During the month of May UCSD-TV devotes Cinema Saturdays to the work of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998). Kurosawa is recognized as one of the great cinema auteurs because of his technical mastery and the universal humanist themes that pervade his work: a compassion for individual suffering, a quest for justice through personal rebellion against corrupt social structures, a concern for the existential crises of ‘man’ in the face of death, social pressure, and the apparent meaningless of life’s struggles. Bridging the historical with the contemporary and Eastern cultural values with the West, his pictures cut across genres, periods and settings, indulging equally his love of John Ford's Westerns, Shakespeare, the films of French director Jean Renoir, and his native bushido code. Because his films acknowledge the danger that the ‘different,’ the ‘other,’ the ‘untranslatable’ will be annihilated as a consequence of this assumption of shared values and cultural sameness, Kurosawa’s work ultimately is a cinema of questing and questioning. Kurosawa's work has exerted enormous influence on post-WWII film: George Lucas used Kurosawa's “The Hidden Fortress” as a model for “Star Wars,” Sergio Leone adapted the samurai tales to create his "spaghetti westerns," and John Sturges transformed Kurosawa's “Seven Samurai” into “The Magnificent Seven” (to cite but a few examples).