Watch: Akira Kurosawa’s Love of Movement: A Video Essay

Tony Zhou has looked at Kurosawa before, as when he examined the Japanese director’s use of geometry in a crucial scene from ‘The Bad Sleep Well.’ In this piece, he takes a more wide-ranging look at the director’s work to show how, in films from ‘Throne of Blood’ to ‘The Hidden Fortress’ to ‘Ran,’ movement is essential to every Kurosawan frame. Zhou’s central idea is that Kurosawa unifies motion and emotion, so that one force speaks through another–and proposes that superior films follow suit, across the board. At one point, Zhou even uses this idea to critique one of the many mediocre scenes in The Avengers, indicating that if we judged the scene by movement alone, without knowing anything about the story, we wouldn’t know what was going on–whereas in Kurosawa, movement tells the story as well as the dialogue.