Kurosawa

Kurosawa is a very interesting director that likes to use certain elements of film very frequently. One thing that he does in all of the films that we watched is that he adds long sequences with only nondiegetic sound. He will do this to make something stand out or tell the story without dialogue. We especially see this in Stray Dog with the enormously long 15 minute sequence in the black market. We also see one of these sequences in Ran where there is dreary music playing and we see many dead bodies, and then all of a sudden there is a diegetic sound of the gunshot on Hidetora's son. Kurosawa is a master of this technique and has used it to add more meaning to his films.
Another repeated thing that we see in Kurosawa's films is the importance of the use of guns. In Stray Dog the whole conflict appears because of a stolen gun in the beginning of the film. Then in Yojimbo one person has a gun and that makes him stand out as a major enemy to the protagonist. And then guns are especially important in Ran because they represent something that brings about death and destruction to the human race. Kurosawa has a very strong opinion with guns and we can see that he fells that guns only cause problems and lead to death and murder.