Donald Richie,
The Films of Akira Kurosawa. 3rd Edition. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996.
ISBN: 0-520-22037-4
273 pp.

(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

Uploaded 1 November 2000

Those who own the second edition of this (once) famous book may want to consider their budget carefully before buying the third. For your considerable outlay you will get a handsome new cover – a colour still from Ran having replaced the black and white one from Kumonosujo – brief chapters on Kurosawa’s last four films, a few cursory references to those films inserted into the final chapter, and a two-page obituary notice added in 1998. Otherwise, you get the unrevised second edition, which in many places is actually the unrevised first. Kurosawa is still referred to in the present tense and the age of the earlier films is still calculated from 1965. Old peculiarities, such as the habit of referring to characters by the names of the actors playing them, survive untouched. (Thus, “Mifune” has VD in The Quiet Duel, is ‘in love with Nastassya’ in The Idiot, and of course is shot to death in Throne of Blood. No wonder the poor man finally broke with his director.) Critics are still habitually quoted without citations (e.g., Alan Booth on p. 216 and Jan Kott on 217). And, yes, that silly chart purporting to show that virtually all Kurosawa films are structured as sonatas is still there (on 231-32). While an acknowledgement thanks two assistants for “long and valued” service, it is difficult to see what that could have been. Even the spectacular cover is a bait and switch tactic: all the stills within, including those from the colour films like Ran and Kagemusha are black-and-white.

Of course, if you don’t own a copy of Richie the Second, that is another matter. Your money will then buy you a still useful introduction to Kurosawa, assuming that you need one, and something perhaps more important: a kind of fossil record of film criticism as it was practiced thirty-five to forty years ago in the heyday of largely unquestioned auteurism. This is, you should understand, less a critical study than a biography on the heroic scale. While we still proceed in chronological order from the beginning of Kurosawa’s career to the end, film-by-film, introductory essay by introductory essay, each item is taken to represent a stage in the development of the master’s vision. In Richie’s eyes Kurosawa is Valiant-for-Truth, exposer of illusion, brave independent, samurai, existential hero . . . in short, a great artist very much on the prevalent model of late ’50s and early ’60s American liberal criticism, who is praised regularly for exploring themes but refraining from making statements, especially political ones: “he . . . is so engrossed in how something such as lack of freedom affects a person, how a living character reacts in all of its richness and humanity, that he forgets the social issue or, better, finds it irrelevant” (36). Here, to cite one of the mantras of the time, is a mind so fine that no idea could penetrate it. Confronted with the awkward fact that Kurosawa was regularly drawn to social issues and very fond of making statements – about nuclear weapons, for example, in films from Record of a Living Being in 1955 to Dreams in 1990 – Richie falls back on the evil twin theory: the “part of him . . . that says social endeavor is the answer” versus the one “which knows perfectly well that it is not” (95). The former position, you will notice, is only a statement; the latter is a recognition of Truth. The real artist broods over humanity; only the journalist bothers to vote. Genuine narrative art is psychological and the psychological is somehow inherently opposed to the political. Social action in this book is always really existential. Watanabe does not get that park built in Ikiru because building parks for children is worth doing but because the process enables him to “discover himself” (94).

Both the social and anti-social constructions of Kurosawa reflect Richie’s fundamental belief that films are direct, largely unmediated expressions of the artist’s vision. Directors create, everybody else is just material. This book is a monument to the intentional fallacy. Every chapter on every film begins with what Kurosawa said about it. While Richie is intelligent enough to argue with some of his master’s judgments and to elaborate and qualify many of the others, it never occurs to him that Kurosawa’s intentions should not dictate the terms of the criticism. In effect, Kurosawa gets to be the co-author as well as the hero of Richie’s book. If Kurosawa said, off and on, that his films were mostly about character revelation, then that’s what they are about. And, not surprisingly, “when Kurosawa says it is the editing that gives life to his films, he is saying that it is here that character is finally presented in full to the audience in terms of empathy, of identification, of emotion” (240).

