A colleague recently expressed some surprise when I indicated that I owned a copy of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film, The Blood of a Poet. My colleague expressed this surprise by saying “I thought you only knew about westerns.” What can I say? I do know about westerns, and over and over again I read just how some of Akira Kurosawa’s films have the sensibility and even of some the plotting of the American western. And it is true that a number of Kurosawa’s films have been recast as westerns – Roshomon becomes The Outrage (Martin Ritt, 1964), Yojimbo becomes A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964) and also Last Man Standing (Walter Hill 1996), and of course The Seven Samurai becomes The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960). We can also find quotations from The Seven Samurai in a number of westerns from John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1968) to Tonino Valerii’s My Name is Nobody (1972). The line of riders appearing on a horizon, slow motion deaths, ritualistic duals with close-ups, cross-cutting to create tension, a boot hill cemetery, the town with a bridge at one end, the training of combatants, all of this and more have become familiar, if not overly familiar, in film after film since The Seven Samurai appeared in 1954. This film was Kurosawa’s 14th feature and his first samurai film.
The Seven Samurai has the epic proportions of the western, although it is far less interested in the land than in the people who share the land. As Kambei, the leader of the Samurai (Takashi Shimura), says at the end of the film, the Samurai have lost and the peasants are the victors. Kurosawa himself echoes this point in an interview. The film details the uneasy relationship between the Samurai class and those beneath them, the peasants. The samurai do not deal easily with the peasants because they carry some disdain for these lower class people, and the villagers harbour their own distrust of the samurai, a distrust most evident in Manzō’s (Kamatari Fujiwara) insistence on cutting his daughter’s hair and disguising her as a boy. The seventh samurai, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), serves as a bridge between the samurai and the villagers because he is himself a peasant, but a peasant who aspires to be a samurai. Notice Kikuchiyo’s excessively long sword (it sometimes comes right into the camera as Kikuchiyo moves). The sword reflects Kikuchiyo’s histrionic personality, his braggadocio, and also his intense desire to be that which he fears he cannot be. This sword might remind us of special guns sometimes worn by cowboy heroes – the buntline special, for example, that Burt Lancaster’s Wyatt Earp wears in The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (John Sturges, 1957).
A paraphrase of the film’s plot may also sound familiar to viewers of westerns: a small village is terrorized by a gang of wandering bandits, rogue samurai who have banded together to make a living by pillaging vulnerable and passive peasants. The villagers debate what to do about the recurring assaults of the marauders, and they decide to seek out a small number of samurai to help them. They can offer only food and lodging as recompense. A few villagers, among them the hothead Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya), go to town to seek out the samurai. What follows is the now familiar gathering of the group. Once the band of samurai (or more precisely the ronin or samurai without a master) have come together, they accompany the peasants back to the village where they make plans for battle and transform the village into a makeshift fortress. To help orient the viewer to the layout of the village, we have scenes in which Kambei, the leader of the seven, examines each entrance to the village, using a map. Finally the brigands arrive and a three-day battle ensues. The samurai and the villagers succeed in defeating the brigands and the village returns to normal, the film ending with a scene of the villagers singing and planting the next rice crop. The action of the film takes approximately a year.
In short, we have set-upon villagers rescued from their plight by heroic good guys, a plot that might describe many westerns that precede The Seven Samurai, such as Law and Order (Edward L. Cahn, 1932), Tombstone: The Town too Tough to Die (William C. McGann, 1942), My Darling Clementine (John Ford 1946), Shane (George Stevens, 1953), and many B westerns in which a hero arrives in a community tyrannized by a big rancher or a big banker or just a band of looting marauders and cleans things up only to leave at the end. The hero or heroes are not part of the community. And so the connection between Kurosawa’s masterpiece and the Western film as produced in Hollywood or Rome is well established. This is unfortunate because The Seven Samurai is much more than a Japanese western.
