Thomas, Kevin. “Movies: Kurosawa Retrospective: Films That Won the West.” Los Angeles Times 9 Jan. 1983: T16.

    This article is a retrospective on director Akira Kurosawa’s body of work and appeared in the Los Angeles Times on January 9, 1983. At this point in Kurosawa’s career, he warrants the description in the opening paragraph of the article as “the world’s greatest living director.” The article’s subject relates to the retrospective being exhibited in Kurosawa’s honor at the County Art Museum. The author Kevin Thomas then goes on to enumerate the many unique accomplishments and characteristics of Kurosawa which earned him the title attributed above. He states that above all Kurosawa’s films evoke a powerful, lingering response in the viewer, of any background. The author is clearly well-versed in the language of film, as he sites the specifics of Kurosawa’s mise en scène, camera movement, and overall narrative. He gives interesting insight into Kurosawa’s training, including his frequent family outings to movies in his youth, training as a painter and calligrapher, his work as a narrator for foreign silent, and being an apprentice screenwriter in accord with Japanese tradition. He points out that while Kurosawa brought Japanese cinema to the world stage, he stands out in his own community as a dynamic, and therefore Western, anomaly among traditional Japanese cinematographers.

This article provides a nice summary of the works of Akira Kurosawa, while highlighting with key example the reasons for his critical success in global cinema. The author balances the overall influence of Kurosawa culturally with specifics of technical film analysis. The information on Rashomon is very in depth, seeing as it’s the film which first established Kurosawa and Japanese cinema in the world’s eye. Consequently, the film is given much attention in the article and has some useful analysis passages. The quotes incorporated from Kurosawa himself paint the picture of the man and his work very well and give the reader insight into what drives this innovative man and therefore his work. Overall, he is depicted as human; yet his work makes him immortal.