Creating the Wikipedia Kurosawa Page

I am using this post on my blog as an area in which those who want to work on the Kurosawa Featured Article Project (see post A Birthday Present for Akira Kurosawa below) can collaborate, offering suggestions, content and revisions to create a Wikpedia page that will be chosen (hopefully during 2010, Kurosawa's centennial year) as a featured article on the site's home page.

Those who wish to participate should respond by posting a comment to this particular post. Please keep all comments constructive. What I and others might write may be controversial to some AK fans and scholars. Our ability to complete this project will depend on our resolving such differences civilly.

Vili Maunula, the owner of the excellent Kurosawa website, http://akirakurosawa.info/, has helpfully suggest a general structure for the article much different from the one currently featured on that Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/akira_kurosawa). Here is what Mr. Maunula came up with. The "x"s represent section headings: single for main headings, two or more for subheadings. (He has written, and I agree, that it would be pointless to number the headings at this point, as many may be added or subtracted as we go along.)

Lead Section
---------------
x Life and career
x.x Youth [1910-1935]
x.x Director in training [1936-1942]
x.x Early works [1943-1945]
x.x Postwar years [1946-1950]
x.x International recognition [1951-1954]
x.x Late 50s [1955-1959]
x.x Final works with Mifune [1960-1965]
x.x Brushes with Hollywood [1966-1969]
x.x Difficult 70s [1970-1979]
x.x Resurgence of financing [1980-1989]
x.x Last decade [1990-1998]
x.x Death and posthumous works [1998-2010]

x Directorial approach
x.x Influences
x.x Kurosawa and his contemporaries
x.x Working methods
x.x Collaboration with the Kurosawa-gumi
x.x Recurring themes
x.x Style
x.x "Western" director

x Legacy
x.x Kurosawa's influence
x.x.x Influence on cinematic arts
x.x.x Remakes
x.x.x Homages and references
x.x Film studies and Kurosawa
x.x Criticism of Kurosawa

x Works
x.x Filmography
x.x As an assistant director
x.x As a screenwriter
x.x Collaborations and television work
x.x Theater
x.x Books
x.x Awards

-----------------
x See also
x References
x Further reading
x External links

This is certainly a comprehensive and coherent structure from which we can work. I just have a few comments:

1. The biographical section divides AK's life exactly as I would wish to do so, except that I would combine the two 1950s subheadings into one single subheading with the title "International recognition." Also, there are some titles of subheadings that I would change: "Brushes with Hollywood" should perhaps be changed simply to "Tora! Tora! Tora!" as his aborted work on that film was his main activity during those bleak years. "Difficult 70s" and "Resurgence of financing" sound too breezy and informal for an encyclopedia article. Otherwise this part can remain as is.

2. For the second section, "Directorial approach" (although taken from the article as it now exists) sounds unsatisfactory. I would welcome suggestions on this section title. "Influences" might be changed to "Cinematic influences," because in that subsection, we would want to deal exclusively with his influence from film, rather than other art forms (e.g., Noh). I believe "Working methods" and "Style" might profitably be combined into the same subsection. "'Western' director" might be changed to something like "Reputation as 'Western' director."

3. In the "Legacy" section, the title of the "Influence on cinematic arts" subsection might be changed to something like "Overall cinematic influence." "Homages and references" should perhaps be changed to "Homages and allusions" to avoid confusion with the numbered references within the article itself. I'm not sure that the "Film studies and Kurosawa" subsection is even necessary: what would be the angle to pursue there? "Criticism of Kurosawa" should be plural: "Criticisms."

4. In the "Works" section, "Filmography" should remain the first subsection and "As director," "As assistant director" and "As editor" should be the sub-subsections under it. I don't know what television work he did besides personal appearances and commercials. I wasn't aware that he did any theatre work at all.

Please comment on any of the above and add any additional changes you would propose.


The passage below contains my draft for the revised Lead Section of the Kurosawa article. This section introduces him, explains why he is historically important and summarizes what is contained in the rest of the article.

