denny Schools Periods & Styles book

See globally acclaimed directors Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese pay tribute to the late Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. This tribute was organized by the Anaheim University Akira Kurosawa School of Film and was held at the Cherry Blossom Gala at the Beverly Hills Hotel on March 23th, 2009, on what would have been the 99th birthday of Akira Kurosawa. Akira Kurosawa (March 23, 1910 - September 6, 1998) Akira Kurosawa was the youngest of seven children, born in Tokyo on 23 March 1910. He has said that the first important influence in his life was a teacher called Tachikawa, who was progressive in his emphasis on art education for the young. This was how the young Kurosawa was introduced to art and film. A talented painter, he enrolled in an art school that emphasized Western styles. Around this time he also joined an artists' group with a great enthusiasm for nineteenth-century Russian literature, with Dostoevsky a particular favourite. Another influence was Heigo, one of his brothers, who loved film and worked as a benshi, a film narrator/commentator for foreign silent films. His suicide deeply affected the director's sensibilities. In 1930 he responded to a newspaper advertisement for assistant directors at a film studio and began assisting Kajiro Yamamoto, who liked the fact he knew 'a lot about things other than movies'. Within five years he was writing scripts and directing whole sequences for Yamamoto films. In 1943 he made his debut as a ...