ABSTRACT
Director Akira Kurosawa’s films are well known for the beauty and expressiveness of his shot compositions. As a young man and much of the aesthetic sense he developed in those years can be appreciated in his painterly visual style. Beginning with Seven Samurai , Kurosawa developed a style that involved the use of multiple cameras and mostly telephoto instead of normal or wide-angle lenses; the shift to longer focal lengths was accompanied with a varied and sophisticated visual language tailored to the optical characteristics of these lenses, intricately woven with recurring themes of his films. Virtually all of the techniques Kurosawa developed for the telephoto lens can be found in Ran, his adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Set in feudal Japan an aging warlord who attained power through ruthless violence, decides to step down and divide his kingdom among his three sons, keeping his title while placing only one of them in charge.
