The 20th anniversary celebrations continue at TIFF Cinematheque with a callback to one of the organization’s greatest glories – the Akira Kurosawa retrospective assembled back in 1990.
Now, to mark the occasion of what would have been the director’s 100th birthday, Kurosawa’s films are returning to the Cinematheque screen in an expanded series, Centenary Of A Sensei. Technically, the highlights (click titles for showtimes) include a 35mm restoration of Rashomon, which opens the series tonight at 7 pm, and new 35mm prints of Stray Dog, Dodes’ka-den and Ran, but in more realistic terms, pretty much everything Kurosawa made can be considered a highlight.
Seriously, look at some of the other titles on this list. Drunken Angel, a crime drama about an ailing yakuza (Toshiro Mifune) and the doctor (Takashi Shimura) who becomes his closest friend. High And Low, a kidnap thriller of clockwork brilliance that elegantly transposes an Evan Hunter novel to 1960s Tokyo. The Hidden Fortress, a tremendously entertaining epic that also happened to be one of George Lucas’s primary references for Star Wars. Seven Samurai, the marvellous energy of which echoes through Western popular culture in everything from Battle Beyond The Stars to Galaxy Quest.
I could go on. Kagemusha, a rich meditation on identity and destiny disguised as a dazzling action movie Sanjuro and Yojimbo, two of the greatest samurai movies ever made by anyone, anywhere. The Bad Sleep Well, which transposes Hamlet to the corporate world Throne Of Blood, which brings Macbeth to feudal Japan. The Lower Depths, a stage play translated to the screen with claustrophobic intensity. And Dersu Uzala, a visually stunning tale of men and nature filmed on location in Siberia.
I won’t pretend that Kurosawa’s work after Ran stands with the films that came before it Dreams, Rhapsody In August and Madadayo! all felt like they’d been plucked from his sketchbook rather than delivered fully-formed onto the screen. But all three of those films are still worth watching in the context of his career – particularly Dreams, which seems to be hiding a much more interesting movie within its margins every time I see it.
With that proviso, any one of those is worth a trip down to Jackman Hall in the next few weeks. Well, except for the weekend of June 25-28, when the venue shuts down for the G-20 summit, forcing the rescheduling of most of the weekend’s programming and the outright cancellation of Kurosawa’s Ikiru – one more thing about which we can be pissed off at Stephen Harper, I guess.[rssbreak]
