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Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema

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One of the issues skirted by James Goodwin's book "Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema" is the difficulty of making sense of visual meaning with the tool of language. Goodwin's attempts to diagram a deconstruction of the "text" proves cumbersome and unsatisfactory, and his "solutions" to the hinted at, but never directly addressed problem of visual meaning, are disappointing. There are valuable insights into the work of Kurosawa, but few enough, and nothing that cannot be found elsewhere in the literature.
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's book "Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema" is, more satifyingly confrontational with the problem of visual meaning, and struggles with the problem of outmoded methodologies and critical assessments of film.
The long and short of it is--the best book on Kurosawa is "Something Like an Autobiography" by Kurosawa himself with the authoring/translation skills of Audie Bock. Nothing will illuminate the man's work more clearly. No book on Kurosawa is more worth reading time and time again.

Goodwin brings the tools of literary criticism to study the films of Akira Kurosawa. He does this by bringing to light many of the cinematographic, historic, and narrative influences of Kurosawa's work.

Such as when introducing color to his films, Henri Langlois (head of the Cinémathèque Française) showed Kurosawa how color can be used to communicate a distinctive meaning.

Or how, in "Ran" (1985), Kurosawa was influenced by the legend of "Motonari Mori (1497-1571)," and by inverting the story, "whose three sons are admired in Japan as the ideal family for loyalty." After writing the first few drafts of the script, Kurosawa noticed a resemblance to Shakespeare's "King Lear". What surprises me about this, is that I believed that the script was primarily influenced by "King Lear", but that's not true. The play is influenced by "King Lear", but was crafted separately under the influence of the inversion of the Motonari Mori legend and its major influence being the mind of Kurosawa himself. The film then becomes an inversion of the ideal, a twisting of the archetype.

Goodwin tore down the myth that Kurosawa was an isolated artist, and introduced me to a man who immersed himself in the literature, drama, and cinema of the whole human experience.

I strongly recommend his book, it opened my eyes; it may open yours.