The movie studio boss walked out on a screening and later bragged that he didn't understand the film he had financed. The local critics panned it: monotonous, too complicated, way too "Western." When Rashomon won the top prize at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, the Japanese cultural establishment was baffled. Only the rest of the world got it and its director, Akira Kurosawa. When he died of a stroke last week at 88, he was the most esteemed Japanese filmmaker--outside of Japan.

At the time, Rashomon, the tale of a violent act refracted through the conflicting testimony of four witnesses, was a significant act of diplomacy. It alerted the world that Japan, feared and hated for its wartime belligerence, could produce a work of art that posed powerful and subtle questions about violence, sexual predation and the need for human beings to lie to save their lives. It also signaled the eruption of Toshiro Mifune, the movie's feral bandit, into stardom. And as the film's title entered the international language, so did its director immediately establish himself as a filmmaker of the top rank.

When a director is the first to emerge from his country into the world spotlight, his films are often thought to embody a peculiar national spirit. So Kurosawa, with his period parables of honor defended and defeated, represented Japan to the West. That notion proved off-kilter; the more delicate films of Kurosawa's great peers, Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, emitted a more redolent whiff of the Japanese character. Indeed, local audiences were suspicious of the Emperor, as Kurosawa was called for his imperious ways, and studio bosses tired of his perfectionism and big budgets. Most of his later films were made only through outside supporters: French producer Serge Silberman (Ran), U.S. directors Francis Coppola and George Lucas (Kagemusha). In 1990 Lucas and Steven Spielberg gave Kurosawa an Oscar for life achievement.

It is fairer to say that Kurosawa brought the West to Japan--in his adaptations of Dostoyevski (The Idiot), Gorki (The Lower Depths) and Shakespeare (Macbeth into Throne of Blood, King Lear into Ran), in his vigorous editing style and bravura nihilism. His films appealed around the world partly because, in text and texture, they eloquently spoke the common language of film.

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