The western may provide one source for The Seven Samurai, but Kurosawa’s sources range far beyond the western. The close-up of villagers, especially villagers at work in the fields, invoke the films of Sergei Eisenstein. Echoes of John Ford appear repeatedly, although the influence works both ways because the cemetery above the village as well as a concentration on doorways appear later in Ford’s The Searchers. The lighting often reminds me of the films of Josef von Sternberg, as well as the distinctive contrast of dark and light in American films following Citizen Kane (1941). Deep Focus keeps us constantly aware of action in the entire frame. Acting, as well as the blocking of actors, often involves practices of silent cinema. In short, The Seven Samurai is something of a compendium of film practice. Nothing is gratuitous. Take for example, two fleeting glimpses of a puppeteer in the scene in which Kikuchiyo blunders drunkenly into the evening gathering of the six samurai. This character, the puppeteer, does not appear elsewhere in the film, and here he only appears in the background. He is, however, important. The puppet tells us that the fates of these characters are controlled. But what controls their fates is a combination of personality and history, personal history as well as national history. Kikuchiyo’s fate is apparent right from the beginning.
We can also see the force of personality and identity as formed by history and class in the early scene in which Kambei cuts his topknot and has his head shaved so that he can disguise himself as a priest to fool the kidnapper of a young child. The villagers look on in amazement as Kambei’s head is shaved; they identify him with his hair. Similarly, the young girl Shino finds identity in her hair. But neither Kambei nor Shino take their identity or their character from their hair. Who they are lies much deeper than the hair on their head.
The Seven Samurai is also a film that reflects it own time. As a late postwar production, The Seven Samurai continues to communicate the mood of Japan as it comes to terms with its occupation by foreign troops (the occupation ended in 1952), and as it continues to reconstruct its economy and social life after a period of upheaval. The story takes place in the early 16th century, a time of civil war and change in Japan. The samurai represent a way of life quickly becoming something other than it had been.
The Seven Samurai contains much to occupy the eye. It has kinetic camera pans with cuts while the camera is in motion; these cuts take us from one pan to another, creating an intense sense of movement, as well as passing time. The film contains amazing crane shots such a the one that tracks down a steep hillside near the village. Deep focus allows us to see activity on several planes- in the foreground, the middle ground, and the background. Wipes shift from one scene to another, forcing us to acknowledge the formality of the camera, its intrusion into our sense of actuality. The black screen punctuates major shifts in time and space. The close-up, the two-shot, and the reaction shot bring us close to these characters; we come to understand who they are and why they act and react the way they do. The telescopic lens brings the viewer as close as possible to the action. Multiple cameras shoot scenes so the action can be fully and dramatically captured. Accented lighting highlights facial features, creates shadows, and enhances the contrast between outside and inside, time of day, and mood of the characters. Famously, Kurosawa composes his scenes in a painterly manner, even as characters enter and leave the frame.
For a film of over three hours, it moves quickly even as it keeps action slow, almost still. For example, the scene of the duel between Kyūzō (Seiji Myaguchi) and a would-be master swordsman is, in effect, an action scene. However, the action that takes place in the two duels, the first when the swordsmen use wood rather than steel and the second in which they use real swords and the challenger dies, has the pacing of a dream. The camera gives us the faces of the crowd as it watches the duel, the faces of the combatants, a distanced shot that takes in the field of the duel and the crowd that watches; we shift from perspective to perspective several times before the burst of action that ends in the first instance in stillness as the two men stand with their wooden swords on each other’s shoulders, and in the second instance in the slow motion death of the challenger. Kurosawa captures the ritual nature of the duel, the interest and concern and admiration and shock of the crowd, and the professionalism of Kyūzō in a long take that stretches time just as the camera stretches space when it frames the duel from a distance.
The camera also catches images that serve as leitmotifs communicating both emotion and idea. Examples include the waterfalls that appear twice in the film, the waterwheel, a stream, the flooded fields, and the torrential rain. Water is one of the four elements and the other three also catch our eye. The earth is front and center when we see the grave mounds above the village and when we see flowers and forest and mud. Air is evident in the wind that blows at significant times accentuating characters emotions. As for fire, we have fire a few times in the film, one instance I’ll look at here. Near the end of the film, just before the final battle, Katsushirō (Isao Kimura), the youngest of the samurai, meets the girl Shino (Keiko Tsushima) and the two surrender passionately to each other. They meet in the dark one on each side of a blazing fire. They move from the fire to inside a nearby building where they fall to the straw amid a chiaroscuro formed by the dazzling combination of light and shade, a shot reminiscent of a shot in Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930). The fire of course communicates the young couple’s passion and the chiaroscuro lets us know that this passion is troubled, roughened by circumstances.
