The Japanese filmmaker who directed some thirty films across half a century and is widely regarded as one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema. His Rashomon (1950) won the top prize at Venice and brought Japanese cinema to wide Western attention, while Seven Samurai (1954) became a template that filmmakers everywhere borrowed. His samurai pictures were remade as Hollywood Westerns and his techniques shaped directors from Sergio Leone to George Lucas, even as critics at home for periods attacked him as too Western to be truly Japanese.
A bandit, a murdered man’s wife, the dead man speaking through a medium, and a woodcutter each give a different account of the same killing in a forest, and no two stories match. Akira Kurosawa filmed this in 1950 as Rashomon, and the film did two things at once. It won the top prize at the Venice festival and forced Western audiences to realize that Japan had been making serious cinema all along. It later gave its name to the Rashomon effect, the unsettling idea that there may be no single true version of an event, only the versions people tell. Within a few years his samurai films were being remade as American Westerns, and young directors abroad were studying how he moved a camera. He had taught the world to see Japan, and then he taught the world's filmmakers how to make movies.