New Prints!
"I try to present a human being that you are unable to forget."-Akira Kurosawa
In actor Toshiro Mifune, Akira Kurosawa found the way to present human beings we could never forget. Exuberantly physical, dominating the screen, Mifune stalked, savaged, simmered, and seethed his way through Kurosawa's films from 1948 to 1966, his visceral acting style and pensive cool helping create some of the best–known-and certainly unforgettable-masterpieces of world cinema. The Kurosawa/Mifune films have inspired countless contemporary filmmakers including George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Sergio Leone, and Martin Scorsese, who terms the collaboration "one of the greatest actor–director teams in the history of cinema, a creative partnership that equaled Ford and Wayne or Léaud and Truffaut." From sweeping costume epics to sweat-drenched noirs, William Shakespeare to Ed McBain, Kurosawa mastered every genre. Sword–wielding samurai, gun–packing gangster, desperate thief, buttoned-down salaryman, Mifune was there with him, a DeNiro of a thousand faces to Kurosawa's Scorsese. To see Mifune and Kurosawa together on the big screen, in brand new prints, is to understand how cinema can entertain, amaze, and illuminate simultaneously.-Jason Sanders
The Seven Samurai, not included in our program, will have a commercial release at Landmark's Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley, November 22 to 28.
