The Films of Akira Kurosawa PDF Download

Author: Donald Richie
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520220374
Category : Motion picture producers and directors
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Film scholars and enthusiasts will welcome this new edition of Donald Richie's incomparable study, last updated in 1984. The Method section, filmography, and bibliography contain new information, and Richie has added chapters on Ran, Dreams, Rhapsody in August, and Madadayo. Kurosawa's films display an extraordinary breadth and an astonishing strength, from the philosophic and sexual complexity of Rashomon to the moral dedication of Ikiru, from the naked violence of Seven Samurai to the savage comedy of Yojimbo, from the terror-filled feudalism of Throne of Blood to the piercing wit of Sanjuro. Running through all Kurosawa's work is a tough, humane, and profoundly ethical concern for the painful, beautiful, frequently ridiculous ambiguities of human life.

Author: Donald Richie
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520341783
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In an epilogue provided for his incomparable study of Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), Donald Richie reflects on Kurosawa's life work of thirty feature films and describes his last, unfinished project, a film set in the Edo period to be called The Ocean Was Watching. Kurosawa remains unchallenged as one of the century's greatest film directors. Through his long and distinguished career he managed, like very few others in the teeth of a huge and relentless industry, to elevate each of his films to a distinctive level of art. His Rashomon—one of the best-remembered and most talked-of films in any language—was a revelation when it appeared in 1950 and did much to bring Japanese cinema to the world's attention. Kurosawa's films display an extraordinary breadth and an astonishing strength, from the philosophic and sexual complexity of Rashomon to the moral dedication of Ikiru, from the naked violence of Seven Samurai to the savage comedy of Yojimbo, from the terror-filled feudalism of Throne of Blood to the piercing wit of Sanjuro.

Author: Donald Richie
Publisher: Berkeley : University of California Press
ISBN: 9780520051911
Category : Motion picture industry
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Film scholars and enthusiasts will welcome this new edition of Donald Richie's incomparable study, last updated in 1984. The Method section, filmography, and bibliography contain new information, and Richie has added chapters on Ran, Dreams, Rhapsody in August, and Madadayo. Kurosawa's films display an extraordinary breadth and an astonishing strength, from the philosophic and sexual complexity of Rashomon to the moral dedication of Ikiru, from the naked violence of Seven Samurai to the savage comedy of Yojimbo, from the terror-filled feudalism of Throne of Blood to the piercing wit of Sanjuro. Running through all Kurosawa's work is a tough, humane, and profoundly ethical concern for the painful, beautiful, frequently ridiculous ambiguities of human life. Donald Richie's acclaimed study is as much a clear and winning introduction for those unfamiliar with Kurosawa's films as it is a bountiful critical appraisal for the initiate. Each film receives thorough sensitive examination, with many illustrations chosen by the author to underscore his analysis. Excerpts from the scripts, notes on camera usage and sound, reconstructions of outstanding moments - all these contribute insights into the director's powerful technique. In addition, Richie includes many quotes from his conversations with Kurosawa, allowing ideas and biographical information to emerge in the filmmaker's own words.

Author: Stephen Prince
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691010465
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
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.

Author: Akira Kurosawa
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578069972
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
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.

Author: Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822325192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
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.

Author: Akira Kurosawa
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030780321X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
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

Author: Donald Richie
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520032774
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
"Substantially the book that devotees of the director have been waiting for: a full-length critical work about Ozu's life, career and working methods, buttressed with reproductions of pages from his notebooks and shooting scripts, numerous quotes from co-workers and Japanese critics, a great many stills and an unusually detailed filmography."—Sight and Sound Yasujiro Ozu, the man whom his kinsmen consider the most Japanese for all film directors, had but one major subject, the Japanese family, and but one major theme, its dissolution. The Japanese family in dissolution figures in every one of his fifty-three films. In his later pictures, the whole world exists in one family, the characters are family members rather than members of a society, and the ends of the earth seem no more distant than the outside of the house.

Author: James Goodwin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
In Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema, James Goodwin draws on contemporary theoretical and critical approaches to explore the Japanese director's use of a variety of texts to create films that are uniquely intertextual and intercultural. Surveying all of Kurosawa's films and examining six films in depth -- The Idiot, The Lower Depths, Rashomon, Ikiru, Throne of Blood, and Ran -- Goodwin finds in Kurosawa's themes and techniques the capacity to restructure perceptions of Western and Japanese cultures and to establish new meanings in each.

Author: Hideo Oguni
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Kurosawa generally is recognized as the best of the modern Japanese filmmakers. He was the first Japanese director to gain international recognition, partly because his storytelling technique is not culture-bound. Rashomon (1950), a story of rape and terror that is told from several different viewpoints, received first prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951; the film's title has become synonymous with the concept of subjective truth expressed in widely varying versions of the same story. The Seven Samurai (1954), a humanistic tale of samurai risking their lives to defend a poor village, is another Kurosawa classic. Kurosawa has always been attracted to Western literature, and two of his most notable films are based on Shakespeare's plays: Throne of Blood (1957), a retelling of Macbeth, and Ran (1985), a masterly reinterpretation of King Lear.