This story revolves around a Japanese samurai known as mifune. He is from a humble farm in Hiroshima who must protect his family from yet another attack by the. The film was the first samurai film that Akira Kurosawa directed. He had originally wanted to direct a film about a single day in the life of a samurai, but later. Seven Samurai (1954) Director: Akira Kurosawa Cast: Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, Seiji Miyaguchi, Yoshio Inaba, Isao Kimura, Daisuke Kato, Seiji Miyaguchi, and. The first official trailer has debuted online for a fantastic documentary. Over the last two months, I watched all 25 original Zatoichi films. While none of them are exactly masterpieces, they are all worth watching at least once. Deep Focus Review - The Definitives. A convergence of art, meaning, and entertainment that has never been surpassed in the history of filmmaking, Seven Samurai represents Japanese master Akira Kurosawa’s most optimistic inspection of humanity and individuality, two themes that twisted with increased cynicism as his career progressed. Kurosawa’s universal story appeals to all audiences, regardless of age or culture, because Kurosawa uses a gamut of filmmaking and narrative methods that go above demographic or nationalistic designation. March 25, 2016 Director Ben Wheatley discusses his favorite films, which include Godard’s Weekend. After watching it, he says, “I almost felt. Blending Western formal methodologies with themes rooted in Eastern history, he generates near tangible energy onscreen with expert editing and innovative camera techniques. When viewing this 2. Directors Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese pay tribute to celebrated Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune in the the documentary that screened at Venice and Telluride. Seven Samurai is a spectacle of the human spirit, an interplay of hope and questions about the way of the world, and finally an epic in which ideas and action converge with a remarkable, vital scope. Known as “The Emperor” in Japan for his dictatorial approach to directing and his status as Japan's preeminent filmmaker, Kurosawa worked primarily as an arthouse filmmaker until 1. Although Japanese productions had produced countless samurai films with chambara, period films rooted in sword fighting, they weren't strictly a classical or historical jidaigeki, in that chambara often ignored the meaning of the past as it applies to contemporary Japanese culture. Kurosawa sought to embrace the realism of history so frequently denied by chambara films, but also activate realism into something “entertaining enough to eat” as he would say—something both the erudite and the common could devour, a film loaded with thematic and energetic richness. To this end, Kurosawa paints with epic, historically precise, and philosophic brushstrokes, allowing Seven Samurai to transcend genre and cultural limitations to become a universally consumable motion picture. Seven Samurai's narrative is deceptively simple: A poor farming village in sixteenth century feudal Japan is plagued by the oncoming threat of bandits. Desperate, community members vote to fight rather than let the bandits raid another year's toiled- over rice crop. Village representatives find that collecting samurai willing to fight, without promise of esteem or money, is near- impossible. Fortunately, the meet Kambei (Takashi Shimura), an honorable do- gooder who helps them locate and audition potential candidates, offering nothing except food and shelter, and of course the excitement of battle. When the peasants and Kambei eventually find six other willing samurai, they are men who enjoy battle, require little, and are impelled to do right. Invigorating the farming community with a sense of solidarity, the samurai teach the peasants to fight and defend themselves, erecting walls and digging motes, while also teaching offensive strategy. When bandits eventually arrive to plunder the village, battle ensues, leaving a number of the samurai and farmers dead but ultimately victorious. Spring arrives in short order, and the three remaining samurai are no longer needed as the rice- planting season awakens, and no bandits are left to battle. The samurai and farmers go their separate ways. To understand how such a simple, familiar tale could become one of cinema's finest treasures, one must understand the setting. Early 1. 95. 0s Japanese cinema relied on a very specific sense of nationalism, from a storytelling point of view. Ostensibly, Japan worked in two major categories: gendaigeki and jidaigeki, both in which any number of genres could function. The former category, gendaigeki, worked exclusively in contemporary settings and focsed on the modern day world. Jidaigeki are historically- set films employing settings that range from Japan’s Heian period (7. A. D.) to the Meiji period (as late as 1. A. D., when Emperor Meiji died). They use a selection of craftsmen, farmers, merchants, nobleman, prostitutes, and most popularly samurai as their choice characters. Frequently, swordplay films known as chambara (an onomatopoeia word for swords clanging), a subgenre within jidaigeki reliant solely on action (equivalent to Western gunslinger movies), dominated the category. Samurai dramas and epics outside of chambara were a longstanding tradition in Japanese film, drawing from a history of written storytelling. In some cases, samurai were nobility; elsewhere, they were merely bureaucrats. Their most common designation was that of warrior. In Japan’s sixteenth century feudal period, the country was ruled by a shogun of the Imperial Army: the True Power behind the representational figurehead of the Emperor. Across warring states, warlords known as daimyo controlled individual clans, fighting great battles while vying for power. Devoted to their daimyo, samurai were committed to death, even suicide (called seppuku or harakiri) on their lord’s command. And should their lord die, samurai would become masterless wanderers known as ronin. Samurai followed bushido, a code meaning “Way of the Warrior”—essentially, edicts on how samurai live their lives, remain loyal, stay self- disciplined, and build their ongoing existential and physical growth. Bushido requires that samurai become authorities in martial arts, poetry, calligraphy, and philosophy, surpassing individualism and selfishness. Experts in Zen- Buddhism and swordsmanship, samurai were a group bent on honor. But if samurai became masterless ronin, they were prevented from undertaking peasant manual labor for pay, and so would become nomadic. Other ronin would take odd jobs that utilized their skills, while others still resorted to criminality. In the years preceding WWII, Japanese culture found a simplified version of samurai honor in military applications, linking kamikaze warriors willing to die for their imperial army to the blind loyalty of samurai to