“I like silent pictures and I always have. They are often so much more beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they had to be.”

On the style of the film Rashomon, as quoted in The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1998) by Donald Richie, 3rd edition, p. 79
Context: I like silent pictures and I always have. They are often so much more beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they had to be. At any rate I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film.

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Akira Kurosawa 16
Japanese film maker 1910–1998

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