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Film fest showcases Kurosawa's legendary vision
By Mary Shaffer American audiences have been touched by legendary Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa even if they haven't seen his movies. George Lucas freely admits the inspiration for ''Star Wars'' (1977) was Kurosawa's ''Hidden Fortress,'' a comic adventure tale of a young princess and her loyal soldier carrying a royal fortune on a treacherous journey to save her kingdom. ''Yojimbo,'' Kurosawa's tongue-in-cheek tale of a lone samurai caught up in a civil war between two equally unappealing factions, was remade by Sergio Leone as ''A Fistful of Dollars'' (1964), the spaghetti Western that catapulted Clint Eastwood to international stardom. Kurosawa's ''Rashomon'' and ''Seven Samurai'' -- films about swordsmen wandering through 16th century Japan -- were successfully remade as Hollywood Westerns, ''The Outrage'' (1964) and ''The Magnificent Seven'' (1960). Such modern American directors as Martin Scorsese (who appears in Kurosawa's 1990 ''Dreams''), Francis Ford Coppola, Lucas and Steven Spielberg were influenced by Kurosawa's ability to translate epic moments of Japan's unique history and culture into timeless universally true stories about individuals anywhere. In 1990, presenting an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement to Kurosawa, Spielberg called him ''a man who many of us believe is our greatest living filmmaker and all of us know as one of the few true visionaries ever to work in our medium.'' ''I have to ask if I really deserve it," then 80-year-old Kurosawa replied, ''I don't feel that I understand cinema yet.'' Combining earthy humor, eerie mysticism, high adventure, stunning visuals, stylized acting and complex characters, his films prove him wrong. Thirty-seven years of Kurosawa's continuing career as a filmmaker, will be screened in a nine-part series on Thursdays, starting tonight, at The Palm Theater in San Luis Obispo. The series captures some of Kurosawa's enormous range -- armies colliding in epic battles, tiny insignificant man dwarfed by nature and the struggles between public duty and self-preservation. Kurosawa's early film, ''Rashomon (In The Forest),'' remains among his most powerful and may still be his most significant since it was the first post-World War II Japanese film to get wide distribution in the West, bringing both Kurosawa and Japanese cinema international acclaim. ''Rashomon'' explores the ambiguity of truth and reality by having four different characters retell the same story of rape and murder in the forest. The brilliantly photographed black and white film, which won Kurosawa his first Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, ends without telling us which version of the truth is real or what happens to the characters after the story ends. But ''Rashomon'' is much more than a whodunit. It's about perception and how people see and deceive themselves, a theme that haunts many of Kurosawa's films, including two works by Shakespeare which he adapted to feudal Japan: ''Ran,'' a variation on ''King Lear,'' and ''Throne of Blood'' based on ''Macbeth.'' Both ''Rashomon'' and ''Macbeth'' star Toshiro Mifune who worked with Kurosawa on several films, starting with ''Drunken Angel,'' the modern story of a wounded gangster and the intense relationship he develops with the doctor who treats him. Mifune epitomizes Kurosawa's hero -- a man of action, an explosive yet compassionate individual seeking meaning amid moral chaos. This character is most fully developed in ''Seven Samurai.'' Kurosawa's best known action-adventure film, it is frequently called an Eastern Western, a shootout with swords. A rural village, more familiar with farming than fighting, is being bled dry by a bunch of murdering bandits who return annually for protection money. The poor town folk pool their meager resources to hire seven distinctly different members of Japan's hereditary warrior class, once-revered but declining in influence by then. The three-hour tale of savagery and sacrifice describes what motivates each individual swordsman before blending them into a fighting unit simultaneously trying to defend the village and convince the villagers to defend themselves. Kurosawa often said Hollywood films, including classic John Ford Westerns, influenced his movies. So did his training as an artist. His eye for visual imagery is apparent in every film, especially in ''Dersu Uzala.'' The film, which won Kurosawa his second Best Foreign Film Oscar, is much more than a character study about a late 19th-century Russian soldier mapping Siberia with the help of Dersu, a simple mountain man living in harmony with nature. The story, based on the writings of Russian explorer Vladimir Arseniev, brings two cultures and vastly different men together, only to show how small man's problems are compared to the unending vastness of nature. ''Dersu'' will leave audiences remembering towering mountain ranges covered with snow, dark woods lit by a lone campfire, Dersu's dream of a mythical tiger and the wind attacking the two friends alone on the steppes. They are unforgettable images and characters in an even more memorable setting and story. That's true of all nine films the Palm will be showing. The Kurosawa series will show each film one time each Thursday through Dec. 2. Call 541-5161 for the starting times.
Mary Shaffer works at Cal Poly. Jerry Bunin is a Telegram-Tribune reporter. Film Series Schedule
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