unruliness of Kurosawa’s greatest star, Toshiro Mifune — that Kurosawa was compelled to make a sequel in 1945.
Released just a few months before the Japanese surrender, “Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two” begins with a moment of undisguised agitprop: Sanshiro kicks the stuffing out of a drunken American sailor (it’s the Yokohama of 1887) and then allows himself to be drawn into an exhibition match that pits his jujitsu against the boxing of an American champion.
Not surprisingly, Sanshiro prevails, but the film is hardly a study in mindless triumphalism. In its second half the conflict turns inward, and Sanshiro finds himself battling a howling madman (Akitake Kono), the brother of a defeated rival, on a desolate mountainside during a raging snowstorm (an early example of expressive weather in Kurosawa’s work). The atmosphere seems more that of a ghost story than a martial arts romp, and the film trails off into a sense of exhaustion and defeat, barely mitigated by a final close-up of the smiling star.
In between the two judo films Kurosawa was assigned to “The Most Beautiful,” a blunt propaganda movie that begins with a written exhortation to the audience to “attack and destroy the enemy.” Set in a factory where female workers are manufacturing optics for bomb sights, the film resembles one of the more demented artifacts of China’s Cultural Revolution with its hordes of happy workers joyfully inflicting social pressure on one another to increase production. It contains none of the ambivalence of “Sanshiro Sugata” and very little of Kurosawa’s art.
His final wartime film was “The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail,” a short (60 minutes), low-budget feature whose cramped sets and painted backgrounds reflect the punishing austerity of the empire’s last days. With so little means to create cinema, Kurosawa seems to have decided to create theater instead: based on two traditional plays about a feudal lord who must cross into enemy territory to escape his treacherous brother, the film is played with the stylized acting and musical commentary of a Noh drama. But the solemnity of the form is ruptured by the outrageous mugging of Kenichi Enomoto, a prewar comedy star cast as a cowardly porter.
Still in production when the armistice was signed, “Tiger’s Tail” fell victim to a bureaucratic foul-up under the American occupation government and remained unseen in Japan until the Venice award prompted a Kurosawa revival in 1952. It is a tiny addition to Kurosawa’s monumental body of work, but one is grateful to have every bit. Da The New York Times, 6 dicembre 2009

È alla ribalta dal 1943, quando dirige il suo primo film, a 33 anni, dopo studi letterari e musicali, e dopo aver subito il trauma del suicidio di un fratello che lo ha praticamente avviato al cinema, lui settimo figlio di un ufficiale di nobili origini. Ottiene di colpo fama internazionale alla Mostra veneziana del 1951, con Rashomon, che riceve il Leone d'oro (e avrà l'Oscar per il miglior film straniero). È una scoperta stupefacente. Ed è una lezione di cui tutti dovranno tener conto (profittarne, come coloro che i film di Kurosawa rifanno, in USA, o imitano, in Italia per opera di Sergio Leone, con Per un pugno di dol lari, 1964, strutturalmente derivato da La sfida del samurai). Rashomon è un film sulla doppiezza dell'uomo (quindi sulla inconoscibilità della verità): ha radici europee, pirandelliane. Anche i film successivi, pur così giapponesi nello stile, hanno ascendenze europee, a volte ispirandosi direttamente a Dostoevskij (L'idiota, 1951) o a Shakespeare (Il trono di sangue, 1957, è il Macbeth, Ran, 1985, è Re Lear), a volte accogliendo suggestioni e climi occidentali, a volte infine nascendo in collaborazione con stranieri (Dersu Uzala,1975, è una coproduzione nippo-sovietica, Kagemusha,1980, e Sogni, 1990, sono realizzati grazie all'intervento del cinema statunitense). Questa singolare sinergia, questo matrimonio in apparenza così abnorme rappresentano la vera forza di un regista tanto personale. Kurosawa è un compendio vivo di culture diverse, di «sogni» disparati ma convergenti, di dolori e allucinazioni che colpiscono tutti gli uomini, ovunque (la guerra in primo luogo, e il Giappone ha subito la «bomba», e nella «bomba» Kurosawa racchiude tutto l'orrore della guerra). Probabilmente, per questo egli è il più giapponese dei registi.

I film maggiori sono splendidi nella veste figurativa, nella tensione interna, nella esattezza dei ritmi (ora lenti ora concitati come gli urli dei samurai), nella banalità di certi effetti, nella ridondanza. Tra i maggiori si può ancora scegliere: Kagemusha, film storico imperniato sul tema del doppio, Ran, un regno diviso dal vecchio monarca fra tre figli, Sogni, otto ossessioni che non si assomigliano, nemmeno nel valore, ma che in due o tre momenti toccano le vette del delirio. Per contro, Rapsodia d'agosto, 1991, storia di una riconciliazione familiare fra usa e Giappone nel ricordo della bombadi Nagasaki, è debole e predicatorio, tranne che nella sconvolgente sequenza finale.
Fernaldo di Giammatteo, Dizionario del cinema. Cento grandi registi, Roma, Newton Compton, 1995