Akira Kurosawa

Although Rashomon was not part of his great works( released in 1950 that brought him on international scene) shown on Zee Studio, on Sundays, few images of outstanding cinema stuck to mind. The black and white films of the maestro were like classic poetry on celluloid, interspersed with mellowed notes of shakuhachi flute. The notes and images spread as softly as mist, lingering, enveloping, touching, as delicately as dew.
The bizarre violent roughness of Seven Samurai, or, delicate tale of ambiguous love of the Red Beard, or, the thriller like suspense of High and Low, for each genre, the director had a different pace and craft. No wonder, he is credited with evolving a new idiom of Japanese cinema.
For High and Low, he uses just one colour in a single scene. The strange gathering and angles used in High and Low to show mob mentality is unparalleled.
Though, the film was adapted in Hindi, it could not go beyond a thriller. It failed to touch the metaphysical aspects Kurosawa leads to, towards the end , with the suggestion of sheer visuals.
The confidence and brilliance of his cinema is awe inspiring, with moral ambiguity of its characters and humanism, almost feminine in treatment. Despite a huge cultural distance between India and Japan, in the cluttered babble of our own language cinema, visual power of Kurosawa’s films convey the truth eloquently and forcibly.
In one of the scenes, a samurai hung upside down from a tree top with a rope on the last lag of his life cries like a wounded fowl. The sun is about to rise, trees and branches appear like ghost arms. While the town with its men and warriors sleep, it is a non- descript fragile, desolate woman who dares to ease the rope to release him. Both have transcended fear, she in her desolation, he, in his brush with death. The scene is like a slice of canvas, devoid of colour, filled with amazing mix of light and shade.
In the final scene of High and Low, when the murderer and the victim face each other in a jail, their images are reflected in the image of the other. Weaving a suggestion, that the tormented lives in the tormentor and vice versa.
Kurosawa’s study of the Samurai tradition is unique, with all possible shades of humanism.