[1] Sabatino Moscati.
The Face of the Ancient Orient: Near Eastern Civilization in Pre-Classical Times.
Mineola, N. Y.: Dover Publications, 2001.
(English translation originally published by Routledge & Kegan Paul and Vallentine, Mitchell & Co., 1960. Original Italian edition published as Il Profilo Dell' Oriente Mediterraneo by Edizioni Radio Italiani.)

A short introduction to the civilizations of the ancient Near East: Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Hittite, Hurrian, Canaanite (i.e., non-Aramaean peoples: Amorites, Moabites, Ammonites, Hebrews), Aramaean, Israeli, Persian.


[2] Joan Mellen.
Seven Samurai.
London: British Film Institute, 2002.
(series: BFI Film Classics)
Seven Samurai at the publisher's web site.
Seven Samurai at the American distributor's web site (University of California Press).
(Joan Mellen, professor of English and Creative Writing, writes much better than Phillip Drummond. Some evidence that Drummond's volume in the BFI Film Classics series is an anomaly in its poor writing. The difference between traditional Literature scholars and the Film Studies crew shows.)

Some links related to the film Seven Samurai or Shichinin no samurai (1954):

The Film:
(1) IMDB.
(2) Rotten Tomatoes.
(3) Roger Ebert's Great Movies.
(4) Amazon.com.
(5) Japan on Film: Seven Samurai.
(6) Criterion Collection DVD edition, essay.
(7) Bright Lights Film Journal review by Garry Morris.
(8) Sight and Sound Directors Top Ten Poll 2002 (Seven Samurai in a three-way tie for #9 among Directors).
(9) Sight and Sound Critics Top Ten Poll 2002 (Seven Samurai ranked #11 among Critics).

Akira Kurosawa (Director):
(1) Thomas Hibbs.
(2) Senses of Cinema essay by Dan Harper.
(3) Strictly Film School essays by Acquarello.
(4) BFI (several links).
(5) Dan Kim excellent web site.
(6) Akira Kurosawa Database.
(7) Akira Kurosawa Home Page.
(8) Asian Film Connections (links to some Essays).
(9) Great Performances, PBS.
(10) Peter Grilli essay.
(11) Asa Fitch (excellent student's web page).
(12) Sight and Sound Directors' Top Ten Directors Poll 2002 (#3).
(13) Sight and Sound Critic's Top Ten Directors Poll 2002 (#6).

Toshiro Mifune (Actor: Kikuchiyo):
(1) IMDB.
(2) BFI.
(3) Toshiro Mifune by Ramona Boersma (excellent web site).

Takashi Shimura (Actor: Kambei Shimada):
(1) IMDB.

I like what Thomas Hibbs writes in the article linked to above:
"What Eliot said of poetry is true of film: It can communicate before it is understood."
Perhaps an overgeneralization, but it seems to me that Film has become the Poetry of our times.

Susan Rutter's excellent comment:
"You say in your blog film is the modern poetry. In art history circles the comparison goes beyond that. They say, and I completely agree, film is the only modern mainstream artistic expression that really counts, the modern version of painting during the Renaissance in Europe. We have our masters and our genres and our styles, just like painting from, say, 1400 through the invention of photography. And just as painting was viewed by all classes and masses in Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Europe, so film is seen by everyone in Western societies. Used for ideological indoctrination and as pure aesthetics, painting and film are/were sociological events packed with cultural information about values."

Other Books:
(1) The Films of Akira Kurosawa by Donald Richie, with additional material by Joan Mellen.
(2) The Warriors' Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa by Steven Price.
(3) The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune by Stuart Galbraith.
(4) A Hundred Years of Japanese Film by Donald Richie.
(5) Something Like An Autobiography by Akira Kurosawa.