The Warrior's Camera - The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa
By Stephen Prince
Princeton University Press | 1991 | xxii + 344 pages | ISBN 0-691-00859-0 | PDF | 10 mb
Amazon Link : http://www.amazon.com/Warriors-Camera-Cinema-Akira-Kurosawa/dp/0691008590
With a career stretching from the chaos of war-torn Japan to the current power and prosperity of his country, the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa has been intrnationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema . Rashomon
helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema, and Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. Providing a new and comprehensive look at this master film maker, The Warrior's Camera probes
the complex visual structure of Kurosawa's work. The book shows how Kurosawa attempted to symbolize on fi l m a course of national development for postwar Japan,and it traces the ways that he tied his social visions to a dynamic system of visual and narrative forms. The author a nalyze 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 spi ritual odyssey wi tnessed 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 political y committed model of film making . It then demonstrates how the col l aps of Kuro awa's efforts to participate as a film maker 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 reistant to change.
CONTENTS
Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction xv
1 Viewing Kurosawa 3
2 The Dialectics of Style 32
3 Willpower Can Cure All Human Ailments 67
4 Experiments and Adaptations 1 14
5 Form and the Modern World 155
6 History and the Period Film 200
7 The Late Films 250
Notes 293
Films Directed by Akira Kurosawa 327
Bibliography 329
Index 339
