The Kurosawa Retrospect

     So now that Signs and Wonders is over for the semester, I decided to write up my final opinions on the Kurosawa films as a whole since I watched all of them. It was really cool seeing them in chronological order because you got to watch how Kurosawa took what he learned from each film, and gradually refine his process. Something I noticed while watching the first few films is how much longer they felt as opposed to the later films, but the thing is...they weren't actually longer. In some cases it was even the opposite. I would attribute this to how much

Kurosawa improved his pacing. In his first few films, Kurosawa tended to linger on certain scenes a little longer than he probably should have, and seemed to move his stories at a slower pace in general; the most extreme example of this being his film Stray Dog when he spent 15 minutes on a montage of detective Murakami walking around the city streets while nothing really happened at all. In his later films though he really managed to tighten up his pacing; one his best examples being Seven Samurai. Though this film (207 minutes) was almost an hour longer than one of his previous films, The Idiot (166 minutes), it seemed 

shorter. This may have to do with the fact that we watched Seven Samurai in two parts, but I think it would not have mattered. Every moment of Seven Samurai felt like it forwarded the plot and at no point did I ever feel bored, which is more than I could say for The Idiot. Ran is the one exception to this rule because despite it being the last film chronologically, there were parts of the film that really seemed to drag on unnecessarily.

     Another aspect that was fun to watch across all the films was the evolution of Kurosawa's most frequently recurring actor, Toshiro Mifune. Toshiro Mifune was not only present, but a main character in every single Kurosawa film except for Ran. It was cool to see how his rolls in each film changed as he got older; from the young, upstart Yakuza in Drunken Angel to the veteran warriors in both The Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo, Toshiro Mifune was excellent in each roll that he played. I feel though that he was at his best when playing wild characters like the bandit from Rashomon and Kikuchiyo in Seven Samurai. Those characters were some of the most vibrant and entertaining I've ever seen in film.
     All in all, I don't regret watching a single one of these films, and would recommend any one of them to anybody as worth watching. It's no small wonder why Kurosawa's works have lasted the test of time and inspired not just new films, but entirely new genres of film.