First, here is the Lead as it appears in the article right now (I have included underscoring where links appear in the original:

"Akira Kurosawa (黒澤 明 or 黒沢 明, Kurosawa Akira?, 23 March 1910 – 6 September 1998) was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. In a career that spanned 50 years, Kurosawa directed 30 films. He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in film history. In 1989, he was awarded the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement 'for cinematic accomplishments that have inspired, delighted, enriched and entertained worldwide audiences and influenced filmmakers throughout the world.' [1]"

Here is my revised version:

"Akira Kurosawa (黒澤 明 or 黒沢 明 Kurosawa Akira?, 23 March 1910 – 6 September 1998) was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. In a film career that spanned over half a century, he directed or co-directed 31 films.

"Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936 following a brief, unsuccessful career as a painter. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director during the Second World War with the popular action film, Sanshiro Sugata (1943) (a.k.a. Judo Saga). The critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast a then-unknown actor, Toshiro Mifune, in a starring role (the two men would collaborate on another 15 films), cemented his reputation as one of the most important filmmakers in Japan. Rashomon (1950), which premiered in Tokyo on August 25, 1950, and which also starred Mifune, became the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and was then released in Europe and North America. The success of this film opened up Western film markets for the first time to the products of the Japanese film industry, which in turn led to international recognition for other significant Japanese film artists, such as Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Kurosawa released approximately a film a year, often to worldwide acclaim. After the mid-1960s, his output became much more infrequent, and his later work –- which included his last two epics, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985) –- was sometimes more admired abroad than in his native land.

"He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in movie history. In 1990, he was awarded the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement 'for cinematic accomplishments that have inspired, delighted, enriched and entertained worldwide audiences and influenced filmmakers throughout the world.' [1]"

Please note that because the Academy Award ceremony of March 26, 1990 honored mostly films make the previous year, it is called "the 1989 Academy Awards." However, AK's award was for lifetime achievement and thus belongs to the year it was actually given to him: 1990, when AK turned 80 years old.

Also note that I have numbered AKs films as 31 rather than 30, counting Those Who Make Tomorrow (1946), on the grounds that a) he never denied that he was actually involved in the making of that film, though not as sole director; b) it was commercially released at the time; and c) AK did not remove his name from the credits. The circumstance that he never wanted to make the picture and was dissatisfied with how it turned out is important but not sufficient to delete the work completely from his filmography, though those facts should be noted when we list the work. (Note also that the film appears on IMDB and in filmographies in books, such as Audie Bock's.) If directors could eliminate films from the record that they were ordered to make but hated, most Hollywood directors could (and probably would) erase half the movies from their filmographies on the exact same grounds.

Thank you in advance for any contributions and suggestions you may make.

JDB

A Birthday Present for Akira Kurosawa

I would like to make the following modest proposal.

As Akira Kurosawa's centennial birthday will occur on March 23rd of this year, I propose that the biographic article on the filmmaker on Wikipedia.com be extensively revised so that it can be submitted to be upgraded to feature article status, and can thus be presented as the featured article on Wikipedia's home page on March 23rd, 2010. It is only right that one of the greatest directors who ever lived -- and the most famous Asian director who ever lived -- should be accorded this honor.

The current rating, according to Wikipedia's quality scale, of the Kurosawa article is, rather shockingly, "C-class," even though Kurosawa's biography as a topic has been rated of Top importance in the category of WikiProject Japan and of Core importance in the category of WikiProject Biography/Actors and Filmmakers. (It also appears in the WikiProject Screenwriters category.) Thus, the article would need to be upgraded pretty substantially in a hurry. I would like to consult with other Kurosawa experts (I definitely can't do this alone) about what needs to be done to bring this piece up to featured article status in two months.

I have reviewed the article and the following are some ways that I feel it can be improved:

• There is a complete lack of narrative flow in the description of Kurosawa's career as a whole that needs to be corrected.
  
