akira

Kurosawa Akira - I am not going to say anything more than what is already been said about him. Lengends like John Ford, Satyjit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, George Lucas considered Kurosawa to be the greatest ever to have weilded the camera.

Born on March 23, 1910 - youngest of 8 - he went through a difficult childhood. Charlie Chaplin like. Greatly influenced by the war and the great kanto earthquake - AK decided to write about these things that left people to believe he was a communist. He didn't know what he was, to say the truth. This blog entry is to show how AK was in love with Nature.

Nature played a great deal in his movies - the heavy rain in the opening scene of Rashomon, heavy rain again in the final battle in Seven Samurai, the intense heat in Stray Dog, the cold wind in Yojimbo, the snow in Ikiru, and the fog in Throne of Blood. AK also liked using frame wipes sometimes cleverly hidden by motion within the frame, as a transition device.

"I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself"

calming influence...

This a temple that you could see right out of the window from my office here in tokyo and the back of the temple leads to a graveyard. There are numerous tombstones in a small space. space management is something you can learn from Japanese constructions. This temple, for me, has in many ocassions has had a calming influence. 30-min session with myself after lunch on a spring afternoon - I wouldn;t trade anything for that.