page_title: Akira Kurosawa
section_title: Legacy of general criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Akira Kurosawa / Legacy / Legacy of general criticism
caption_attribution_description: English: Jacques Rivette in 2006 during the shooting of Ne Touchez pas la hacheFrançais&#160;: Tournage - "Ne Touchez pas la hache"
context_page_description: Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese film director and screenwriter, who directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema.
  Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata. After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel, in which Kurosawa cast then-unknown actor Toshiro Mifune in a starring role, cemented the director's reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan. The two men would go on to collaborate on another 15 films.
  Rashomon, which premiered in Tokyo, became the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. The commercial and critical success of that film opened up Western film markets for the first time to the products of the Japanese film industry, which in turn led to international recognition for other Japanese filmmakers.
context_section_description: Kenji Mizoguchi, the acclaimed director of Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954) was 14 years Kurosawa's senior. After the mid-1950s, some critics of the French New Wave began to favor Mizoguchi to Kurosawa.  New Wave critic-filmmaker Jacques Rivette, in particular, thought Mizoguchi to be the only Japanese director whose work was at once entirely Japanese and truly universal; Kurosawa, by contrast was thought to be more influenced by Western cinema and culture, a view that has been disputed.
  
  In Japan, some critics and filmmakers considered Kurosawa to be elitist.  They viewed him to center his effort and attention on exceptional or heroic characters. In her DVD commentary on Seven Samurai, Joan Mellen argued that certain shots of the samurai characters Kambei and Kyuzo,  which show Kurosawa to have accorded higher status or validity to them, constitutes evidence for this point of view. Kurosawa was not sufficiently progressive, these Japanese critics argued, because the peasants were unable to find leaders from within their ranks.  In an interview with Mellen, Kurosawa defended himself, saying, 
  "I wanted to say that after everything the peasants were the stronger, closely clinging to the earth ... It was the samurai who were weak because they were being blown by the winds of time.'"
  From the early 1950s, Kurosawa was also charged with catering to Western tastes due to his popularity in Europe and America. In the 1970s, the left-wing director Nagisa Oshima, who was noted for his critical reaction to Kurosawa's work, accused Kurosawa of pandering to Western beliefs and ideologies. Author Audie Block, however, assessed Kurosawa to have never played up to a non-Japanese viewing public and to have denounced those directors who did.
caption: Jacques Rivette, a prominent critic of the French New Wave who assessed Mizoguchi's work to be more wholly Japanese in comparison to Kurosawa's.
exif: {"Image Make": "FUJIFILM", "Image Model": "FinePixS2Pro", "Image XResolution": "240", "Image YResolution": "240", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.4 (Macintosh)", "Image DateTime": "2015:02:05 19:33:37", "Image ExifOffset": "212", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "784", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "12264", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/350", "EXIF FNumber": "28/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2006:04:29 11:40:58", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2006:04:29 11:40:58", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "8451211/1000000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "2485427/500000", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "204/25", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Shade", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "178", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "1322", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "1322", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "3", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Manual", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "267", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Contrast": "Soft", "EXIF Saturation": "Soft", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}