Current and Upcoming Courses:

May
Akira Kurosawa: East Meets West

June
Alfred Hitchcock: The Early Years

July
Symphony of Horrors:
Dracula in Literature and Film

September
The Language of Film
Now you can take this class at BMFI or
in Center City at The Gershman Y!

September - December
Film History Discussion Series:
1945-Present

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May
Akira Kurosawa: East Meets West
Taught by Paul Wright, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English, Cabrini College

Akira Kurosawa is the director perhaps most singularly responsible for introducing non-Western film to American audiences, and is arguably the foreign filmmaker who had the greatest influence on Hollywood’s first blockbuster auteurs, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Yet despite his now iconic status as one of the luminaries of world cinema, over the course of his long career, Kurosawa regularly met with criticism in his native Japan—it was said that he was not “Japanese” enough and was too much a hostage to Western styles and genres.

In this course, we will try to understand Kurosawa’s films as a skillful and increasingly brave response to this caricature of his work. In Stray Dog and High & Low, Kurosawa shrewdly blends film noir and the harsh realities of post-war Japanese society. In Throne of Blood, Kurosawa adapts Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the samurai ethos, and in Yojimbo (template for Leone’s Fistful of Dollars), Kurosawa is at his most inventive, merging the conventions of the American western and the samurai film to astonishing effect.

Yojimbo (1961)

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