The his­to­ry books say that there were three Japan­ese film­mak­ers to emerge in the 1950s – Ken­ji Mizoguchi, Yasu­jiro Ozu and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa. Nev­er mind that Mizoguchi and Ozu made many of their best movies in the 1930s. Nev­er mind that mas­ter­ful, inno­v­a­tive direc­tors like Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshi­ta have been unfair­ly over­shad­owed by the bril­liance of these three greats.

Mizoguchi was an ear­ly mod­ernist who by the end of his career made med­i­ta­tive movies about how women suf­fer at the hands of men. His mas­ter­pieces like Uget­su and San­sho Dayu feel like Bud­dhist scroll paint­ings come to life. Ozu, “the most Japan­ese” of all film­mak­ers, made qui­et­ly mov­ing dra­mas about fam­i­lies, like Tokyo Sto­ry, but did so in a way that dis­card­ed such Hol­ly­wood prin­ci­ples as con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing and the 180 degree rule. Ozu was a qui­et rad­i­cal.

Com­pared to Ozu and Mizoguchi, Kurosawa’s movies are noisy, mas­cu­line and vital. Unlike Ozu, he didn’t chal­lenge Hol­ly­wood film form but improved on it. Born rough­ly a decade after the oth­er two film­mak­ers, Kuro­sawa spent his youth watch­ing West­ern movies, absorb­ing the lessons of his cin­e­mat­ic heroes like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra. At his cre­ative height, in the 1950s and 60s, Kuro­sawa pro­duced mas­ter­piece after mas­ter­piece. Hol­ly­wood would remake or ref­er­ence Kuro­sawa con­stant­ly in the years that fol­lowed but few of those films had Kurosawa’s inven­tive­ness.

Tony Zhou, who has made a career of dis­sect­ing movies in his excel­lent video series Every Frame a Pic­ture, argues that the key to Kuro­sawa is move­ment. “A Kuro­sawa movie moves like no one else’s,” Zhou notes in his video. “Each one is a mas­ter class in dif­fer­ent types of motion and also ways to com­bine them.”

Kuro­sawa had an innate under­stand­ing that there is inher­ent dra­ma in the wind blow­ing in the trees. Like Andrei Tarkovsky and lat­er Ter­rence Mal­ick, he liked to place human dra­ma square­ly in the realm of nature. The rain falls, a fire rages and that move­ment makes an image com­pelling. He under­stood that graph­ic con­sid­er­a­tions out­weighed psy­cho­log­i­cal ones – he sim­pli­fied and exag­ger­at­ed a character’s move­ment with the frame to make char­ac­ter traits and emo­tions easy to reg­is­ter for the audi­ence. His cam­era move­ments were clear, moti­vat­ed and flu­id. Zhou com­pares Sev­en Samu­rai with The Avengers. You might have thought that The Avengers was unin­spired and soul­less but after watch­ing Zhou’s video, you’ll under­stand why – aside from the sil­ly plot and char­ac­ters – the movie was unin­spired and soul­less. The piece should be required view­ing for film­mak­ers every­where. You can watch it above.

And below you can see anoth­er video Zhou did on Kuro­sawa, focus­ing on his 1960 movie The Bad Sleep Well.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

David Lynch Lists His Favorite Films & Direc­tors, Includ­ing Felli­ni, Wilder, Tati & Hitch­cock

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Star in Japan­ese Whisky Com­mer­cials (1980)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

One type of argu­ment made against “auteur the­o­ry,” which posits a film’s direc­tor as its “author,” holds that cer­tain non-direc­to­r­i­al col­lab­o­ra­tors con­tribute just as many — or, as Pauline Kael argued about Cit­i­zen Kane, more — of a work of cin­e­ma’s defin­ing qual­i­ties. Sure­ly a video essay­ist like Lewis Bond, co-cre­ator with Luiza Liz Bond of Youtube chan­nel The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy, sub­scribes to auteur the­o­ry: just look at the increas­ing­ly in-depth analy­ses he’s cre­at­ed on Stan­ley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, and David Lynch — all, of course, direc­tors. But the recent Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy essay “The Cin­e­matog­ra­phy That Changed Cin­e­ma” sees him turn­ing away from the fig­ure of the direc­tor, explor­ing instead the auteur-like con­tri­bu­tions of those mas­ters of the cam­era.

Any com­pe­tent cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er can make shots pret­ty; few can make them tru­ly cin­e­mat­ic. Here we use “cin­e­mat­ic” in the sense that Peter Green­away would, refer­ring to the vast capa­bil­i­ties of the medi­um to go beyond pho­to­graph­i­cal­ly illus­trat­ing essen­tial­ly ver­bal sto­ries — capa­bil­i­ties that, alas, have so far gone most­ly unused. It should come as no sur­prise this essay uses Green­away’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover to estab­lish its per­spec­tive on the pow­er of cin­e­matog­ra­phy.

Iron­i­cal­ly, the movie’s inven­tive­ness in that respect and all oth­ers pro­duces “a film so removed from cin­e­ma that it rarely feels as though it was even intend­ed to be a film.” Shot by Sacha Vierny (best known for Alain Resnais’ Hiroshi­ma mon amour), its ultra-arti­fi­cial images resem­ble those of no oth­er movies, much less any­thing in real life, and for that rea­son they sweep us along.

Draw­ing exam­ples from dozens of films over half an hour, the Bonds show how cin­e­matog­ra­phers have not just rep­re­sent­ed or enhanced real­i­ty, but cre­at­ed it anew. This hap­pens in such pic­tures famous for their visu­al lush­ness as Michael Pow­ell’s The Red Shoes (cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er: Jack Cardiff), Kubrick­’s Bar­ry Lyn­don (John Alcott), Ter­rence Mal­ick­’s Days of Heav­en (Nés­tor Almen­dros), and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa’s Ran (Asakazu Nakai, Takao Saitô, and Shôji Ueda). But it also hap­pens in less like­ly cin­e­mat­ic realms: 1970s Ital­ian hor­ror, doc­u­men­tary, and even pro­duc­tions stripped near­ly bare of mon­ey and equip­ment, whether by choice (as under the rig­ors of the Dogme 95 man­i­festo) or by neces­si­ty (as in Mikhail Kala­to­zov’s still aes­thet­i­cal­ly exhil­a­rat­ing I Am Cuba). You could call each of these films beau­ti­ful, but as every cinephile has felt, film does­n’t exist to achieve beau­ty: it exists to go beyond it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

A Mes­mer­iz­ing Super­cut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

Every Acad­e­my Award Win­ner for Best Cin­e­matog­ra­phy in One Super­cut: From 1927’s Sun­rise to 2016’s La La Land

How Famous Paint­ings Inspired Cin­e­mat­ic Shots in the Films of Taran­ti­no, Gilliam, Hitch­cock & More: A Big Super­cut

The Great­est Cut in Film His­to­ry: Watch the “Match Cut” Immor­tal­ized by Lawrence of Ara­bia

The His­to­ry of the Movie Cam­era in Four Min­utes: From the Lumiere Broth­ers to Google Glass

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.