their daimyo. Death was met openly and without hesitation in both cases. When Japan surrendered, thus ending WWII, the Japanese people were struck with a vast ambiguity and uncertainty that penetrated their self identity. With the war lost, U. S. Occupation forces that implemented an enforced democracy oversaw the Japanese film industry and required pre- approval of all film scripts prior to their production. For Occupation authorities, the samurai film represented a sense of Imperialist Japan’s nationalism, therefore incongruous for the new, reformed, democratic Japan. But with a lacking samurai presence in Japanese culture, the samurai’s sense of honor and loyalty also disappeared. Japan’s culture took an Americanized dive, resulting in rampant crime and disillusion, as well as the emergence of highly organized yakuza gangs (something Kurosawa recognized and addressed in his postwar pictures Drunken Angel and, to an extent, Stray Dog). Only after the Occupation ended, effective April of 1. With Seven Samurai, Kurosawa hopes for understanding between the polarized peoples in his newly reformed culture—those willing to embrace past ideals, and those lost contemporaries looking to redefine themselves. He does this through historical and narrative allegory, and therein links his contemporary opposition with the oppositional conflict and hopeful understanding between his film’s very different parties: farmer and samurai. Instead of burying the past under a veil of his present- day postwar despair, known as the “kyodatsu condition,” Kurosawa sought to reincorporate a relevant past to revive the Japanese Self, which could draw on contemporarily applicable historical events and iconography, specifically the long- venerable code of the samurai. And yet, in the strictest definition, the samurai hired by the farmers are ronin and are not technically samurai; they are obligated to no master beyond their own personal discipline to “The Way of the Warrior”. Roger Ebert suggests these samurai simply follow “the roles imposed on them by society,” as if they simply fulfilled some preordained behavioral directive by helping the farmers. But pride can obstruct such directives, as we see early on when the farmers solicit a husky samurai who shouts in refusal, insulted that they would offer such absurd terms for his services. For the seven samurai hired by the farmers, taking on such unrewarding, surely bleak circumstances attests to their individual ethos; while the peasants remain unable to offer more than rice and a warm bed, each ronin chooses a humanist’s devotion to samurai honor by accepting their terms. Thusly, the title does not refer to them as ronin, but samurai, because based on their selflessness on behalf of the farming village, each remains true to the mores established in bushido code. Kurosawa’s humanism settles in the tangibility of his seven heroes, each with a specific, cohesive personality. Introduced all throughout the film’s first hour, Kurosawa describes them as a congenial and honorable bunch, making their ensuing deaths more profound for the viewer. Defining the samurai characters involved developing seven distinct personalities, one of many aspects of the film’s production labored- over by Kurosawa. When the farmers first meet their samurai leader, Kambei, he displays colossal humility and bravery, defying the farmers’ prejudices against the proud warriors. A crowd gathers around Kambei, an elder who kneels by a stream and proceeds to shave off his own topknot. A samurai losing his topknot infers punishment or his induction into priesthood—either way, with no topknot, he no longer remains a samurai. Once Kambei’s head is smooth, he dresses in a priest’s clothe, and then he uses the disguise to cut down a kidnapper holding a child hostage. Doing this without accepting reward for his actions, Kambei is plainly the farmers’ ideal candidate to lead their bandit resistance. When asked to join, he accepts their proposal, continuing with the recruitment process himself. Kambei’s sense of honor becomes the selling point to other samurai teeter- tottering on whether or not to join the farmers’ David and Goliath fight. One of the docs at this year’s festival, Mifune: The Last Samuai, pays tribute to legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, whose work with Akira Kurosawa helped to revitalize Japanese cinema in the years after World War II. The subject is a rich one, but the film simply isn’t incisive enough to make much of a dent in a crowded marketplace. Keanu Reeves provides the rather bland narration, which offers such nuggets as that Mifune “embodied steadfastness and integrity.” The script, by director Steven Okazaki and Stuart Galbraith IV, rarely goes beyond platitudes. There are some impressive interviewees on display here, including American directors Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, several of Mifune’s surviving collaborators, and family members of both Mifune and Kurosawa. But the people asking the questions didn’t encourage anyone to probe very deeply into their subject. The film opens arrestingly, with a thumbnail history of Japanese cinema and excerpts from silent films that have largely vanished. A whole new wave emerged with Kurosawa’s masterpieces, Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, in the early 1. Yet the doc fails to provide any trenchant analysis of these seminal films. Rashomon in particular had a lasting cultural impact that is never even hinted at here. The dissection of Throne of Blood, Kurosawa’s electrifying adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is more substantial. Okazaki informs us that the startling climax of the film, in which the hero dies after an attack by enemy archers, was executed without many safety precautions. We get some hints about the impact of the war on both Mifune and Kurosawa. We learn about Mifune’s drinking and about the breakup of his marriage. Similarly, there are mentions of tensions between actor and director that finally brought an end to their collaboration after 1. Perhaps Mifune craved recognition beyond Japanese shores. He went on to co- star in Hollywood movies like John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix, John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific, as well as Spielberg’s comic dud, 1. Kurosawa. The film excerpts are welcome and do convince us of the startling impact of some of these pictures. But you will have to search elsewhere to find a deeper understanding of the greatest Japanese actor. Director- editor: Steven Okazaki. Screenwriters: Steven Okazaki, Stuart Galbraith IVProducers: Toshiaki Nakazawa, Toichiro Shiraishi, Kensuke Zushi, Yukie Kito, Steven Okazaki, Taro Goto. Consulting producer: Rikiya Mifune. Directors of photography: Tohru Hina, Yasuyuki Isikawa. Music: Jeffrey Wood. No rating, 8. 0 minutes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |