Akira Kurosawa was a master in so many aspects of filmmaking, but his ability to stage a scene and tell stories visually would give his knack for editing, what some would say was his greatest talent, a run for its money.
One of our favorite video essayists Tony Zhou breaks down a scene from Kurosawa’s 1960 thriller The Bad Sleep Well and in doing so reveals just how skilled the director was at visual storytelling. Zhou points out the geometric patterns formed in order to create tension — the triangles made with eyelines and props, as well as the squares made to form frames within frames.
Check out the video essay below:
Aesthetics was not only my favorite subject in college, but it proved to be supremely and uniquely helpful to me as not only a teller of visual stories, but as a consumer of visual stories. I feel like I say this constantly, but understanding the language of film and becoming more visually literate can not only transform the meanings behind key scenes in your films, but deliver them with a bigger, stronger punch. Like they always say, in film, it’s better to show than to tell.