The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa - Revised and Expanded Edition Paperback - 1999

From the rear cover

The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of eighty-eight, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon, which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's films, Stephen Prince provides two new chapters in which he examines Kurosawa's remaining work, placing him in the context of cinema history. Prince also discusses how Kurosawa furnished a template for some well-known Hollywood directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Speilberg, and George Lucas.

The Warrior's Camera examines the four creative stages of Kurosawa's work. After exploring the development of Kurosawa's visual style in his early films, the book shows how he used this style in subsequent films to forge a politically committed model of filmmaking. It then demonstrates how the collapse of Kurosawa's efforts to participate as a filmmaker in the tasks of social reconstruction produced a revision of his style in the pessimistic films of 1970-1985. Finally, it examines the psychobiographical mode of Kurosawa's last films, produced when the director was in his eighties and preoccupied by issues of aging and his artistic legacy.