Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Kiyoshi Kurosawa | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | July 19, 1955 |
| Occupation(s) | Film director and screenwriter |
| Years active | 1973 – present |
Kiyoshi Kurosawa (黒沢 清, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, born July 19, 1955) is a Japanese filmmaker. He is best known for his many contributions to the Japanese horror genre.
Biography
Born in Kobe on July 19, 1955, Kiyoshi Kurosawa is not related to director Akira Kurosawa.[1] After studying at Rikkyo University in Tokyo under the guide of prominent film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, where he began making 8mm films, Kurosawa began directing commercially in the 1980s, working on pink films and low-budget V-Cinema (direct-to-video) productions such as formula yakuza pictures. In the early 1990s, he won a scholarship to the Sundance Institute and was able to study filmmaking in the United States, although he had been directing for nearly ten years professionally.
Kurosawa first achieved international acclaim with his serial killer film Kyua (Cure) (1997). Also that year, Kurosawa experimented by filming two thrillers back-to-back, Serpent's Path and Eyes of the Spider, both of which shared the same premise (a father taking revenge for his child's murder) and lead actor (Show Aikawa) but spun entirely different stories.
Kurosawa followed up Cure with a semi-sequel in 1999 with Charisma, which established his penchant for apocalyptic imagery and themes of identity and isolation. In 2001 Kurosawa directed Pulse, a film about ghosts invading the world of the living by way of the Internet. More recently Kurosawa has released Akarui Mirai (Bright Future) (2003), starring Tadanobu Asano, the first film of his shot with a 24p High-definition video camera. Kurosawa followed this with another digital feature, Doppelganger, later the same year.
A skilled writer, he has written novelizations of some of his films as well as a history of horror cinema with Makoto Shinozaki.[2] He recently made a cameo in Kôji Shiraishi's horror film Occult as himself.
Style and influences
Kurosawa's directing style has been compared to that of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, though he has never expressly listed those directors as influences.[3] Nevertheless he admitted in a interview that Alfred Hitchcock and Yasujiro Ozu features analyzed and discussed under the guidance of Shigehiko Hasumi contributed to shape his personal vision of the medium.[4]
Many of his films are concerned in some form with the way society shapes the individual, with individuals obsessed with some eccentric project, or how social mechanisms disintegrate when faced with the wholly irrational. Cure is widely cited as the best example of all of these concepts in one film, but they show up in others as well: Bright Future combines the first and second in its plot about a ruminative young man trying to acclimate a jellyfish to live in fresh water with unexpected results.[citation needed]
According to Tim Palmer, Kurosawa's films occupy a peculiar position between the materials of mass genre, on the one hand, and esoteric or intellectual abstraction, on the other. They also clearly engage with issues of environmental critique, given Kurosawa's preference for shooting in decaying open spaces, abandoned (and often condemned) buildings, and in places rife with toxins, pestilence and entropy.[5]
Selected filmography
- 1983 Kandagawa Pervert Wars
- 1995 Shoot Yourself 1 The Heist (Katte ni Shiyagare!) colloquially translates as "Do whatever the fuck you want!"[6]
- 1995 Shoot Yourself 2 The Escape
- 1996 Shoot Yourself 3
- 1996 Door 3 (ドア３ or occasionally ＤＯＯＲ ＩＩＩ Doa surī)
- 1997 Cure (キュア Kyua)
- 1998 Serpent's Path (蛇の道 Hebi no michi)
- 1998 Eyes of the Spider (蜘蛛の瞳 Kumo no hitomi)
- 1998 License to Live (ニンゲン合格 Ningen gōkaku)
- 1999 Barren Illusions (大いなる幻影 Ōinaru genei)
- 2000 Charisma (カリスマ Karisuma)
- 2001 Kairo (回路), aka Pulse
- 2001 Seance (降霊 Kōrei)
- 2003 Bright Future (アカルイミライ Akarui mirai)
- 2003 Doppelganger (ドッペルゲンガー Dopperugengā)
- 2005 Loft (ロフト Rofuto)
- 2006 Retribution (叫 Sakebi)
- 2008 Tokyo Sonata (トウキョウソナタ Tōkyō Sonata)
References
- ^ Richie, Donald (2001). A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History. Tokyo: Kodansha International. p. 214. ISBN 4-7700-2682-X.
- ^ Kurosawa, Kiyoshi; Shinozaki, Makoto (2003). Kurosawa Kiyoshi no kyōfu no eigashi (in Japanese). Tokyo: Seidosha. ISBN 978-4-7917-6053-4.
- ^ Cure DVD. “Interview with Kiyoshi Kurosawa." New York: Home Vision Entertainment/Janus Films, 2001.
- ^ Giuseppe Sedia, Interview with Kiyoshi Kurosawa at Asia Express (italian), october 2006.
- ^ Palmer, Tim, The Rules of the World: Japanese Ecocinema and Kiyoshi Kurosawa in Willloquet-Maricondi, Paula (ed.) Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. University of Virginia Press, 2010. 978-0-8139-3006-0
- ^ Stephens, Chuck (September 1, 2001). "Another green world: the blossoming of Kiyoshi Kurosawa". Film Comment. 37 (5): 64. Retrieved 2008-09-26. [dead link]
External links
- Kiyoshi Kurosawa at IMDb
- Kiyoshi Kurosawa at the Japanese Movie Database (in Japanese)
- Machiyama, Tomo. "PULPman Profiles 06: Kiyoshi Kurosawa". PULP: The Manga Magazine. Archived from the original on 2004-10-22. Retrieved 2009-11-30.
{{cite web}}: External link in|publisher= - Sedia Giuseppe Interview with Kiyoshi Kurosawa at Asia Express, (Italian), October 2006.