Akira Kurosawa’s Film Noir: Adaptation and Reinvention

4 Tuesdays, November 11 to December 2, 6:30 pm to 10:30 pm
Instructor: Paul Wright, Ph.D., Main Line Classical Academy

Despite his status as a world-cinema luminary, Akira Kurosawa regularly faced criticism in his native Japan—it was said that he was not “Japanese” enough and too much a hostage to Western styles and genres. In this course, we’ll explore Kurosawa’s films as an increasingly defiant response to this caricature of his work, illustrating his distinctive processes of adaptation and genre innovation. Our reference point will be Kurosawa’s unique brand of noir. Over four films, we’ll see Kurosawa adopt the tropes and themes of Western film noir, while also repurposing them to his own cultural and decidedly humanistic sensibilities.

In DRUNKEN ANGEL (1948), Kurosawa’s first of many collaborations with Toshirô Mifune, we encounter a volatile, ailing yakuza who finds himself in a fraught relationship with his concerned physician (Takashi Shimura). STRAY DOG (1949) offers a bracing look at the economic, psychological, and moral devastation of postwar Tokyo as Mifune’s young detective doggedly pursues his missing sidearm. THE BAD SLEEP WELL (1960) boldly marries film noir conventions to Kurosawa’s own take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the dog-eat-dog world of modern Japanese business. Finally, in HIGH AND LOW (1963), he brings into sharp relief the contradictions of Japan’s nascent postwar prosperity and the desperation of those whom Japan’s economic rebound has so pitilessly left behind.

You may also like the following events from Bryn Mawr Film Institute:

• This Saturday, 29th November, 11:00 am, CINDERELLA (1950) in Bryn Mawr
• Next Monday, 1st December, 09:15 pm, OPEN SCREEN MONDAY in Bryn Mawr
• Next Tuesday, 2nd December, 07:15 pm, HIGH AND LOW (1963) in Bryn Mawr

Also check out other Entertainment events in Bryn Mawr, Workshops in Bryn Mawr.