Action · Drama · History · War
Japanese (影武者)
1980 · Directed by Akira Kurosawa · 180 min
In sixteenth-century Japan, a powerful warlord's death must be hidden from rival clans, and a petty criminal who looks exactly like him is pressed into taking his place. Kurosawa's late epic is slow, painterly and tragic, a study of power as something worn like a costume.
Why it matters in cinema history
A defining film of Kurosawa's late period and of the large-scale historical epic at the end of the 1970s, made when such spectacle was becoming rare in Japanese cinema.
Watch with intention
Watch it as a film about performance: what does it take to look like a ruler, and how much of power is image?
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