Festival honors legendary Kurosawa flicks

Very few filmmakers have created something that is universally considered a masterpiece. Even fewer have more than one to their name.

Akira Kurosawa is perhaps the only creator of multiple cinematic opuses that deal as much with medieval times and characters as with the people and places of today. Now, 100 years after Kurosawa’s birth, Film Forum’s “Akira Kurosawa Centennial 1910-2010” is featuring 29 of the Japanese director’s greatest works.

Kurosawa’s breakthrough film of 1950, “Rashomon,” explores four witnesses’ conflicting explanations of a rape and murder in 12th-century Kyoto. Aside from its tour-de-force performances and its stunning black and white cinematography, “Rashomon” is remembered especially for its groundbreaking narrative presentation. Each of the four witnesses’ descriptions of the crime is filmed as if each really took place. What has come to be known as the “Rashomon effect”—the uncertainty that comes with watching something on screen and thinking, “That may not have actually happened”—makes the new 35 mm restoration of this Kurosawa a classic.

Also featured in the festival is “Seven Samurai” (1954), considered by many to be Kurosawa’s greatest achievement. It follows a group of poor, defenseless farmers who hire seven samurai to protect their land from 40 marauding bandits in 16th-century Japan. Very much like a John Ford Western (and, indeed, Kurosawa drew many of his influences from Ford’s work), “Seven Samurai” has consistently been the most popular Kurosawa film among American audiences.

Two other films in Kurosawa’s canon also stand out, for different reasons. “Rhapsody in August,” about a woman’s grandchildren coming to visit her at her home near Nagasaki, is nothing short of a poetic analogy to Kurosawa’s worldview at the time he made the film. Eighty years old, he captured on screen the simultaneous beauty and sadness behind the modern times’ lost appreciation for the elderly.

“Dodes’Ka-Den”—Kurosawa’s first color film, whose title is the young protagonist’s imitation of the sound of a trolley—bleeds with racy comedy, stylized acting, and a truly ridiculous story line, even as it portrays the lives of the impoverished inhabitants of a garbage dump. Now in a new 35 mm print, the most non-Kurosawa of Kurosawa films is a treat for aficionados of the avant-garde.

Of course, Film Forum is featuring many more of the master filmmaker’s best known works, because it is nearly impossible to define Kurosawa by any single movie of his. That’s why this diverse, comprehensive retrospective seems so fitting an honor.