Poetry of unadulterated imagination: The late style of akira kurosawa

Kurosawas career spanned 50 years, during which he became the most celebrated Japanese film director in the West. Critical acclaim has focused, in the West and in his native country, on the films he produced during the 1950s and 1960sthat is, the middle part of his long careerwhereas reception of his late works has ranged from ambivalence to outright rejection. Adopting a life-span perspective to creative achievement, the author exposes a tendency to examine Kurosawas late films through criteria evolved specifically for his earlier works, criteria that the director later greatly modified and partly disowned. Concentrating on major stylistic shifts, a movement from action-oriented, linear, and conflictual narrative toward minimal, cyclical, and desublimated, highly ambiguous forms of cinematic expression is identified, particularly in Kurosawas three last filmsDreams (A. Kurosawa, 1990), Rhapsody in August (A. Kurosawa & K. Murata, 1991), and Madadayo (A. Kurosawa & H. Uchida, 1993). Discussing these transformations in the context of aging and relating them to various other examples of late-life works, a reexamination of Kurosawas films attending to life-span developmental processes is suggested.