Chichester Cinema at New Park

If Yasujiro Ozu is often called 'the most Japanese of Japanese directors', then one could almost identify Akira Kurosawa as the least Japanese of Japanese directors. His admiration for Western culture showed in the abiding influence on his work of foreign cinema and literature. Film historian Joseph Anderson has commented that 'without the American cinema, there would be no Kurosawa', and Kurosawa himself acknowledged his debt to John Ford, whose example helped to shape the classical clarity and directness of the Japanese director’s most famous film, Seven Samurai.

An admirer, too, of European literature, Kurosawa based films on works by Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Gorky, as well as the popular American writer Ed McBain. It's no surprise, then, that Kurosawa was the first Japanese filmmaker to achieve an international reputation, nor that he remains the most popular of Japanese directors in the West. Twelve years after his death and nearly sixty years after ‘Rashomon’ scooped the Golden Lion at Venice, he continues to win audiences and to exert a profound influence on filmmakers throughout the world. This 5 film retrospective offers 5 genuine masterpieces.