Warrior's Camera

With a career stretching from the chaos of war-torn Japan to the current power and prosperity of his country, the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema, and Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. Providing a new and comprehensive look at this master filmmaker, The Warrior's Camera probes the complex visual structure of Kurosawa's work. The book shows how Kurosawa attempted to symbolize on film a course of national development for post-war Japan, and it traces the ways that he tied his social visions to a dynamic system of visual and narrative forms. The author analyzes Kurosawa's entire career and places the films in context by drawing on the director's autobiography--a fascinating work that presents Kurosawa as a Kurosawa character and the story of his life as the kind of spiritual odyssey witnessed so often in his films. After examining the development of Kurosawa's visual style in his early work, The Warrior's Camera explains 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 led to the very different cinematic style evident in his most recent films, works of pessimism that view the world as resistant to change.Prince, Stephen is the author of 'Warrior's Camera' with ISBN 9780691008592 and ISBN 0691008590.