The book begins with a short foreword by Martin Scorsese, an introduction by Donald Richie, a tiny note from Kurosawa’s daughter, costume designer Kazuko Kurosawa, and finally an equally short preface by the author himself. These, like the rest of the book, are accompanied by various stills from Kurosawa’s movies, as well as posters, pictures of Kurosawa and his family, and drawings by both Kurosawa and his close aide Teruyo Nogami. The book also includes a number of script pages, with scribbles and drawings made while filming. It is this type of visual material that dominates the book, and one gets the feeling that the primary purpose of the included text is simply to fill up the spaces around the images and to arrange them thematically.

Chapter 1 (pages 36-51) is titled “The Man and His Formative Years” and it gives us some basic information about Kurosawa and his early works. Chapter 2 (pages 52-103), “Images of the Modern World”, discusses those Kurosawa films that take place in a contemporary setting, while chapter 3 (pages 104-185), titled “The Historical Imperative”, turns our attention to Kurosawa’s jidai-geki, or period pictures. These chapters, within which discussion progresses more or less chronologically, offer basically no new insights, instead repeating the typical anecdotes and bits of information familiar to anyone who has read a Kurosawa book or two. Of the pictures included in these chapters, the ones taken of Kurosawa with his family or the director at his summer retreat are perhaps the most interesting. Chapter 3 also includes a number of examples of Teruyo Nogami’s continuity sketches, while pages 100 and 101 present us a very nice side-to-side comparison of a scene from Madadayo and a storyboard painting that it was based on.

Chapter 4, “The Literary Connection” (pages 186-231), concentrates on Kurosawa’s most straightforward adaptations of western literature, namely the films The Idiot, The Lower Depths, Throne of Blood and Ran, with more than half of the chapter constituting of pictures from the last mentioned. This if followed by chapter 5 (pages 232-275) “Formalism and the Elements”, which is something of a hodgepodge of topics and is divided into subsections titled “water”, “air”, “fire”, “earth”, “painting”, “music”, “theatrical influences” and “color”. It is in these two chapters that one would expect Cowie to finally bring something of his own to the table, but unfortunately this is not the case. “The Literary Connection” chapter not only has very little substantial to say about Kurosawa’s literary adaptations, but like the list of films indicates doesn’t really bother with Kurosawa’s adaptations of Japanese works. Meanwhile, the sections in chapter 5 are nothing more than thinly veiled excuses to group certain types of pictures together, rather than prompting Cowie to provide substantial thoughts about Kurosawa’s relationship with the elements listed. However, as with the first three chapters, the images themselves are gorgeous and well selected.

The book concludes with the brief chapter 6 (276-284) titled “Riding into History”, which offers a few words about Kurosawa’s continuing influence. After the final chapter, we also get a very cursory filmography, a list of references, and a few acknowledgements.

All in all, Cowie’s book was clearly written with the coffee table book audience in mind. You can pick up the book, open it pretty much anywhere to read just a paragraph or two, and you are rewarded with a generic self-contained anecdote or thought. As the book was thus meant to be picked up and read randomly, it contains quite little real coherence or overall narration, preventing any real theorising or argumentation. As mentioned earlier, this is quite disappointing considering the calibre of the writer.

The pictures are, of course, nice to look at. So, if you feel the need to own a coffee table book which can function as a conversation starter, Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema is an excellent choice. For information about Kurosawa and his works, however, many better books exist.

Peter Cowie’s Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema is now available for purchase, including from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and The Book Depository.

Not much information is yet available about the book apart from it being marketed as “the most lavishly produced and profusely illustrated volume on Akira Kurosawa ever published”, suggesting that the book is heavy on illustrations, including “annotated script pages, sketches, and storyboards”. One wonders what the book can bring onto the table here that the Akira Kurosawa Digital Archive hasn’t already given us.

Fortunately, it should not be all pictures. Peter Cowie has written extensively on film, especially Ingmar Bergman and Scandinavian cinema in general. A well respected film scholar, I am quite excited to find out what Cowie has to say about Kurosawa’s works, and I expect to see some new insights.

As always, you will hear from me in the form of a book review once I get a copy of the book (I ordered from the Book Depository, which I have used in the past and been happy with). Unless the delivery is delayed for some reason (usually takes about 5 days), I would expect to have a review ready in about a week or two.

March is Akira Kurosawa month at Criterion. On the twenty-third, the great Japanese filmmaker would have been one hundred years old. For this centennial celebration, we will be posting trivia questions and topics for discussion on Facebook and Twitter all month, and giving away a different Kurosawa poster, DVD, or Blu-ray disc every weekday. Be sure to become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to get in on all the action!

If you decide to take part in the competition, good luck and let us know if you win anything!

DVD Talk point out “a wealth of issues that mar this gorgeous film”. You should read the review for the details, but to sum it up contrast is apparently way off, with too much edge enhancements, with many scenes “blown out of proportion” and with lots of “detail-swallowing darkness and overly bright points”. The reviewer also notes “a rather abundant level of digital grain that stretches beyond the confines of natural film texture”. Oh dear. At least the sound quality and the extras get thumbs up.

The DVD Verdict review pretty much agrees with DVD Talk and points out the larger problem with the release: “no matter how many times you look at it, hold it in your hands, put it on your DVD shelf, rearrange its position or squint at it from a distance, it stubbornly and obstinately refuses to transform itself into a Criterion Collection title”. Considering that this release apparently caused the cancellation of the Criterion release last year, the end result is quite disappointing indeed. Just like the DVD Talk review, also DVD Verdict really only recommends the release for fans who are after the new extras (just don’t throw out your old Criterion DVD).

It should be noted though that all reviewers agree that the colours are generally pretty good with this release, and that considering everything this may still be (digitally speaking) the best release out there. Just not quite what the film would deserve.

For even more additional details and screen captures, see DVD Beaver.

The film is currently available for purchase from Amazon.com.

Apparently, the film will follow a Sunday league football team who take on the job of protecting a local Tandoori restaurant from thugs. While this is pretty much all I know about the project story-wise, the story synopsis takes me strongly back to independent British cinema from the 1990s, which had its soccer stories and its immigrant stories.

Three actors are apparently now attached to the project: Sean Bean, Dougray Scott and veteran actor Robert Vaughn, who also played in The Magnificent Seven.

Indie Movies Online and Slashfilm have more details.

According to an official quoted in the report, this probably means that the foundation is currently more or less penniless. This would explain why nothing seems to be moving forward under the AK foundation, including the much talked about Kurosawa memorial museum or the AK100 events.

Yamamoto’s influence on Kurosawa’s career in the 1960s does not in fact stop there. Between Sanjuro and Dodesukaden, Kurosawa had made Red Beard, again a Yamamoto adaptation, while also co-adapting another Yamamoto novel into Dora-heita, which would remain unfilmed until Kon Ichikawa dug up the script in the late 90s and filmed it for a release in 2000. In addition to the above four, also the first two posthumous Kurosawa films, Ame agaru (1999) and The Sea Is Watching (2002), were based on Yamamoto’s stories, further emphasizing the place that the author had in Kurosawa’s late career. It is therefore very unfortunate that Yamamoto’s literary output is practically unavailable in English, apart from the historical novel The Flower Mat (Red Beard, meanwhile, has been translated into French as Barberousse).

While we could then say that Kurosawa was on fairly familiar ground with the film’s source material, much of the rest of the film’s production was new and challenging. Dodesukaden was Kurosawa’s first film in colour, and his first without Toshiro Mifune in almost 20 years. The budget was significantly smaller than with his recent projects, and the two-month shooting schedule significantly shorter than had been the case with his preceding two-year project Red Beard.

There was also a sense of going back — perhaps somewhat untypical of Kurosawa. The film is often compared with The Lower Depths (see for instance Goodwin, 218), while the episodic narrative style employed is similar to that of Red Beard. After more than ten years of widescreen films, Kurosawa also returned to the “standard” aspect ratio, apparently both because of the intimacy of the shanty-town settings as well as because of the colours. (Galbraith, 478)

Dodesukaden was in fact Kurosawa’s first film in five years, the longest that he had taken between films in his career. Not that he hadn’t been busy, first preparing his first Hollywood film Runaway Train, and then taking over the Japanese part of the mammoth Tora! Tora! Tora! production. But both projects had fallen through, leaving the director with strained ties with both foreign and Japanese film studios.

This, combined with a rapid shift in the Japanese film industry towards cheap TV productions, drove Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi and Keisuke Kinoshita to form their own production company, Club of the Four Knights. Dodesukaden was their first production (after Dora-heita was deemed too expensive), and it was made with the intention of paving the way for a string of other high quality domestic cinema that would work to rejuvenate the Japanese film industry. This was not to happen, however. Dodesukaden failed at the box office, and was unable to make back the around $300,000 that it had cost to produce. As Galbraith suggests, this was especially difficult for Kurosawa, as the film had not only cost far less than his typical projects, but had also been finished “ahead of schedule and under budget” (485, emphasis Galbraith’s). Club of the Four Knights would never make another film as a production company.

Despite its poor performance at the box office, the film gained a cautiously positive initial response from critics both in Japan and abroad. (Galbraith, 485-486) As for later critics, the film has had both its defenders and attackers, and there appears to be very little critical consensus regarding its place in the Kurosawa canon, perhaps more so than with any other Kurosawa film. Joan Mellen in her essay on Dodesukaden for Richie’s The Films of Akira Kurosawa writes off the work as a “minor film that compares with Kurosawa’s great works only as a shadow resembles substance.” (Richie, 184) And as if there was nothing of interest to say about the film, the recent Criterion edition was also, untypically of Criterion’s Kurosawa DVDs, released without a commentary track. At the other end of the spectrum, David Desser in an essay for Post Script (vol. 20, fall 2000) sees Dodesukaden’s place “at the top of the list of Kurosawa’s greatest films, virtually the equal of Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and High and Low, and in most ways superior to scholarly favourites like Rashomon and Throne of Blood.” (69) And then there is everything in between.

At least, then, there has been discussion. A fair amount of it, in fact, and for a relatively wide range of topics. As Kurosawa’s first colour film, the use of colour is much discussed. So is the type(s) of narration, and Kurosawa’s method of sewing together largely unconnected stories into a fairly coherent whole — some dismiss the film as one without a central story, while others praise it for its multiple layers. Similarly, Yoshimoto sees Dodesukaden as a very personal film, indeed almost autobiographical for Kurosawa, while others have insisted that they fail to see the Kurosawa that they know in the work.

One thing that critics do largely agree on, however, is that Dodesukaden marked a change in Kurosawa’s career. Whether it actually was the last film of an old era, the first of a new era, or a film between two distinct eras is debatable, but the consensus certainly is that Dodesukaden was and still is a flag pole, and a definite marker of change in Kurosawa’s career. Prince in fact goes as far as to say that it “looks like no previous Kurosawa film” and that it largely “lacks Kurosawa’s stylistic signatures” (251), suggesting a very fundamental change of direction in Kurosawa’s career as occuring with Dodesukaden.

What do you think? The forums are open.

Despite the title, this is not really a review, but an attempt at one based on somewhat incomplete data. While I really appreciate Criterion’s kind offer to send me review copies of the discs that they had not previously released, it is obviously difficult to draw a complete picture of the box set based on only the four film prints that I got. But here’s a try.

The Four New Films

I’ll start with what I know, which means the four films not previously available on proper Region 1 DVD. These are Sanshiro Sugata, The Most Beautiful, Sanshiro Sugata Part II and The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail.

Picture quality for these four films is perfectly watchable, but nowhere near the quality of Criterion’s “proper” releases. Dust and scratch marks are everywhere, and there are brightness changes from one scene to another. Neither has the sound has been remastered. All in all, the prints of these four films are of slightly lower quality than with the five films found in Criterion’s Eclipse “Postwar Kurosawa” set.

