Message from lclark

[Anonymous]

Akira Kurosawa is, quite simply, the greatest film director of the twentieth century. The early Orson Welles (Citizen Kane and, far less successfully, The Magnificent Ambersons) and Ingmar Bergman (his entire oeuvre) in their best moments equal Kurosawa. But no one exceeds him for startling originality, technical virtuosity and the sheer force of his stunning visual and dramatic presentations. New directors may emerge in the future, of course, to challenge Kurosawa's mastery. But the American and international films I have seen since Kurosawa's death--especially the epic attempts, such as the later Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and their many clones--continue to convince me that Kurosawa's supremacy remains secure.

Kurosawa in his long career produced what his most astute critic, Donald Richie, calls "a relentless succession of masterpieces." To single out one as the best is invidious. But if we have to do this, as I am doing here, then the obvious choice is the brilliant battle epic known in Engllish as The Seven Samurai. (I hedge my choice by calling it his greatest epic film, thereby eliminating from consideration astonishing mini-epics like Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo and contemporary masterpieces such as Ikiru.) Schininin no Samurai was first released in Japan in 1954 at 207 minutes and two years later in the US as The Seven Samurai in a drastically cut version that runs a little over two hours. Even in its truncated version the film is overwhelming in its visual power and narrative sweep and precision. I first saw it back in the '60s on television, and even with the small black-and-white screen and the heavy cutting and the unspeakable intrusion of commercials, I was stunned and humbled. No first viewing of any film has ever affected me as powerfully, not even my first encounter with Citizen Kane (which I first saw under similar deplorable conditions). Now that the full running time of almost three and a half hours has been available in the US in restored editions for the past several decades, it is easy to compare the cut and original versions and see that what the American editors excised back in the '50s were the deliberate repetitions of events and actions, the formal frozen kata that precede the sword duels and the abundance of details, in closeups and long shots, that contribute to the Zen-like intensity and almost meditative mindfulness of the full viewing experience. However, like any incomparable work of art, The Seven Samura is not to all tastes. Posts to this thread have criticized the film as overlong, boring or generally alienating. In no way does it conform to the venerable American pacing tradition best exemplified in Billy Wilder's ironic anecdote. (Wilder once complained that a European director could open his film with three shots of clouds, just clouds, and the audience would sit still for it; but while an American audience would sit still for the first shot of clouds, in the second there had better be an airplane, and in the third shot it had better explode.) Like any truly great and groundbreaking film, The Seven Samurai forces us to reconsider and redefine our sense of films, how they work and what they mean.

The film opens with a long shot of a gang of bandits on horseback attaining the ridge of a low mountain that overlooks a small village and its meager rice fields. In a terse bit of dialogue the bandit chieftain announces that this will be their next target, but a subordinate reminds him that they pillaged this place last year and had better give it a while longer to recover before they hit it again. The bandit chieftain agrees and the bandits ride off, to return on a later day when the time, and the rice, is ripe. A terrified villager, who has been hiding and has overheard this grim discourse, emerges from the undergrowth with a look of sick horror on his face and hurries down the mountainside to alert the other villagers of the peril they will soon face. So far, so basic. It could have come from a number of the great John Ford westerns that inspired Kurosawa (such as the sinister Walter Brennan at the beginning of My Darling Clementine). But Kurosawa looks nothing like Ford. The bandits are shot in extreme closeups from below, their horses' heads twitching violently back and forth, as if they would throw off these ragged and desperate men on their backs, desperate almost as the starving villagers they plan to rob and rape on another day. The village is brought to agitated life in scenes of angry discussions about what to do and how the farmers can defend themselves against the bandits. In one breathtaking sequence Manzo (Kamatari Fujiwara) approaches his teenage daughter Shino (Keiko Tsushima) with knife in hand. The terrified girl, knowing well, as the audience does not, what is in store for her, flees desperately, pursued by her frantic father, who cuts off her long, shining dark hair as she weeps helplessly, the father hoping to disguise her as a boy and spare her from rape and abduction at the hands of the bandits. A later sequence, even more startling in its intensity of action and revelation, occurs when Katsushiro (Isao Kimura), a young disciple of the head samurai Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura), chases after what he thinks is a disobedient boy until he catches Shino and, attempting to subdue him (her), pulls open her tunic and realizes, to his embarrassment and dismay, that she is a young woman. The scene ends with a shot characteristic of Kurosawa: an extreme long shot with the two characters at opposite ends of the frame, in a field of bright flowers, panting for breath, embarrassed, exhausted and excited, a perfect stillness charged with furious erotic energy.

Toshiro Mifune, who plays Kikuchiyo, the peasant who would become a samurai, is a great actor with a range that extends from broad comic slapstick to the heights of tragic anger and desolation, and Western audiences understandably see him as the "star" of The Seven Samurai, but that role belongs to Takashi Shimura, a magisterial actor who has played many parts, leading and supporting, for Kurosawa (who, like his model John Ford, knew the value of a versatile stock company). Shimura plays Kambei Shimada, the ronin, or masterless samurai, who recruits the other six and becomes their unofficial leader. We first see Shimada as an accidental savior called upon by a poor family to save their young child, who has been captured and is being held hostage inside a small house by a psychotic criminal who threatens to kill her. Shimada asks for the peasants to bring him a bowl of water, with which he wets his head then calmly shaves it, using a straightedge razor. Then he enters the house with a begging bowl, in the guise of a Buddhist monk, as the criminal screams at him, threatening to kill the child. Seconds later we see the criminal stagger out and fall to his death in subtle, exquisite slow motion (a device first employed by Kurosawa and later exploited and vulgarized by Sam Peckinpah, Sam Raimi, the Wachowski brothers and hack action directors too numerous to mention). Shimada comes out with the child in his arms, having performed this act of salvation as a matter of honor and skill. He continues to be the moral focus of the film, the man who recruits six other poor, masterless samurai to undertake the defense of a starving village for the payment of a few bowls of rice. He is not the most skillfull of the samurai. That honor belongs to Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi)), the ultimate swordsman who goes out by himself in the rain to practice his technique, only to fall in the end, in one of the most ironic moments in world cinema, before a bullet fired from a Portuguese musket possessed by the bandits, a dark foreshadowing of the fate of Tokugawa Japan as a consequence of its first contact with the West. Kambei Shimada is the lesser warior but the wiser and the one who survives, along with his young disciple Katsushiro, to stand before the heaped-up graves of the other five in a shot that consciously echoes the conclusion of John Ford's The Lost Patrol. It is Shimada who announces, to the confusion of his disciple Katsushiro, that, once again, they have lost, that the farmers are the ones who have won, not the samurai who lie buried beneath the heaped-up graves. As magnificent as the battle scenes are, nothing in the film feels quite as magnificent as this subdued ending, quiet and powerful as anything in Milton, in which Kurosawa expresses visually and emotionally the great, dark theme of Homer's Iliad: that warfare brings no honor or glory to its warriors, nothing of value except the bleak fact of their survival, for those fortunate enough to survive.

If you love film, you must see The Seven Samurai. It is an obligation, not a choice. But don't see it when you're tired or pressed for time or with a crowd hungry for some fast martial-arts action. See it alone, or with someone who loves film as much as you do. Open yourself to it and let it do its work on you and, at the end of almost three and a half hours, it will have changed the way you look at film and film-making and, most probably, yourself.

Leigh Clark
Monroe High School