Akira Kurosawa is considered Japan’s greatest director and one of the world’s most influential filmmakers.

Filmmakers like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese cite him for having introduced them to now-commonplace cinematic themes and techniques — from epic battle scenes to intimate, touching depictions of humanity.

This month the Honolulu Museum of Art is offering a retrospective on Kurosawa’s work, screening 24 of his 30 films, allowing fans to enjoy both the breadth and length of his remarkable body of work in all of its visual splendor and storytelling mastery.

“The intention was to screen as many of Kurosawa’s films as possible,” said Taylour Chang, director of the museum’s Doris Duke Theatre and an organizer of the retrospective. “It’s one of those rare opportunities where you could see almost all of his films in a month’s span of time. It gives you the opportunity to appreciate his work on a larger canvas, in more or less chronological order.”

The retrospective is part of the museum’s exhibit “Abstract Expressionism: Looking East From the Far West,” which shows the results of interactions between a prominent group of predominantly white, male artists and Asian-American artists, largely of Japanese heritage and many of them from Hawaii. That exchange had its parallel in the film industry, with Kurosawa either adapting Western storytelling traditions or being adapted by Western filmmakers.

Andre Haag, a professor of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, credits his current career path partly to a viewing of Kurosawa’s masterpiece “Rashomon,” Kurosawa’s depiction of the relativity of truth. He remembers coming across the film on late-night television in Hawaii in the late 1980s when he was a teen.

“A few moments and I was transfixed,” said Haag, who teaches a course on Japanese films at UH. “It meant a lot and it stayed with me.”

“Rashomon” put Japanese filmmaking on the map, winning the top prize at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. It almost didn’t happen. Some of Kurosawa’s colleagues didn’t want to submit it; “they thought it would be impossible to follow, and they thought a more contemporary setting would be a better film to showcase Japanese cinema,” Haag said, adding that the depiction of feudal society was thought to be offensive to Western sensibilities.

Not surprisingly, Haag recommends “Rashomon” as a good introduction to Kurosawa’s work for those who haven’t seen it before. It is an adaption of two stories by Japanese novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa and shows Kurosawa’s ability to transform the written word into a cinematic masterpiece. He would show that expertise again and again, and occasionally used stories from the West, borrowing from Dostoevsky in “The Idiot” and Shakespeare for “Ran” (“King Lear”) and “Throne of Blood” (“Macbeth”), which are also being screened during the retrospective.

KUROSAWA’S SAMURAI films, such as “Yojimbo” and “Sanjuro,” are his most popular and influential — watch any of them and try not to think of Jedi knights fighting with lightsabers — but Haag also recommends some of the filmmaker’s contemporary films.

Consider the 1949 film “Stray Dog.”

“It may be the world cinema’s first buddy-cop movie,” Haag said. “You have the team-up of the younger, impetuous detective and then the older veteran who has a better sense of how people work and think.”

“Stray Dog” also gives viewers a look at Japan in the late 1940s, in the aftermath of World War II. “There’s long scenes of passing through the streets, the black markets and the carnivalesque atmosphere of postwar Tokyo,” Haag said.

The film “The Bad Sleep Well,” a murder mystery set in the corrupt world of corporate Japan, also provides “a sense of social criticism and social engagement that really runs through Kurosawa’s entire body of work, but it’s more pronounced in that film,” Haag said. “You can’t ignore it behind the swords and the armor, like you can in some of his other films.”

Of Kurosawa’s samurai films, “Yojimbo” (“The Bodyguard”) is one of the most well known. The story was adapted into “A Fistful of Dollars,” the first of the spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood, without the permission of Kurosawa, who subsequently sent filmmaker Sergio Leone a letter praising him for “making a fine film … but it is my film.”

Kurosawa himself, however, had “borrowed” much of the story from Dashiell Hammett’s “hard-boiled” crime novels and Westerns by John Ford, Haag said.

“It’s not that much of a leap that it’s been re-adapted with Clint Eastwood several years later,” Haag said.

Kurosawa didn’t have problems when another of his films, “Seven Samurai,” was remade as “The Magnificent Seven” in 1960. He gave filmmaker John Sturges a sword. (“The Magnificent Seven” was remade yet again last year.)

The filmmaker’s roots in cinema began during the silent-film era, when his brother was a “benshi,” a narrator of silent films who also provided full-on dramatic readings of dialogue.

“They actually performed the voice and improvised, and in some cases made the story completely different than what the director intended,” Haag said.

With the advent of talking pictures, Kurosawa’s brother was unable to find work, which ultimately led to his suicide. That was not before he passed on an important bit of perspective to his younger brother.

“It was during the great Kanto earthquake that devastated Tokyo in 1923,” Haag said. “There were corpses of the victims all over the city, and young Kurosawa Akira turned his gaze away and looked away from the bodies, and his brother said, ‘No! You have to look. You can’t turn away from these ugly realities.’

“That was something that Akira would later look back on as serving as his underpinnings as a director — not looking away.”

AKIRA KUROSAWA RETROSPECTIVE SCHEDULE

All films in Japanese with English subtitles, unless noted

>> “Sanshiro Sugata”: Part 1, Saturday 6 p.m.; Part 2, 8 p.m. — Kurosawa’s first two films follow the life of judo student Sanshiro. In Part 1 he takes on a jiujitsu school; in Part 2 he fights Americans (the film was made during WWII) as well as enemies from the first film. (1943-45)

>> “The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail”: Sunday, 1 p.m. — Lord Yoshitsune and his samurai dress as monks to pass through hostile territory in this visual spectacle. (1945)

>> “No Regrets for Our Youth”: Sunday, 4 p.m. — The only Kurosawa film with a female protagonist tells the story of a professor denounced for his politics and his daughter’s journey to a meaningful life. (1946)

>> “One Wonderful Sunday”: Sunday, 7 p.m. — Young lovers seek work and affordable lodging and entertainment in postwar Tokyo. (1947)

>> “Drunken Angel”: Wednesday, 1 and 7:30 p.m. — Kurosawa’s famous collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune began with this noirish film about an ill yakuza gangster seeking help from a disillusioned (female) doctor, who both become endangered by the gangster’s past. (1948)

>> “Stray Dog”: Oct. 14, 1 p.m. — A newbie detective has his gun stolen and teams with a veteran detective to try to get it back, leading to an escalating crime wave by the thief and an intensification of the newbie’s darker side. (1949)

>> “Rashomon”: Oct. 14, 4 p.m. — The relativity of truth — and the less talked-about theme of complicity in crime — are explicated in this beautifully told murder mystery, which took the top award at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and brought Kurosawa to worldwide fame. (1950)

>> “The Idiot”: Oct. 14, 7 p.m. — Kurosawa adapts Dostoevsky’s novel in this story about a pure, sincere man’s integration into the harshness of the real world of postwar Japan. (1951)

>> “Ikiru”: Oct. 15, 4 p.m. — Stricken with terminal cancer, a middle-age bureaucrat at first seeks superficial pleasure in life but then hopes to turn his life’s work into something meaningful. (1952)

>> “Throne of Blood”: Oct. 18, 1 p.m.; Oct. 19, 7:30 p.m. — A retelling of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” “Throne of Blood” fuses Western tragedy with Noh theater techniques. (1957)

>> “The Bad Sleep Well”: Oct. 18, 7:30 p.m.; Oct. 19, 1 p.m. — A young executive searches for his father’s killer in the film that exposed corruption in corporate Japan. (1960)

>> “Seven Samurai”: Oct. 20, 1 and 7:30 p.m. — A group of out-of-work samurai band together to protect a small village from bandits in this movie, which inspired countless Westerns with its archetypal characters and classic storytelling structure. (1954)

>> “The Lower Depths”: Oct. 21, 1 p.m. — Kurosawa’s adaption of Maxim Gorky’s play focuses on the conflict between illusion and reality in this story about a tenement house occupied by various ne’er-do-wells where lust, jealousy and manipulation reign. (1957)

>> “The Hidden Fortress”: Oct. 22, 1 p.m. — A princess fleeing through enemy land with her family’s treasure gets help from two peasants, who might have ulterior motives. The film inspired “Star Wars,” with R2D2 and C3PO adapted from the two peasants. (1958)

>> “Yojimbo”: Oct. 22, 4 p.m.; Oct. 25, 1 p.m. — In this inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti Western movies, an unemployed samurai arrives in a village beset by factional struggles and sets them off against each other. Mifune is at his best as the bodyguard Sanjuro, and the soundtrack is as good as anything from Ennio Morricone. (1961)

>> “Sanjuro”: Oct. 22, 7 p.m. — A comedic sequel to “Yojimbo” in which Mifune’s Sanjuro takes on corruption in a clan of samurai. (1962)

>> “Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo”: Oct. 25, 7:30 p.m. — The lone film not directed by Kurosawa in the festival: Director Kihachi Okamoto spoofed the “Yojimbo” films by having famous blind swordsman Zatoichi face off against a Sanjuro-like character played by Mifune, the bodyguard of a young crime lord. (1970)

>> “High and Low”: Oct. 26, 1 and 7:30 p.m. — A kidnapper takes aim at the family of a wealthy industrialist in a film that blends crime thriller with social commentary. (1963)

>> “Red Beard”: Oct. 28, 12 p.m. — Mifune’s final role with Kurosawa has him portraying a compassionate doctor trying to reign in an immature young colleague. (1965)

>> “Dodes’ka-den”: Oct. 28, 4 p.m. — The lives of a group of slum residents play out in Kurosawa’s first color film. (1970)

>> “Ran”: Oct. 28, 7 p.m. — In this epic adaptation of Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” three sons of an aging lord engage in a power struggle after he tries to divide his empire among all three of them. Recently restored. (1985)

>> “Dersu Uzala”: Oct. 29, 1 p.m. — A Russian explorer leans on the expertise of a nomad to explore and survive the harsh landscape of Siberia. Oscar winner for best foreign film. In Russian and Chinese with subtitles. (1975)

>> “Dreams”: Oct. 29, 7 p.m. — In a series of dream sequences, a Kurosawa stand-in examines his life and times during his turbulent life in Japan. Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese all assisted in making the film in some way to pay tribute to the Japanese master filmmaker. (1990)

>> “Rhapsody in August”: Nov. 1, 1 p.m.; Nov. 2, 7:30 p.m. — A survivor of the atomic bombing on Nagasaki must decide whether to visit her dying brother in Hawaii. Stars Richard Gere. (1991)

>> “Madadayo”: Nov. 1, 7:30 p.m.; Nov. 2, 1 p.m. — Kurosawa’s final film is a tribute to teacher and writer Kyakken Uchida and consists of short stories relating the teacher’s close relationship with his students. (1993)