Akira Kurosawa, Screenwriter

 As a director, Akira Kurosawa created a succession of masterpieces with the support of numerous master screenwriters. However, Kurosawa was also a screenwriter in his own right. From early in his career, he matured by writing scripts while being influenced by the world’s literary giants. This exhibition focuses on that aspect of Akira Kurosawa. It attempts to unveil the creative secrets of “Kurosawa, the screenwriter” by analyzing the processes by which he created and reworked famous screenplays, including Seven Samurai (1954), and by taking into account scripts he provided to other directors and newly discovered un-filmed scripts. Although the associations between Kurosawa’s films and Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and Shugoro Yamamoto have been a topic of considerable discussion, in reality Kurosawa also drew strong inspiration from the literary works of Balzac and many others.

 Ever since the 2010 exhibition “Akira Kurosawa Retrospective at his Centenary,” the National Film Archive of Japan has engaged in a groundbreaking exploration of Kurosawa’s films through exhibitions, among them the poster showings “Kurosawa Travels around the World” (2018) and “Rashomon at the 70th Anniversary” (2020). This exhibition, which was prepared with the full cooperation of Kurosawa experts, focuses on Kurosawa’s scriptwriting skills and thus represents the latest in this series of research endeavors.