Seven Samurai
Jidaigeki (“period drama”) is a Japanese film genre that features stories set in the past. Within that there is the subgenre, “chambara,” which translates to “sword fight.” Works in this category include films by famed moviemakers such as Akira Kurosawa, who created the revered sword epic, Seven Samurai, which first stormed cinemas in 1954. While it was set in 16th century Japan, the movie was steeped in contemporary influences, notably 1950s westerns. But it also reflected realities of postwar Japan.
In 1954, Japan’s economy was rebounding after a gruelling postwar slump, a shiny new technology called television had recently appeared, and the U.S. occupation had officially ended. However, just eight years earlier, in 1946, 250,000 protesters gathered outside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to protest the conditions they lived in. Their slogan was simply “food.” The nation had struggled to feed its citizens during the difficult final days of World War II, and now it had to fill the bellies of 3 million repatriated soldiers. The 1945 harvest had been poor and food imports were costly. Black markets were everywhere, and so were crime and prostitution.
The opening scenes of Seven Samurai perhaps harken back to 1946 as much as 1586, when they depict the plight of struggling peasants, harassed by bandits and facing starvation, during the Sengoku (“warring states”) period.
“The gods want us farmers dead!” one of them laments, encircled by keening neighbours.
I viewed this affecting tableau writ large, along with numerous other beautifully composed shots, on a proper movie screen for the first time, after only seeing it on DVD, Kanopy and other small-screen platforms. Courtesy of the film series, Black Belt Cinema, I watched a restored print of Seven Samurai at my go-to rep house, the Revue Cinema. It’s always a revelation to finally see classic films on a big screen, but Seven Samurai presents a whole new movie at its intended cinematic scale. The level of detail Kurosawa put into the movie is overwhelming. Seated in a darkened cinema, you’re swallowed up by scenery that dwarfs the characters in panoramas reminiscent of John Ford westerns (and Star Wars, which emulated Kurosawa).
Equally breathtaking is Kurosawa’s use of human beings as scenery. On one hand, his efforts to realize beleaguered farm folk individually, included crafting a family tree for each villager. But he also made their collective presence felt in each scene, like a Greek chorus. In one early scene the whole village proceeds in one tight formation, heads bowed like the sad-faced workers in Fritz Land’s Metropolis, to the oldest villager’s house to petition his advice. In several scenes, their bodies move to and fro like rippling wheat stalks.
The samurai, themselves, have seven markedly different personalities, but they’re arranged collectively in each frame like figures in a Rembrandt painting. Except, of course, the film’s standout character, Kikuchiyo, played by Toshiro Mifune, who always breaks out of the picture. This irrepressible swordsman was written in last, after Kurosawa realized six self-serious samurai needed a foil. Kikuchiyo brings home the film’s populist message. Uncouth, excitable and barely clothed (Mifune received fan mail praising his “bare ass”), he’s not samurai by birth, but from peasant stock himself. Yet he comes to define Kurosawa’s unconventional treatment of bushidō, the samurai code.
Kurosawa, himself, came from a samurai family. “When I was a child, my father still had the topknot,” he told Dick Cavett in a 1981 television interview. Despite his warrior lineage, Kurosawa identified as a pacifist. “I, in fact, detest violence,” he confessed to Cavett.
Kurosawa strove to help redefine samurai values in more humanistic, and less elitist terms in his films. Codified in various texts since the 1600s, bushidō, was strongly interpreted in militaristic, ultranationalist terms during the Second World War, when Japan fought with Hitler’s Axis. Samurai were portrayed with such qualities in films such as the 1941 adaptation of The 47 Ronin, a traditional story about faithful samurai who willingly meet death to avenge their master. Such self-sacrificing values were impressed on kamikaze pilots, who deliberately crashed their planes into enemy targets (when they didn’t miss, which was most of the time). As Japan lost ground to the Allies, soldiers were ordered to their deaths in ferocious but futile banzai attacks.
After the war, occupying Americans tried to discourage this morbid approach to patriotism. Historical films were banned for elements and themes such as feudal loyalty, pursuing vendettas, seppuku (ritual suicide) and even the use of katanas. These restrictions were lifted after the U.S. occupation ended, but when filmmakers made new sword epics, they sought fresh ways to redefine samurai honour, such as Kurosawa’s attempts to democratize bushidō. In Seven Samurai, Kikuchiyo proves as resourceful and valorous as his well-born companions—who, themselves are reduced to commoner jobs, like policing small-time thieves and chopping wood. When they are hired to defend farmers from bandits, they’re persuaded to help, not for riches or courtly honours, but rice and barley.
