J apanese auteur Akira Kurosawa is widely regarded as one of the greatest moviemakers of all time. Kurosawa undoubtedly played a pivotal role in the emergence of cinema as the predominant art form of the 20th century. While the Oriental master is best remembered for his swashbuckling samurai epics, his works were not always rife with resplendence and often dealt with social issues and human plight. In a career that spanned over five decades, Kurosawa produced a plethora of cinematic gems that explored uncharted avenues with great authority and conviction , thus making cinema touch new highs and lows. Akira Kurosawa shot to global fame with his 1950 masterpiece, Rashômon. The movie not only pioneered Kurosawa's tryst with unprecedented success, but also helped introduce the Japanese Cinema to the rest of the world. Despite his colossal success in the west, the suspicious producers in the Japan continued to show him the same kind of skepticism they had shown to Yasujirō Ozu decades earlier. But, they seemed to underestimate Kurosawa's prodigious talent and his great risk-taking abilities as a moviemaker. Though out his career Kurosawa took huge risks, often uncalculated ones. While some of them paid off, many of them failed to hit the target but the failures never bothered him. When it came to his art, Kurosawa never gave away an inch and perhaps that's what made his works so singularly influential.



