Japanese cinema was virtually unknown in the Western world until 1951, when the Venice Film Festival screened Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. It won the Golden Lion for best film and went on to receive the Oscar for best foreign-language film, introducing Western eyes to a unique national cinema and to one of the great directors of the century in Kurosawa, who died at his Tokyo home last Sunday at the age of 88.
Despite the international acclaim accorded Kurosawa's work from Rashomon onwards, it is one of the anomalies of film distribution that the mass audience here and in the United States is more familiar with the western remakes of Kurosawa's films than with the superior originals. Sergio Leone turned Yojimbo into A Fistful Of Dollars and made a star of Clint Eastwood. Rashomon was recycled by Martin Ritt as The Outrage, a vehicle for Paul Newman. Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven and, later, Battle Beyond The Stars.
The Japanese director's remarkable influence on Western cinema extended even further than that. Brian De Palma, for example, modelled the closing scene of Scarface on the ending to Throne Of Blood. Even the Star Wars robots, R2-D2 and C-3PO, were modelled by George Lucas on characters in Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. Kurosawa saw all the remakes and rip-offs of his work, and he hated all of them, he told me when I had the pleasure of interviewing him in the spring of 1986. "They lack any freshness," he said through his interpreter. "Those films I made evolved through a process rather like birth. If you take an idea and stick it in another country or another culture, it loses everything that gives it its vitality. It becomes an empty imitation.
"You cannot always transpose the cultural situation. For example, the samurai in The Seven Samurai were turned into gunslingers in The Magnificent Seven. That's not a samurai, not his code of ethics, his morals or his feelings, so you've lost everything that was relevant to the original."
Whatever about American and Italian directors reworking his movies, Kurosawa was not averse to adapting Western sources into a Japanese context. The powerful Throne Of Blood filtered Macbeth through stylised Noh drama, and the magnificent Ran freely adapted King Lear to a 16th-century wartime setting in which Lear is an ageing warrior chief who decides to abdicate power. The three daughters in Shakespeare's play were turned into sons, rivals for the inheritance of power. Kurosawa also adapted Dostoevsky, Gorky and Ed McBain.
Despite all the expressions of grief in Japan this week after Kurosawa's death, the director commanded far greater respect and attention abroad than in his native land, where he was often accused of selling out to the West. So bleak had the outlook become by 1971 - after he resigned within a few days of starting work on the international war epic, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and after the negative Japanese reaction to his 1970 film, Dodeskaden - that Kurosawa attempted suicide by slashing his wrists.
His output as a film-maker became sporadic and he regularly had to turn to other countries to find the principal financing for his work. After Dodeskaden he did not work until 1975, when he accepted an offer from the Soviet Union to film a project of his choice on Russian soil, and he made Dersu Uzala.
His American admirers, George Lucas and Francis Copolla, came to the rescue when Kurosawa had problems raising the budget for his next film, Kagemusha, and he finally realised his long-time ambition to film Ran thanks to the intervention of Luis Bunuel's regular producer, Serge Silberman, a Pole resident in Paris.
Discussing his own position in Japan when we talked 12 years ago, Kurosawa noted that the social position of film-makers there has always been low. "That's the way it is, and it's hard to explain it," he said. "It's not something I am very happy with. In Japan politicians, the social system and so on do not respect film or the film industry or actors. There was a time when film was the lowest of the trades, the least respected. Now it's improved, but the income and the respect accorded a film director is still very low."
Whatever revisionist views may now follow in Japan after his death, Akira Kurosawa long ago reserved his place in world cinema history as one of the medium's most gifted and illustrious practitioners.
