There I was, a forty something guy, going through this course with a group of young sixth form students (18 years old at the most). The lecturer – Alistair Mickie - was a joy, really enthusiastic about his subject and it rubbed off on to everybody. It gave me a great lift to go down to the college one night a week and forget about the worries of the day job. I had decades of experience of watching films over the kids and could quite easily pull out specific examples from my memory. I particularly enjoyed the detailed analyses of parts of films and found new meanings and images that I had never seen before. You suddenly start to understand what the director or the actors meant to get across. The theory gave me an insight into how to watch and understand films better than before. It gave me a new lease of life.

Watching Eisenstein and the old Russian directors showed me what montage was all about. We even tried to do a Proppian analysis of the story in Casablanca – the first time that the teacher had even tried this. Even analysis of more recent films (not necessarily great ones) such as Speed and The Net provided insights into the grammar of film and the underlying story telling. Studying Kubrick as an auteur/author and the rules on different genres and being able to discuss them and listen to different views was quite liberating. We had to watch Citizen Kane, every one had to not because it is supposed to be the greatest film of all time but because, as a student it gave you examples of so many cinematic and editing techniques that it could be an example in almost all of the exam questions. And you could choose to analyse more closely some of your favourite films. I chose Seven Samurai and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Very different but very rewarding.

I don’t consider myself a film geek or even an authority. I am an enthusiast. I can still watch new films and appreciate them better than I used to. I have very eclectic tastes. From Hollywood to Art House, studio blockbusters to small independent films, english, american or sub titled and virtually any genre (although I am not too keen on romantic weepies – my better half loves them wouldn’t you know!). I do know that following that course helped me appreciate films and the cinema a lot more. Reading books is fine but discussion and debate makes it better. I suppose film forums and film chat rooms can provide that sort of outlet for your views nowadays. It opens your eyes and sharpens your senses and gives you a vocabulary to talk about a visual medium.

My main message from this post is to keep learning about film. That way you can get a better appreciation and ultimately more satisfaction watching films whether they are good or bad.

Most people will know of him as the maker of “The Seven Samurai” – a film that told the story of seven itinerant swords-for-hire who come together to defend a village from a large gang robbers. It was remade in Hollywood as “The Magnificent Seven”.  This is extremely interesting as Kurosawa has always acknowledged the influence on him of John Ford westerns!

He was perhaps the only Japanese film maker of his era to gain wider acceptance in the west although in Japan his staus was not as pronounced. His long career spanned over from the 1930s as a young assistant director to the 2000s just before his death. He made over 30 films as director and many more as writer, editor or producer, sometimes combining the roles on one film.

His golden era started in the 1950s with a series of critically acclaimed but mostly historical films. In addition to “The Seven Samurai”, he directed the savage and cynical revenge piece “Yojimbo” translated as The Bodyguard. This film was remade in the West as “A Fistful of Dollars”  – the classic spaghetti western that spawned a whole new genre of films.

More interestingly, he made the superb “Rashomon” – a tale of the (supposed) rape of a woman in the forest told from several different character viewpoints. As well as winning several awards in its day, you can see its influence on more recent Hollywood films such as “The Usual Suspects” and many court room dramas.

Speilberg and Lucas have acknowledged their debt to Kurosawa. Indeed, the arguing robots in Star Wars are based on a couple of soldiers in Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress”.

He also had the power to take Shakespearian material and remould it into a medieval Japanese setting. His “Throne of Blood” was a bloody version of Macbeth in the tradition of a No play. One of his greatest works was the masterful “Ran” (literally translated as Chaos) – an epic tragedy based on  ”King Lear”.

In his later works, there were a number of common strands and themes:

• Strong stories – he was a master story teller and he made sure that these shone through his writings.
• Beautiful cinematography – he was also a painter and used to storyboard his pictures as paintings and works of art in their own right. The landscape photography in “Dersu Uzala” is breath-taking. The burning castle in “Ran” is beautiful but terrible. The final scene in “Kagemusha” as the camera pans out to see the extent of death on the battle field is wondrous with the rivers literally running red.
• The weather – he used the weather as a metaphor and also to induce moods in his films. The wind represented  chaos and upheaval in “Throne of Blood” and “Ran”. The rain in Seven Samurai accentuated the slaughter of the robbers at the climax with horses and robbers struggling to fight in the mud. Fog and mist were used to denote the mystical and supernatural and invoke fear in the characters
• Believably human characters – his characters were multi-faceted, mixing the good traits with the bad, making the stories come alive. They all have their own particular mannerisms, foibles, fears and beliefs.
• Action sequences – he was extremely skillful in staging large scale battle sequences as evidenced in “Throne of Blood”, “Kagemusha” and “Ran”. They are stirring, exciting, epic and tragic
• Humour – Kurosawa could use humour to let the audience catch their breath before the next action or show a different side to a particular character.

There is much to admire in Kurosawa’s films if you can get over the inevitable sub titles. He has given Hollywood and the West, in general, many insights in to great film-making. Let’s hope that the newer breeds of director, during their filmic upbringing, have learnt from  an acknowledged master of his craft.