The Cinema of Kurosawa

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course explores the cinema of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998). We will screen a number of his best-known films, including "Stray Dog" (1949), "Rashomon" (1950), "Ikiru" (1952), "Seven Samurai" (1954), "High and Low" (1963), and "Ran" (1985). In addition to introducing basic tools of formal analysis of cinema, we will study the historical and cultural context of Kurosawa's filmmaking in postwar Japan, his place in the global history of film discourse, the director's own writings on the theory of cinema, and questions of literary adaptation.