[March 23 1910, legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa was born. To celebrate the centennial of his life, his prolific contributions to the world of cinema, and immense impact on the hearts and minds of those quietly mourning his absence, staffers at Row Three are (rather enthusiastically) taking this opportunity to share their own experiences of the Kurosawa catalogue]
Ksagemusha has the distinction of being the first Kurosawa film I ever saw, and I will forever hold it in high regard and strong affection. The film is a visual, artistic triumph. Though Dodes’ka-den and Dersu Uzala certainly have their merits, Kagemusha seems to me to be the first film in Kurosawa’s colour canon where he fully utilized and exploded the opportunities of the palette, any doubt of which should be immediately quelled Kagemusha’s second sequence – a page running through a seemingly endless forest of different-coloured warriors.
As the legend goes, when Kurosawa could not initially raise the funds to make Kagemusha, he spent his time painting the sequences as he saw them in his mind. The resulting film has a decadent splendour which only Dreams would eventually surmount. » Read the rest of the entry..
