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The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa - Revised and Expanded Edition
The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of 88, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon , which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's films, Stephen Prince provides two new chapters that examine Kurosawa's remaining films, placing him in the context of cinema history. Prince also discusses how Kurosawa furnished a template for some well-known Hollywood directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas.
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.
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.
Hardcover
First published December 1, 1990
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About the author
Stephen Prince
43 books12 followersStephen Prince teaches film history, criticism, and theory at Virginia Tech’s School of Performing Arts . He received his Ph.D from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 21, 2007
Stephen Prince’s comprehensive book, The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, puts the master director’s work into perspective as he classifies his film into four distinct creative stages. The first shows how Kurosawa style was developed in films like Sanshiro Sugata and They Who Tread On The Tiger’s Tail. The next stage focuses on how his political convictions are realized in an “age of heroism” in some of his most celebrated films like Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Stray Dog, Ikiru, Yojimbo, High and Low, and Red Beard. The following stage, in which Kurosawa had trouble finding financing for his film projects, shows the master questioning his youthful idealism. The result is a number of pessimistic films like Kagemusha and Ran. The final phase of his filmmaking career reflects a contemplative moralizing and a preoccupation with issues of ageing and his artistic legacy. The final chapter of the book looks at the legacy of Kurosawa that can be seen in the work of directors like Arthur Penn, Samuel Peckinpah, John Sturges, Walter Hill, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Martin Scorcese, and Brian DePalma not mention relative newcomers Quentin Tarantino and John Woo. His discussion of the influence of Kurosawa on the making of The Wild Bunch makes me want to go back and watch it again. Prince is particularly good at analyzing the filming techniques regarding framing, camera angels, and the number of cameras Kurosawa used to achieve the particular results he was looking for in his films. He also gives a particularly close analysis to a handful of films like Ikiru, Yojimbo, High and Low, and Red Beard. It is a very scholarly and insightful look at the impressive film career of Kurosawa, one of my favorite filmmakers.
November 23, 2024
started reading this in my research of kurosawa (and in particular of his film high and low) and it is very comprehensive. a dense and definitive work of scholarship on the entirety of his filmography, with between 5 and 20 pages dedicated to each film. the legacy section left a little to be desired and the closeness between the book's publication and kurosawa's late period dates its (frankly degrading) opinion on his final films; but i appreciated how it moves largely chronologically through his career, contextualising his biography in the analysis. i came away with a heavier appreciation for films i haven't seen or remember not liking as much, and it was interesting to read an explanation of his movies as adaptations of form. like stephen prince, i too find the emphasis on kurosawa's kinetic editing to be only the most visible legacy of his technique when his composition and general quietude is more revealing in its characterisation and authorial perspective. will likely return to read sections of this on occasion.
November 30, 2021
I’m not sure this book could have been written if the word dialectic, and it’s various forms, were disallowed; but it is an overall sound, sensitive and thorough examination of one of cinema’s great directors. Mr Prince does not have the easiest writing style but he has a lot to teach about Kurosawa. I’d recommend this to any fan of Akira Kurosawa’s films or Japanese cinema.
July 10, 2023
Excellent book by Prince. This was a thorough examination of Kurosawa's work - up to Ran. I have not read the updated version that includes Kurosawa's last three films. Throughout the book, Prince explores Kurosawa's techniques, how he uses cinematic forms to probe the content of the film (the dialectic). This book made me see his films in a new way.
July 31, 2019
If I had a dollar for every time this dude uses the word "dialectic" in this book, I'd have over $100 (which I could REALLY use right now).
May 15, 2007
This book begins with much promise but ultimately ends in disappointment. Prince begins by stressing the importance of historically-based analysis. He suggests that one understand Kurosawa's films as "address[ing] the Japan shattered by World War II and [as helping] reshape society." (8) This is a most interesting, preliminary claim that initially promises certain fascinating paths of reading. Also, Prince begins by criticizing 'auteurism' and naive assumptions of 'authorship'. He notes that the formation of 'film studies' as an academic field imposed a "major code" that reduced all Kurosawa films to "the ideal of humanism". Now this is also promising - finally, a comprehensive work on Kurosawa, other than that of Donald Richie, that gets beyond 'auteurism'.
