What I like about Shakespeare and Kurosawa is that they were both very deliberate creators and knew the machinery of what they made, yet they were also never able to dissociate their own distinct identity and emotional power from whatever they did. Many musicians can't even read music (Beatles), but Shakespeare and Kurosawa were able to have, I think, a powerful technical and human understanding of their medium... To hold both those powers often dilutes the other, but I think their genius was so great they absorbed both.Montresor wrote:Hitchcock was certainly great.
Spielberg called Kurosawa the "Shakespeare of film" for good reason. No other film maker has so consistently brought greatness to film, interweaving plot, theme, character, and cinematography to achieve raw beauty and human truth. For me, Kurosawa is at least twice as good as the next best film maker. I'd go so far as to pick Kurosawa as the greatest artist of the twentieth century.
Most 20th century anything (film, pop music) strikes me as going for immediate distinction--rock 'n roll, Expressionism, harsh angles in modern art--try to shock, whereas Kurosawa and Shakespeare (obviously Shakespeare) were removed--their atmosphere was entirely a world to its own, and it's hard to explain, but I believe they sucked in their cultural pasts and art movements around them and made them their own... And of course, like Shakespeare took old stories into Elizabethan drama standards, so did Kurosawa blend modern anachronisms into Japanese past (in Seven Samurai the samurai are concerned about Rikichi "bottling up" his feelings, which is very modern; I doubt people were so aware of their emotions in everyday life in the 16th century).
I'll give it a read if you're game . . .
well, 3 out of 4 aint bad. 