  His career, from most every reference work I've ever consulted and from my own viewing, falls into very sharply defined periods (e.g., the war years; the immediate postwar period; the "classic" years, including Rashomon, Ikiru, Yojimbo, etc.; and so on). But there is no sense of this structure at all in the article as it now exists. We read about his early career and his later career, but the middle (and most famous) period is not addressed at all. In the section about the later films, we read that he made films far less frequently, because they were more difficult to finance, but the article does not explain why this was the case. Just as importantly, there is no sense in the article of the context of Japanese film culture and of the movie industry as a whole in which A.K.'s achievement can make some kind of sense. His "Golden Age" -- 1950 through 1965 -- roughly corresponded with the so-called Golden Age of Japanese cinema, when domestic movies in general had a huge and loyal audience and esteemed directors -- Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and others -- enjoyed unprecedented (but far from total) freedom to realize their creative visions.
  
  
• The section "Directorial Approach" should be revised extensively.
  
  This section should probably be renamed "Artistic Style" or "Artistic Technique." It makes some interesting points about the director's visual techniques, but it doesn't place them properly within his history. For example, it mentions, correctly, that he liked to use the editing technique of the screen "wipe" as a transitional device between scenes (this device appears from the very beginning of his career, in Sanshiro Sugata). Yet the section also indicates that he preferred to shoot scenes with telephoto lenses and multiple cameras, failing to mention that these methods only appeared in his work from Seven Samurai on. This is not a minor issue. Confusing such matters makes his artistic development less clear. The section also fails to mention the admiration which his Japanese colleagues felt for his skills as an editor. (They always referred to him as "The World's Greatest Editor.) Citations in general are very lacking in this section.
  
  
• The section on "Influences" (which rather should read something like "Artistic Influences on Kurosawa") is not quite complete.
  
  The nature and significance of the influence of the directors whom A.K. most admired (e.g., John Ford) is not communicated in the article. Some very important European influences, such as that of the French director Jean Renoir, go unmentioned. Finally, in the late 1990s, shortly before his death, he compiled a list consisting of 100 favorite films of his, in chronological order, with, however, a self-imposed limit of one film per director (presumably, he would have chosen more John Ford films other than My Darling Clementine, had he not thus limited himself). This list reflects the wide range of his cinematic interests and enthusiasms and is thus appropriate to this section.
  
  
• The section titled "Influence" (which perhaps ought to be "Film Artists Who Were Influenced by Kurosawa) is rambling and undisciplined.
  
  Films that are not officially credited as remakes of films by Kurosawa (except in the case of A Fistful of Dollars, which A.K. successfully sued to receive credit) ought to be deleted. The bulleted list of directors cited as being influenced by him is far too long, and the name of any director not including a usable quote about A.K. should be deleted.
  
  
• The section titled "Collaboration" (which should perhaps be called "Collaborators") is fairly good, but flawed.
  
  For example, it fails to mention the crucial qualities that these collaborators (such as the composer Fumio Hayasaska) added to his films, though A.K. himself in published statements was quite explicit about the importance of their contribution.
  
  
• A new section should be created titled "Recurring Themes in Kurosawa's Films."
  
  Some examples of such themes might be: "Master and Student," "Personal Responsibility," "The Fateful Meeting," "Clash of the Upper and Lower Classes" and "The Ego." Citations in books and on the web demonstrating these themes might take a little digging, but I believe they can be found.
  
  
• There should be a new short section on the importance of the films that Kurosawa set in contemporary times -- e.g., Ikiru, Record of a Living Being -- as opposed to the samurai epics.
  
  
• A brief subsection on the supposedly "Western" quality of his film technique should be added.
  
  
• Finally, a short section entitled "Criticisms of Kurosawa" must be added for balance.
  

These are just a few of my ideas. I would ask any reader who can claim expertise on this subject to look over the Wikipedia article clearly and make your own suggestions. Together, lovers of Kurosawa's films should be able to completely revise and correct the Wikipedia page by March 23rd.

David Baldwin