“Show me a samurai who’ll fight for farmers in return for food,” argues one pessimistic villager.
“Find hungry samurai,” suggests the old man.
However, the good-hearted samurai, Shimada Kambei, and the six others who join him, seem motivated by more than food. They don’t exactly drive a hard bargain with the peasants, who even lose the bag of rice they brought to bargain with when townsfolk rob them. Like Second World War veterans, who returned not just to poverty but purposelessness, these war-weary rōnin crave a chance to do something meaningful. However, in doing so they do bend the samurai code in various ways to defeat the much larger force of bandits. The message seems to be that larger principles matter more than strict rule-following.
Rule-breaking characters with their own rough code of honour aren’t out of place in westerns, the genre Kurosawa loved, and which also loved him back. Seven Samurai and Kurosawa’s other projects (such as Yojimbo) translate easily to Hollywood westerns such as Magnificent Seven (which sought Kurosawa’s permission and credited him) and so-called spaghetti westerns, like Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (which did not).
Lady Snowblood
This type of cross-pollination continued well into the 70s, when spaghetti westerns and American gangster movies informed samurai films, such as the racy, violent Jidaigeki film, Lady Snowblood.
This blood-spattered period piece, adapted by Toshiya Fujita from the manga series by Kazuo Koike (also known for Lone Wolf and Cub), is set in the late 19th century, during the Meiji (post-Shogun) era. I got to take in to this hack-and-slash samurai tale at the TIFF Lightbox, where it painted a state-of-the-art movie screen red. This 1973 film inspired other cinematic bloodbaths, notably Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies—which, like Lady Snowblood, has a sword-wielding heroine, an unambiguous revenge plot, and an aesthetic steeped in 70s exploitation films.
Like the manga it’s based on, this kimono-clad murder spree dispenses with Kurosawa’s nuanced morality. However, like Seven Samurai, this bloody, surprisingly literary rōnin saga, reflects the decade it was made. In her intro to the film, Noriko Yamamoto, director of the Japan Foundation of Toronto, describes the Meiji Period (1868-1912) as a time of “rapid change,” in which Japan transitioned from a feudal, isolationist society, to a swiftly modernizing nation. The film hints at this period’s transitional nature with pointed anachronisms, such as characters wielding katanas and revolvers, and the culturally fluid crime boss Gishirō, who wears a kimono with a jaunty bowler hat, and round Beatleish sunglasses, while sporting 70s-appropriate sideburns.
Like the Meiji years, Japan in the early 1970s was a time of rapid change. A quickly rising yen triggered steep inflation, and with it consumer panic, as necessities were priced out of reach and an OPEC embargo threatened to paralyze resource-poor Japan. A leftist group calling itself the Red Army hijacked an airplane in 1971, forcing a detour to North Korea. Prior to that, novelist Yukio Mishima tried to stage a nationalist coup at the headquarters of Japan’s self-defence forces. This episode ended with the samurai-descended author committing seppuku. During that time, a smooth-talking serial killer named Kiyoshi Okubo raped and killed eight women he lured into his shiny white car.
Yuki (a.k.a. Lady Snowblood), the film’s steely-eyed protagonist, is a child born of murder and rape, who executes vengeance on those who molested her mother and killed her half brother. She seems to embody unhinged aspects of that time as she executes vengeance, the only love language left to her family. One of the film’s poetic captions, cribbed from the comic, reads, “A thread of blood unites love and hate.” Great jets of fake blood tie together the movie’s action, which lurches forward with raw, jarring cuts between scenes of mayhem. The camera quick-zooms at skewed angles, like manga frames, as Yuki slashes her way through gangsters with a sword sheathed in a florid purple parasol. Each gangster she cuts bleeds for quite a while, spewing blood coloured like spaghetti sauce for up to a minute, with an ASMR kind of spatter sound (which Tarantino employs in Kill Bill’s beheading scene).
Ran
The 1970s were also a jarring time for Kurosawa. Despite his legend status among Western film connoisseurs, he fell out of favour in Japan, which prompted a suicide attempt in 1971. A decade later he still sounded stung. In his 1981 chat with Dick Cavett, the interviewer voiced his bewilderment about indifference of Kurosawa’s home country to his films, while directors like George Lucas and Francis Coppola raved about him.
“I certainly can’t explain that either,” answered Kurosawa.