I must stress, however, that the picture quality here should still be good enough to take nothing away from anyone’s enjoyment of these films, unless of course you watch films solely for their prints’ technical aspects (does anyone actually do that?). Also, and very importantly, since the subtitles are very good throughout, these Criterion discs are a much better pick than the earlier Chinese releases. And even if below Criterion’s usual high standards, the picture and sound quality are also a great improvement over the Chinese editions.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the Australian releases of the two Sanshiro Sugata films to compare Criterion’s efforts with, so I cannot say how the AK100 discs compare with those. But what I can say is that if you have been waiting for Sanshiro Sugata, The Most Beautiful, Sanshiro Sugata Part II and The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail to come out in Region 1, you should not be disappointed with the results.

This is what you get

Other Films

The other films included in the collection come from Criterion’s older releases, plus Madadayo, which Criterion has also slipped in. As this is a 25 film box set from a 30 film director, five of Kurosawa’s films are missing. These are The Quiet Duel, Dersu Uzala, Ran, Dreams and Rhapsody in August, which are all currently available on DVD from other publishers. These have in fact clearly been left out due to rights issues — Criterion simply couldn’t negotiate rights to release these films on DVD. I don’t think that this should be held against them, for bringing 25 films into one release is already a huge achievement in itself.

I have no way to confirm first-hand what the transfers used for these 21 other films are like, but a DVD File review informs us that the transfers are near-identical to Criterion’s older releases. I’m sure that some will be happy to hear that picture-boxing used in older releases has been removed, so you now get the picture occupying the entire screen estate, rather than including black bars to compensate for the area often left out around the edges by older televisions.

It was, of course, to be expected that Criterion would use their old transfers. How old, however, is another question. Films like Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Sanjuro and High and Low have all received new and much improved transfers from Criterion to replace the company’s first attempts with them. Whether the discs included in the AK100 box set are the new transfers or the old ones is something that I cannot say. At least Seven Samurai, like all the other films in the collection, is included on just one disc, and therefore cannot be the same transfer as Criterion’s much celebrated three-DVD release, where the newly restored film was on two discs. Whether Criterion has reverted back to their original transfer, or re-encoded the restored transfer to fit onto one disc, is impossible for me to say. The same goes for the other films mentioned above — has Criterion used the new restored prints, or reverted back to the old ones? Unfortunately, I have no answer to you. The DVD File reviewer referred to above considers the DVD quality similar to older releases, but does not say which ones he is comparing them to. Additionally, he also sees the Sanshiro Sugata prints as an improvement over Criterion’s Eclipse releases, which as I mentioned is not how I see them.

Another question that I have no answer for is what the Madadayo disc looks like. As Criterion hasn’t at least to my knowledge previously released this film on DVD, I am left wondering whether this is the same transfer used by Winstar in their Region 1 Madadayo, or something else.

The good news is that other reviews of the AK100 box set will be published soon, and those will doubtlessly clarify the issue regarding transfers. Here, in any case, is an alphabetic list of the titles included:

The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Dodes’ka-den (1970)
Drunken Angel (1948)
The Hidden Fortress (1958)
High and Low (1963)
I Live in Fear (1955)
The Idiot (1951)
Ikiru (1952)
Kagemusha (1980)
The Lower Depths (1957)
Madadayo (1993)
The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945)
The Most Beautiful (1944)
No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)
One Wonderful Sunday (1947)
Rashomon (1951)
Red Beard (1965)
Sanjuro (1962)
Sanshiro Sugata (1943)
Sanshiro Sugata, Part II (1944)
Scandal (1950)
Seven Samurai (1954)
Stray Dog (1949)
Throne of Blood (1957)
Yojimbo (1961)

This is what I got.

DVD Extras

The box set films have no supplementary features on the discs, so unfortunately those buying this collection will get none of Criterion’s usual commentaries and documentaries that greatly help a newcomer to understand the films and their place in the Kurosawa canon. This is a real shame, but obviously an understandable marketing decision.

Written Material

The box set comes with an illustrated book, which includes a 3750 word introduction from Stephen Prince, his notes to each of the included films, and a short 1250 word “Remembering Kurosawa” essay from Donald Richie. I have had the opportunity to read this material in digital format.

