Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Kurosawa and Baseball
I was watching a documentary on Kurosawa the other day and was surprised that one of his first visual memories was of baseball - his father was involved in youth athletics and was one of the people involved in the spread of baseball in Japan.
One of Kurosawa's minor works was "Stray Dog". The knowledge of Kurosawa's relationship with baseball brought this movie to mind because a few years back I enjoyed the baseball segment in the middle of the film. So I did a little bit of homework on this film. According to Steven Prince, a biographer of Kurosawa, post-war censors were very hard on any content that portrayed the westernization of Japan. Baseball, for whatever cultural reason, was given special treatment. Since westernization was a central theme to "Stray Dog", Kurosawa felt he could do this best via baseball.
But there's and even more interesting fact here. Kurosawa did not shoot the baseball footage himself, this was performed by his assistant director Ishiro Honda. Honda would later on direct Gojira, better known in the west as Godzilla.
BUY THE MOVIE
posted by David 10:59 AM