Indeed, when Kurosawa made his final great epic, Ran, it got much of its funding, press and acclaim came from outside Japan. The 1985 film, co-produced with Paris producer Serge Silberman, had a budget of $12 million, which made it not only his most costly film, but the most expensive Japanese film produced at that point. It was an exacting production, during which Kurosawa’s wife passed away, making him pause filming to mourn her.
Ran was Kurosawa’s second period film to adapt Shakespeare. The first, Throne of Blood (1957) was based on Macbeth, starring Toshiro Mifune as a katana-wielding version of the Scottish king. Ran derived its plot from King Lear, Shakespeare’s tragedy about an aging king, so it was interesting to hear it introduced by two young men at the Paradise Theatre, one of them strongly projecting Toshiro Mifune energy.
“I love it when auteurs do movies as old men that are their autobiography,” said one of the hosts, who program the Eastern Promises film series. “King Lear is Kurosawa.”
When questioned about this in 1986, Kurosawa, aged 75, denied any autobiographical intent. Still, like Shakespeare’s grizzled king, Ran centres on an old man with an old man’s grievances.
Like with Throne of Blood, Kurosawa took considerable inspiration from Noh (a type of traditional mask theatre in Japan) for Ran. In both films, actors’ facial expressions and make-up, derive from Noh character masks. The aging warlord Hidetora, Kurosawa’s version of Lear, looks strikingly unreal, and his makeup is noticeably mask-like.
Kurosawa chose not to innovate with Ran, but to lean into what he knew best. Acting performances have a graceful staginess, like in Kurosawa’s other period films. It was filmed in colour, but actually feels colorized. Bright swatches of yellow, red and blue play against backgrounds that are practically black-and-white, such as a grey, ruined castle, or a field of volcanic ash—which feels empty of everything but the characters. For an epic film centered on a clan of warlords, there are moments of incredible stillness, with nothing but the sound of cicadas.
Not to worry, though. If you stick it out through this nearly three-hour film, you eventually get a show-stopping battle with swordsmen, archers and an entire castle burned to the ground. True to Shakespearean tragedy, nearly no-one is left alive by the end. Hidetora’s clan utterly implodes in paroxysms of ambition and betrayal. However, long before swords, bows and torches come out, the scheming Lady Kaede (played fantastically by Mieko Harada) sets a chain of dark events in motion. Cosmetically similar to Lady Asaji Washiz (a.k.a. Lady Macbeth) in Throne of Blood, Kaede is psychologically related to Yukio in Lady Snowblood. Fate has also fashioned her into an instrument of vengeance.
However, of course, all along, the rot began with Hidetora himself, who transforms more and more into a mask of madness and tragedy, as he realizes his own past atrocities that set the tragic events around him in motion. In an interview with writer Peter Grilli, president of Boston’s Japan Society, Kurosawa explained how he found it essential to, “give Lear a history. I try to make clear that his power must rest upon a lifetime of bloodthirsty savagery. Forced to confront the consequences of his misdeeds, he his driven mad. But only by confronting his evil head-on can he transcend it and begin to struggle again toward virtue.”
As in Shakespeare’s play, the character who prods Lear/Hidetora toward self-knowledge is the Fool, secretly the smartest person in the room, and also the character with the best lines.
In King Lear, the Fool informs his king, “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”
Likewise, the best line in Ran is given to Kyoami, the fool character, played by Ikehata Shinnosuke (who goes by the stage name Peter)—actor, entertainer and one of Japan’s most famous drag artists. Peter also delivers Ran’s other top performance.
“Man is born crying,” Kyoami tells Hidetora, referencing to the Buddhist notion that life is suffering. “He cries, he cries, then he dies.”
As in Seven Samurai, a commoner speaks truth to power. Kyoami is also, incidentally, the last person in Ran left standing, besides a dispossessed blind prince and an unheeded Buddha portrait.
“Is there no God or Buddha in this world?” wails Kyoami, in the final soliloquy. “Are they so bored in heaven that they enjoy watching men die like worms? Damn God! Is it so amusing to see and hear human beings cry and scream?”
Whether or not gods are watching, humans in theatre seats certainly are. And perhaps Kurosawa, who endured moments of futility, himself, wondered whether his plea for a better world had fallen on deaf ears.
“I suppose all of my films have a common theme,” he once wrote. “Why can’t people be happier together?”
Baby ran, she ran away...why she ran...
watching lady snowblood just a few weeks before Ran, I was primed for the female revenge plot twist that I didn't know I would love
Stunning films both and well played together as woven in this thread