The director who thought Akira Kurosawa was overrated: “Seductive but minor”
You’d be hard-pressed to find a filmmaker who doesn’t revere Akira Kurosawa. The Japanese director has had a profound influence on cinema, with masterpieces like Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Ran pioneering composition, narrative structure, and editing.
Many of the filmmakers who are considered to be the definition of cinematic auteurs were heavily and admittedly influenced by Kurosawa, including Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Stanley Kubrick. Even George Lucas, who is now considered more of a media mogul than an auteur, adored the Japanese director, modelling Star Wars off of 1958’s The Hidden Fortress. Wim Wenders once dedicated an entire interview with Kurosawa to his use of weather in movies and later stated that anyone planning to put rain or snow or anything else into their film must study the master first.
However, there is one prominent director who was less than awed by Kurosawa’s work, and he wasn’t afraid to talk about it. Jean-Luc Godard, the pioneering French New Wave director whose films like Breathless and Contempt helped define the movement and who became hugely influential in his own right, was dismissive of the Japanese auteur. It wasn’t that he thought Kurosawa was a bad director; it was that he believed the filmmaker was artistically inferior to another Japanese auteur, Kenji Mizoguchi.
For some reason, Godard seemed to think that there was a binary choice between the directors – if you liked Kurosawa, then you automatically disparaged Mizoguchi, and vice versa. Mizoguchi was a decade older than Kurosawa and died in 1956, right as he was rising to international prominence with films like 1952’s The Life of Oharu, 1953’s Ugetsu, and 1954’s Sansho the Bailiff.
“There can be no doubt that any comparison between Mizoguchi and Kurosawa turns irrefutably to the advantage of the former,” the French director proclaimed in his humbly titled tome, Godard on Godard, explaining that the filmmaker went “beyond the seductive but minor stage of exoticism” to a level where you no longer had to worry about “false prestige”.
This backhanded swipe at Kurosawa was pretty catty, even Godard, but he wasn’t finished. Elsewhere in the book, which features a collection of the filmmaker’s writings from when he was still a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, he dismissed the director in passing as “merely a more elegant Ralph Habib,” citing a minor French director who peddled crowd-pleasing melodramas.
As a critic, Godard tended toward polemics and often seemed more interested in having an intellectual debate than an artistic one. Pitting the two auteurs against each other was evidence of how American and European film critics viewed international cinema at the time. There was no need to construct a rivalry between Kurosawa and Mizoguchi, but by restricting the entirety of Japanese cinema to two directors, Godard went straight for negativity.
For their part, the auteurs in question had nothing but admiration for each other. When Mizoguchi died in 1956 at just 58 years old, Kurosawa gave a eulogy in which he called him the “truest creator” in Japanese cinema.
