Talk:Criticism of Akira Kurosawa

Merger Discussion

I have serious concerns about this article. I am not at all a Kurosawa fan, have no interest in his movies, so I have no vested interest in "protecting" him from criticism or anything, but this article, created as a standalone as it is, seems to be written with serious WP:NPOV issues. It also seems like any discussion of criticism of Kurosawa as a person or as a director should be dealt with on the main Akira Kurosawa article. Perhaps that latter sentence means that this should be merged, but I hesitate to merge so much stuff that seems so pointy into the main article. Mmyers1976 (talk) 22:59, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

There's too much here to merge into an already very long article. The best way to address NPOV issues is probably to add some positive stuff to balance it out, not remove all the negative critism - unless it turns out to be unverifiable, in which case get rid of it before proposing a merge. DoctorKubla (talk) 15:30, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

It is already atypical for there to be so much as a separate page centering on criticism of an acclaimed filmmaker. The above charge that it has serious WP:NPOV issues is therefore unsurprising. AndrewOne (talk) 05:01, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

To Mmyers1976, DoctorKubla and AndrewOne: you are making understandable but completely mistaken assumptions about my creation of this page. Several years ago, with the help of another writer, I vastly expanded the Akira Kurosawa article with the intention of promoting it to featured article status, which (for complex reasons I won't get into) did not happen. This made it necessary, in order to preserve NPOV on the main page, to include criticisms of Kurosawa as well as praise of him, as positive quotes tended to overwhelm the article. So in the main article, I incorporated criticisms of the director, both those by people all over the world and by the Japanese people only, in a section simply labeled "Criticisms." However, I actually had much too much material since, for reasons of space, I could only include a few paragraphs of it in the main article, and so I created this side article to contain all the additional research.

You must understand that, to me, Kurosawa is the greatest director who ever lived, and a great man. Therefore, I do not think that most of the critiques cited in this article are valid. However, I included them all for the sake of preserving the public record, both positive and negative, about this extraordinary artist. For example, concerning one of those few aspects of his work for which I believe criticism of Kurosawa is perfectly valid or even irrefutable — his relative lack of interest in women as film subjects — for the sake of balance I included both severe (Joan Mellen) and mild (Stephen Prince) critiques of this alleged shortcoming. Where I felt that a put-down of Kurosawa was not justified, I usually included a quote by the director himself that effectively refuted the charge. For example, regarding the (Japanese) accusation that the filmmaker in his work pandered to Western audiences, I included a Kurosawa quote in which he made an argument that had never occurred to me until I read his words: namely, that during this period (the 1950s and 1960s), he deliberately utilized a dynamic "Western" film technique in order to attract the young Japanese audience. These moviegoers, who increasingly preferred American and European films for their kinetic excitement to Japanese ones, would not have been attracted to a conventionally-made Japanese film. Just about the only criticism of the artist that I left completely unanswered was the disparaging Japanese nickname "the Emperor" and its pejorative connotations. I couldn't find a quote by Kurosawa (or anyone else) that refuted this attack. But you must keep in mind that, in the context of a consensus society like Japan, Kurosawa's stubborn individualism and fierce temperament were, and are, intensely alienating for many Japanese, so such vilification should be taken with a grain (or rather a barrel) of salt.

I think it's very ironic that a page that was deliberately designed to portray its subject in a balanced, three-dimensional way should be taken as an attack on that subject. If anything, I personally would tend to err on the side of praise toward my hero. But artists are not gods, and critics certainly are not, and so it's not surprising that there were, and still are, many in Japan and elsewhere who harp on Kurosawa's faults, real or imaginary, rather than his virtues. Dylanexpert (talk) 00:08, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

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