KUROSAWA FESTIVAL AT FILM FORUM, NEW YORK CITY, JANUARY 6-FEBRUARY 4
A 4-week, 28-film festival celebrating the centennial of director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) will run at Film Forum from Wednesday, January 6 through Thursday, February 4. The festival opens with a 9-day run (Jan. 6-14) of his early Film Noir tour de force Stray Dog, starring Toshiro Mifune as a cop searching for his stolen service revolver through a sweltering post-war Tokyo.
The festival, programmed by Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s Repertory
Program Director, includes all of the director’s other legendary
masterworks – Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Rashomon, Ikiru, High and Low, Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Ran, etc. – along with his earliest films from the 1940s and lesser-known classics like The Idiot, The Bad Sleep Well, Scandal, and I Live in Fear.
Born March 22, 1910 in Tokyo, Kurosawa came from a samurai family that
traced its lineage back to the eleventh century. The youngest of nine
children, Kurosawa’s first interest was painting (which he never really
abandoned), but was drawn to movies through his older brother, who
worked as a benshi, or narrator of silent films.
In 1936, Kurosawa answered a newspaper ad looking for apprentice film
directors at P.C.L. (later to become Toho Studios). Hired as director
Kajiro Yamamoto’s assistant, he apprenticed for seven years before
given the chance to direct his first film, Sanshiro Sugata. Only five years later, he’d make Drunken Angel,
the movie that solidified his critical reputation in Japan and first
teamed him with actor Toshiro Mifune, playing a TB-infected gangster.
It was the beginning of the most fruitful director-actor collaboration
in film history.
Kurosawa’s reputation exploded in 1950 with Rashomon.
Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and a Best
Foreign Film Oscar, it introduced the world to Japanese cinema and
vaulted its director and two stars – actress Machiko Kyo and Mifune –
to international prominence.
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