Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa is the reason Western audiences learned to take Japanese cinema seriously. He is also the reason George Lucas made Star Wars, the reason Sergio Leone invented the spaghetti Western, and the reason the word "sensei" carries weight in film schools around the world. His influence is so pervasive that most people who have never seen one of his films have seen dozens of films that exist because of him.

He began as a painter, and he never stopped being one. His storyboards were watercolor compositions of extraordinary beauty, and his films are composed with the eye of an artist who understood that cinema is, at its foundation, a visual medium. Every frame of a Kurosawa film could be hung in a gallery. But unlike paintings, his frames move — and they move with a kinetic energy that no one has matched.

Seven Samurai is the greatest action film ever made. It is also the greatest ensemble film, the greatest film about class, and one of the greatest films about what it means to fight for something larger than yourself. It runs three and a half hours and not a single minute is wasted. The final battle in the rain — shot with multiple cameras, a technique Kurosawa pioneered — is the sequence that every action director has been trying to replicate for seventy years.

Rashomon did something no film had done before: it told the same story from four different perspectives and refused to tell the audience which one was true. It introduced the concept of subjective truth to cinema and, by extension, to the entire vocabulary of modern storytelling. The "Rashomon effect" is now a term used in psychology, philosophy, and law.

Ikiru is his most personal film — the story of a dying bureaucrat who discovers meaning in one final act of creation. It is devastating and quiet and completely unlike anything else in his filmography, which proves that Kurosawa's range was as vast as his ambition. Yojimbo invented the anti-hero action film. Ran reimagined King Lear as a Japanese epic of such visual grandeur that it makes most modern blockbusters look like television.

He struggled in his later years. Studios abandoned him. He attempted suicide in 1971. Then Coppola and Lucas helped finance Kagemusha, and Spielberg called him "the Shakespeare of cinema." He made Ran at seventy-five, Dreams at eighty, and continued working until his death at eighty-eight.

The Emperor is gone. His empire endures.