As one would imagine, neither Prince’s or Richie’s essay touches any new ground, but rather concentrates on introducing Kurosawa to new audiences. Prince does a fine job in giving all the basic biographical and filmographic details, while Richie’s essay recounts a few anecdotes and perhaps somewhat surprisingly (but all the more honestly) concludes that ultimately Kurosawa is a director “about whom we really don’t know all that much”.

Prince’s notes on each film are very good, and he is able to in just three or four paragraphs give the reader a very good basic understanding of each film’s background and possible agenda. While these are obviously not comparable to his full-length commentary tracks that appear on Criterion’s original releases, they should be enough for someone who is only interested in watching these films for the sake of boosting his or her general knowledge of film history.

The box set closed. For once, the word “box” is not an exaggeration.

Conclusion

The question then is, who is this box set for? I would say that there are two kinds of people who should definitely buy this: those who need an easy and relatively cheap introduction to Kurosawa’s body of work, and those collectors who simply need to have every Kurosawa release out there.

For audiences new to Kurosawa’s films, the AK100 box set is well priced. The suggested retail price of $400 for 25 films comes to only $16 per film, and since from Amazon and other retailers are currently selling this for around $285, the unit price can be as low as $11.40 for each individual film. If you haven’t got any Kurosawa in your collection yet, and don’t think that you would in any case have it in you to spend hours going through supplementary materials found on Criterion’s earlier releases, this is certainly an excellent deal. Especially since for supplementary material, you can always later turn to the available Kurosawa literature, which can substitute for much of the missing audio commentaries, although you will still miss the excellent little “It is Wonderful to Create” documentaries that appear on most of Criterion’s Kurosawa releases, and include interviews with people who worked with Kurosawa. But if your aim is to get to know Kurosawa, not to become an authority in his works, this box set is for you.

The four films that have never before been properly released in Region 1 will obviously make this a tempting buy also for those who already have everything else. But, unless money is not an issue, the question that you need to ask is how long it will take for Criterion to release these discs separately, or as part of a box set of their own. While I have no official confirmation one way or another, I would bet that the four films will eventually come out sooner or later, possibly through the Eclipse series. (Edit: Criterion has now confirmed that the discs are getting a separate release.)

Whatever you do, remember that the AK100 films do not have those audio commentaries and documentaries found on earlier Criterion releases. So do think twice before you sell those older Criterion discs to replace them with the AK100 box set.

AK100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa will be available for purchase from December 8th, and can among other places be bought from Amazon.com, which currently prices the box set at $284.99 ($114.96 off the retail price), as well as from Amazon.ca.

So, this month I’m ready to face the facts and come to the conclusion that a quick note is better than nothing at all.

In other words, this month’s Film Club film is Sanjuro (1962), a sequel (or companion piece) to 1961’s Yojimbo, which we discussed last year. In fact, those discussions may be a good starting point for Sanjuro, although as it is very much a free-standing film in its own, no knowledge of the prequel is necessarily required.

You may also be interested in the 2007 remake, if you can find it.

Please, don’t let my current work load keep you from tackling Sanjuro — the forums are always open!

The Blu-ray disc is presented in 1080p High Definition Widescreen format with Japanese, English, Spanish, French, German and Italian DTS master audio. Special features seem interesting, and include Chris Marker’s making-of documentary “A.K.”, a documentary on Kurosawa called “Akira Kurosawa: The Epic and the Intimate”, a Portrait of Kurosawa by Japanese cinema expert and interpreter Catherine Cadou, a documentary on Samurai art called simply “The Samurai”, an interview with a Japanese art of war expert, and a 20-page collectible booklet. BD-Live features are also advertised.

Suggested retail price is currently rumoured to be $39.99.

Some of you may remember that Criterion was to release Ran on Blu-ray last year, but cancelled the release only weeks before the advertised date. As their DVD release also quickly went out of print, it became clear that Criterion had lost rights to the film. At least based on the list of extras, it seems like Lionsgate is now doing its very best to convince cinephiles that the Criterion release that never was should not be missed, and that they can do the job just as well as Criterion. Whether this is true will be revealed in February, when we get to see what Lionsgate’s transfer looks like — especially, how the colours come across.