In this book, Prince describes and analyses all of Kurosawa’s films, giving attention to their narrative and formal construction and their thematic concerns. He has tried to situate the films in their historical, social and cultural context, making recourse to the English-language literature on Japanese history and Japanese culture, as well as Kurosawa’s own writings and comments. But his familiarity with Japanese cinema apart from Kurosawa is very limited. So he focuses exclusively on Kurosawa’s films, which are explicated with reference to Kurosawa’s autobiography, samurai ethics, Zeami and Zen aesthetics, Dostoievsky, Brecht and Eisenstein.  

Princeton University Press, 1999

Revised and Expanded edition of 1991 publication

417 pp, inc. notes, bibliography, index

ISBN 0-691-01046-3 paperback

Stephen Prince is an American film scholar with an interest in action cinema and the treatment of violence^[1]. He is not a Japanese film specialist, nor a Japanese Studies expert. But he is an admirer of Kurosawa and has made a systematic study of his films.

In this book, Prince describes and analyses all of Kurosawa’s films, giving attention to their narrative and formal construction and their thematic concerns. He has tried to situate the films in their historical, social and cultural context, making recourse to the English-language literature on Japanese history and Japanese culture, as well as Kurosawa’s own writings and comments. But his familiarity with Japanese cinema apart from Kurosawa is very limited. So he focuses exclusively on Kurosawa’s films, which are explicated with reference to Kurosawa’s autobiography, samurai ethics, Zeami and Zen aesthetics, Dostoievsky, Brecht and Eisenstein. 

Prince’s thesis is that Kurosawa had a project and that was to forge a political cinema that was also popular. His films form “a series of enquiries on the place and the possibilities of the autonomous self within a culture whose social relations stress group ties and obligations.” (p 27)  Prince is no uncritical fan. He damns the later films as defeatist, despairing, pessimistic; and finds negative tendencies in the earlier work too. Like a true red-blooded American, he values the heroic struggle of the individual against social injustice and evil. But he is also a lover of film, and responds with delight to the bravura technique and formal complexity of Kurosawa films, which he explores in extensive analyses of sequences. In this respect he has updated Richie’s pioneer study of Kurosawa^[2], which concentrated more on the semantics than the syntax of the films.        

In his first chapter, Prince questions the truth of some common critical responses to Kurosawa, his alleged “humanism” and debt to the American cinema, and outlines his view that Kurosawa’s work is a response to the tensions and strains of cultural modernization and democratization in his society. He then proceeds to discuss the phases of Kurosawa’s career in roughly chronological order. The second chapter is devoted to Kurosawa’s apprenticeship and early war-time works, in which he developed his own visual and narrative style. In this chapter Prince gives extended treatment to an analysis of Sanshiro Sugata (1943) and allots the other films more cursory attention. The third chapter examines the early post-war films that address urgent problems arising from the War and the defeat.  Drunken Angel (1948), Stray Dog (1949) and Ikiru (1952) are singled out for extended analysis. The fourth chapter examines his experiments with adaptations of Japanese and foreign literary and theatrical texts. He judges Kurosawa’s Donzoko  (1957) and Kumonosu-jo (1957) “true transformations” of Gorki’s The Lower Depths  and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and rates them superior to his adaptations of Akutagawa and Dostoievsky in Rashomon (1950) and The Idiot (1951). In his fifth chapter, Prince analyses the contemporary films addressing major social issues – finding Kurosawa unable to cope satisfactorily except in the case of High and Low (1963), which powerfully addresses systemic social inequities and highlights them in its formal construction. The sixth chapter examines the period films from The Seven Samurai (1954) to Red Beard (1965), over which time Kurosawa moves from a celebration of heroic endeavour to a more disenchanted and pessimistic view of the possibilities of social action. In the seventh chapter, devoted to the late features from Dodeskaden (1970) to Ran (1985) he finds this pessimism has deepened into a despairing view of human nature and human society.

The original edition of this book, published in 1991, ended here. For this 1999 edition, Prince has added two new chapters, written after the death of Kurosawa in 1998. Chapter 8 examines Kurosawa’s final three films, all made when he was in his eighties – Dreams (1990), Rhapsody in August (1991) and Madadayo (1993). Prince labels this group of films “psycho-biography”. In the final chapter, he discourses on the legacy of Kurosawa. He demonstrates Kurosawa’s influence on American action cinema and the western, and exemplifies his high prestige among Hollywood action directors. He comes to the conclusion that, in influence and reputation, Kurosawa has been over-valued as an action director and under-valued as a reflective filmmaker with serious human values.

Since publication of this book, another full-length study of Kurosawa’s cinema has been published in the US^[3]. Written by a former student of Masao Miyoshi, it has a strong polemical bent, attacking the culturalist and formalist biases of most western criticism of Japanese film and blaming the ideological underpinnings of American academic institutions for the marginalization and de-politicization of the teaching of Japanese cinema. Yoshimoto attacks the sort of cultural criticism that plays up the significance of bushido and Zen as keys to an understanding of Japanese cinema and/or Kurosawa movies, finding it essentialist and ahistorical. He also disputes the unity and consistency of Kurosawa cinema, claiming Kurosawa had no single artistic or political project throughout his career. He stresses the historically specific industrial, political and economic determinants of the works. As a corrective to Prince’s biases and limitations, Yoshimoto is useful; but Prince’s accounts of the films remain forceful and insightful. Despite his particular American stance (one that applauds optimism and heroic  individualism) and his limited knowledge of Japanese film history, he explores the films with energy, flair and detailed attention to their formal and narrative construction. In comparison, Yoshimoto’s accounts of the films are dry and uninspiring, his verve reserved for polemical attacks on the academy and on “Western criticism of Japanese film”.  Prince is familiar with academic film theory but avoids jargon so that his books are accessible to undergraduates who encounter difficulties understanding the abstruse terminology employed by film theorists such as Noel Burch^[4]. His literate, fluent writing style and his richly detailed analyses make him an engaging read. His book is recommended for use in the classroom, with reservations.

Despite their different agendas, Prince and Yoshimoto ultimately share a high regard for Kurosawa and for particular Kurosawa films. They both rate Stray Dog, Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, and High and Low very highly, devoting more attention to them than to the other works. Both too have capitalised on the popularity of Kurosawa, while deploring the limitations and misunderstandings of critics and fans of his work. Despite Yoshimoto’s worthy attempt to situate the work within the Japanese film industry, the strategy to focus on the only Japanese cinema director who is well known in the United States tends only to reinforce ignorance of the richness and variety of Japanese film production beyond this one master.   

Freda Freiberg

^[1] Recent books include Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies , 1998

^[2] Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, University of California Press, 1970

^[3] Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema, Duke University Press, 2000

^[4] Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, Scolar Press, 1979