The imbedded assumptions in such statements as these are remarkably resistant to contrary evidence. The belief that “each [Kurosawa] film is a direct expression of himself” (229) is quite unaffected by the anecdote on the following page which makes clear that most of them were written by committee or by the (correct) proposition advanced at various points in the text that his weakest scripts are those written alone. The endlessly repeated assertion that Kurosawa’s “pictures are about character revelation” (230) is contradicted by the number of major films, such as Ran and Throne of Blood, that even Richie acknowledges are fables little concerned with “inner richness” or individuality, even if you assume (mistakenly) that film is ever capable of presenting such things “in full”. The latter film, of course, explicitly treats Washizu as an eternally recurrent type whose “spirit is walking today”, as the final chorus puts it. The comment about editing further assumes, without argument, that the highest purpose of film narrative is the creation of empathy with characters Richie habitually praises as “real”. For Richie, that empathy is achieved by the practice of Western-style realism (exemplified by Mifune’s portrayal of Washizu) and prevented by Eastern stylization, especially that lifted from Noh theatre (exemplified by Isuzu Yamada’s Asaji). Noh characters do not speak or move like real people; therefore we can only watch them with detachment. To put it mildly, that is not the effect produced on my students or me by Kaede’s frightening and funny Noh-style seduction of Jiro in Ran, nor is it the necessary effect of Noh itself, as described by John Collick (in Shakespeare, Cinema and Society) and others more knowledgeable than I. It is very probably the effect produced on someone like Richie for whom Kurosawa’s Japaneseness – however exotic and interesting – is basically a limitation to be overcome on the way to universal humanism.

This book is a theory-free zone, however studded with random assertions about Life, Art, and Humanity. I am, in fact, quite willing to entertain an auteurist reading of Kurosawa, who – as co-writer, director, and editor of nearly all his films – has a better claim to that status than most. The problem is that Richie doesn’t realize that auteurism is an approach and thus needs to be justified and weighed against other approaches. He thinks that is just the way it is: artists make art, so directors – not studios, not collectives, not discourses, not industries – make film, and both do so only because they want to express their inward vision. Because he hasn’t thought through his own assumptions he is habitually unable to deal with evidence to the contrary: the many co-writers who also made those scripts, the stock company of distinguished actors who perform them, the complex industrial and cultural circumstances in which they were made. I don’t mind his not considering this in the early ’60s. What bothers me is that his successive revisions indicate no willingness to engage the relevant theoretical issues. If Richie has had a new thought or a second thought on the subject of Kurosawa in the last thirty-five years, he hasn’t seen fit to incorporate it. This “new” edition deals with the fact that the last four films, including Ran, contradict his model of ‘the Kurosawa film’ as character-centred, by dismissing them as products of dotage.

The unconfronted issues prominently include – for readers of this journal at least – the antihistoricism of Richie’s “family of man” kind of psychological humanism. Throughout, Kurosawa is honored for dealing with individuals – not movements, periods, or types – and those individuals are valued for transcending their temporal and political setting, for being that dullest of all things, “people like us”, timeless human essentials. “When I look at Japanese history – or the history of the world'”, Kurosawa is quoted as saying, “what I see is how man repeats himself over and over again” (115). If you subscribe to that view, of course, the feudal setting of, say, Kagemusha or The Seven Samurai can be no more than local color or an alienation effect. The films themselves suggest to me that Kurosawa’s view is more complex than this. Richie’s, unfortunately, is not.

I see that I have succumbed to the impulse to score points off an old book that has done good service in its time – another good intention overcome – so let me make the necessary acknowledgements. More than any other critic, of course, Richie introduced Kurosawa and with him Japanese film to Western audiences; for that both the filmmakers and ourselves owe him considerable gratitude. Better books have followed – Stephen Prince’s The Warrior’s Camera, James Goodwin’s Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema – but surprisingly few. Richie’s concluding section on style in Kurosawa and his close readings of shot sequences – for example, in the chapter on Ikiru – are knowledgeable and observant. He had, of course, exceptional access both to Kurosawa and his associates and can tell us a great deal about the production process behind the films. It is easy to mock the misplaced intentionalism that motivates this approach, but it does allow Richie to give a remarkably empathic version of what Kurosawa and company consciously meant to do. Though no one would want to read the book through, it remains a useful reference tool and still (alas) the best starting point for students new to the director. For the rest of us, it is a very nice coffee table book that won’t date you too much.

Arthur Lindley