Unfortunately, Prince's book does not live up to these introductory assertions. First, Prince continually makes use of terms like "Zen Buddhism", "heroic ideal", "warrior ideal", instead of terms like "humanist universalism" as if they were more accurate interpretive concepts for understanding Kurosawa's films (see pp. 10, 11, 28, 30, 115). However, he never 'historicizes' these very concepts but treats them as somewhat static and a-historical. I don't think that one would find it completely convincing or that interesting if some critic put to use concepts like "Christian providence" or "protestant individualism" for the purposes of deciphering the work of Orsen Welles without demonstrating first the historic intricacies of such empty concepts and second their specific, contextual relevance to a given Welles' film-text. Thus, it must be asked: why make use of analogous empty signifiers of Japanese history and culture so carelessly in relation to Kurosawa's films? Ultimately, Prince's interpretive framework remains less than convincing , for his initial imperative to read "against the grain of history" is violated repeatedly throughout the book.
Also, it is disappointing that right after Prince criticizes the usual appeal to authorship or auteurism he categorically states, "Kurosawa's films form a series of inquiries on the place and the possibilities of the autonomous self within a culture whose social relations stress group ties and obligations." (27) From this Prince establishes his own master code for interpreting the totality of Kurosawa's work based upon the supposed `intentions' of Kurosawa-as-author. It is a code that reads Kurosawa's films as being primarily about the negotiation of the ego in the modern world. Prince continues, throughout the work, to make sense of the rich diversity of films in terms of this restricted framework. He writes, "Kurosawa's world is an arena where his characters must be tested , where they must be victorious in their goals or must be broken and defeated." (116) Later, he reduces the entire complexity of Kurosawa films into a `meta-narrative' that is "...the passage from willed optimism of the early films to the ethic of resignation and despair that pervades the late works..." (154) The meaning that Prince detects in these films is not wrong per say but way too limited and reductive. There is a vast complexity of meaning and significance in Kurosawa's diverse catalogue of films, and some of it is in direct contradiction to Prince's `auteurist' thesis. I cannot say that I was satisfied with Prince's analysis for these reasons. However, if one is sympathetic to auteur forms of criticism, then this book may be for you. Just remember what Foucault says in `What is an Author?': "the author serves to neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts." Personally, I think the "contradictions" that one might locate in a series of texts serve as the sites of most interest in any interpretive investigation; thus, they should not be effaced by way of some reductive narrative of authorship.
Unfortunately, Prince's book does not live up to these introductory assertions. First, Prince continually makes use of terms like "Zen Buddhism", "heroic ideal", "warrior ideal", instead of terms like "humanist universalism" as if they were more accurate interpretive concepts for understanding Kurosawa's films (see pp. 10, 11, 28, 30, 115). However, he never 'historicizes' these very concepts but treats them as somewhat static and a-historical. I don't think that one would find it completely convincing or that interesting if some critic put to use concepts like "Christian providence" or "protestant individualism" for the purposes of deciphering the work of Orsen Welles without demonstrating first the historic intricacies of such empty concepts and second their specific, contextual relevance to a given Welles' film-text. Thus, it must be asked: why make use of analogous empty signifiers of Japanese history and culture so carelessly in relation to Kurosawa's films? Ultimately, Prince's interpretive framework remains less than convincing , for his initial imperative to read "against the grain of history" is violated repeatedly throughout the book.
Also, it is disappointing that right after Prince criticizes the usual appeal to authorship or auteurism he categorically states, "Kurosawa's films form a series of inquiries on the place and the possibilities of the autonomous self within a culture whose social relations stress group ties and obligations." (27) From this Prince establishes his own master code for interpreting the totality of Kurosawa's work based upon the supposed `intentions' of Kurosawa-as-author. It is a code that reads Kurosawa's films as being primarily about the negotiation of the ego in the modern world. Prince continues, throughout the work, to make sense of the rich diversity of films in terms of this restricted framework. He writes, "Kurosawa's world is an arena where his characters must be tested , where they must be victorious in their goals or must be broken and defeated." (116) Later, he reduces the entire complexity of Kurosawa films into a `meta-narrative' that is "...the passage from willed optimism of the early films to the ethic of resignation and despair that pervades the late works..." (154) The meaning that Prince detects in these films is not wrong per say but way too limited and reductive. There is a vast complexity of meaning and significance in Kurosawa's diverse catalogue of films, and some of it is in direct contradiction to Prince's `auteurist' thesis. I cannot say that I was satisfied with Prince's analysis for these reasons. However, if one is sympathetic to auteur forms of criticism, then this book may be for you. Just remember what Foucault says in `What is an Author?': "the author serves to neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts." Personally, I think the "contradictions" that one might locate in a series of texts serve as the sites of most interest in any interpretive investigation; thus, they should not be effaced by way of some reductive narrative of authorship.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews