Akira Kurosawa (II)

In October, we continue our comprehensive retrospective of the films of Akira Kurosawa. We not only present his first four films, which were made in the last years of the war and are marked by this time in different ways – tinges of propaganda, censorship, limited production possibilities – but his later work, too, from his first film in color DODES'KA-DEN to MADADAYO, his meditation about the will to live at all costs and the inevitability of death.

TENGOKU TO JIGOKU (High and Low, Japan 1963, October 10) A brilliant and compelling thriller that sometimes exploits the mechanics of the genre, sometimes ignores them completely. The suspense stems from the inner conflict of a production director (Mifune), which is depicted at length at the start of the film, who has to decide whether to bail out his son's friend or salvage his own career. The dilemma between responsibility and corruptibility seems all the more acute against the backdrop of a modern world gone awry.