For me, filmmaking combines everything. Thatâs the reason Iâve made cinema my lifeâs work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.
- Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography  Â
In the late 1970s, during the long years of waiting for international and domestic funding to come together to produce Kagemusha, Akira Kurosawa returned to the pastime of his youth - he painted. Working fast and furiously, each day turning out scores of sketches and paintings, Kurosawa accumulated a unique body of work that was born as much out of despair and frustration as from a passion to create. One after another, he pulled from his mindâs eye the images he visualised for the epic drama and set down on paper the scenes he ached to re-create on film.
Kurosawa began his career as a painter and had always been skilled at drawing. He decided he wanted to be an artist in his teens and later became increasingly associated with what came to be called the Japan Proletariat Artistsâ Group. Strongly influenced by the mannerist styles of contemporary German expressionism and Soviet realism, the young Kurosawaâs painting was forthright and dramatic: human figures rendered in powerful calligraphic lines and bold primary colours. His decision in the late 1930s to turn from painting to film was impelled by many factors, including intensified political pressure from the Japanese militarist government against artists and liberal writers, the need to find a more stable livelihood, and the suicide of his elder brother, who had been deeply engaged in the film industry.Â
Unlike directors who are drawn to filmmaking by purely literary instincts, Kurosawa turned to the medium to express his visual imagination as much as his narrative interests. From the outset, he was known for the care he lavished on storyboards, which he drew himself. The visual richness of all his films grew systematically out of the precise sketches and detailed storyboards he prepared for them. Scripts were almost always written in collaboration with two or three writing partners, but Kurosawa reserved for himself the translation of prose scenes into visual images. It was a process of linking eye and brain that had always been his favourite way of working, and indeed he knew no other.
But the case of Kagemusha was different. In the past, working at his customary fast pace, Kurosawa had been able to produce a new film almost every year. During his first three decades as a director, when the work was going
well, his sketches and drawings had sprung immediately into three-dimensional life, in a matter of only days or weeks. But by the time of Kagemusha, he was having great difficulty finding support for his projects, and the pace of filmmaking had slowed. So for nearly four years - as he waited for funding to come through for Kagemusha - he âdirectedâ his actors and scenes in his head, and set down his mental images in complex, full-scale paintings.
Over time, the images for Kagemusha grew more complex - and darker. The original fable, about a great warlord impersonated by a boorish ruffian thief, gradually took on epic proportions as an allegory about human folly and ambition. The paintings that had begun as simple sketches came to be populated with huge armies of foot soldiers surging into battle against cavalries of mounted warriors and phalanxes of riflemen. As Kurosawaâs spirits darkened with the passage of time and his increasing doubts that the film would ever get made, so too did his palette and the psychological attributes of his characters.
Eventually, thanks to the support of two of Kurosawaâs most celebrated admirers, American directors Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, Kagemusha did finally go into production, early in 1979. The filming was beset with delays and difficulties (all of which received disproportionate attention from the insatiable Japanese media, hungry to document another Kurosawa failure), but in the end the creative vision of Kurosawa prevailed. The paintings and drawings he had agonised over for nearly half a decade found their true life in a film whose epic grandeur harked back to the masterpieces of Sergei Eisenstein or David Lean, and in the view of many film critics and historians even transcended them.
Arguably more than any of his other films it is Kagemusha, is the film that finally bring together the energy of a passionate young artist and the genius of a mature master of film.
**Photo: Akira Kurosawa on the set of Kagemusha (1980)
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
2087
snowghoul
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
jbbartram-illu
discoholicmusic
prguitarman
annaxmalina
areudirty