Another motif is the circle and the open circle. At the beginning of the film, the brigands ride in silhouette across the horizon and come to a stop on an outcropping above the village. We see the village from the brigand’s perspective, with the riders in the foreground looking down upon the village. The village has a circular form. The opening for the road would break at the bottom end of the village, but the brigands effectively close off our sight of this road and consequently they complete the circle effect. Shortly after this, we have a scene in which the people of the village gather in a circle to discuss what to do about the brigands. We have a sequence of shots from above, close-ups, and the disruption of the village circle by the agitated and angry character, Rikichi who wants to kill the brigands any way he can, but the other villagers refuse to accept his hot-headedness. A crane shot shows Rikichi leaving the group, walking away from the others and slumping to the ground. A cut shows him from nearly ground level as he sits apart from the others who are now in a horizontal line behind him. The camera lens flattens the visual field so that we see the figure in the foreground (Rikichi) not so much isolated from the group as blening with them. First one person emerges from behind Rikichi, and then others come to bring the hothead back into the fold. He is reintegrated into the group.
Another example of the circle at work occurs when the samurai have accepted the job and are traveling to the village with the peasants who have recruited them. At this time, they are six samurai. Coming along behind in a hang-dog sort of way is Kikuchiyo. The scene takes place on the road and we view the characters from a position up the road from where they walk. At one point the group stops, turns, and looks back up the road to see Kikuchiyo at the horizon. The group in the foreground forms an imperfect circle, with an opening, an opening that will eventually be filled by Kikuchiyo. This insistence on the circle is picked up in the image of the water wheel, an image that captures all four elements: the wheel is a water wheel, it serves to turn the mill to grind the earth’s grain, it rises into the air, and it crashes in flames when the final battle takes place.
Another geometric figure we see is the triangle. We have triangles formed by weapons, architectural features, burial mounds, and characters. The formality of the circle and triangle gives an indication of control and order. This control is evident in the manner in which the early fights are staged, and in the rhythm the film sets with its balance of slow action punctuated by bursts of action. Control and order come to ruin in the final battle in the rain. Here the world and its order descend into the primeval ooze. As the rain falls and the mud spashes any semblance of the formality of circle and triangle disappears in a maelstrom of bodies and weapons and horses and running about. The chaos of the final battle uncovers the ugliness of death and violence.
Horses constitute another motif. They provide energy in their galloping, an energy that is inevitable, natural, and powerful. They also provide comic relief a couple of times in the film. The scene in which Kikuchiyo rides the horse through the covered bridge, and then emerges chasing the horse is both comic and also proleptic, a reminder of failure. Kikuchiyo is associated with nature; he captures a fish bare-handed; he rolls about the earth when he is drunk; he tries to ride the horse; he has kids follow him and laugh at his antics. He is, in short, a character marked by his tragic past, and consequently doomed.
Just as the film has much for the yes, it also has much for the ear. It uses sound carefully. Kurosawa uses music sparingly, but when he does it is important. Characters have their specific themes, the samurai theme, Kikuchiyo’s theme, the villagers’ theme and so on. Natural sounds – wind and rain, the sound of fire, the chopping of wood, the pounding of horses’ hoofs, the insistent sound of the mill – all these intensify the emotional impact of the film.
Finally, this is a film of faces. The faces of the people we see register the full gamut of human emotion from grief to exhilaration, from anger to sly interest, from fear to relief. Kurosawa has often been praised for his humanism, his interest in and compassion for human beings. He often gives us characters who do not quite fit in to their world – Dersu Uzala, Kanji (Ikiru), Taketoki (Throne of Blood), Sanjuro (Yojimbo), Kyoji Fugisaki (The Quiet Duel), for example. Here the obvious outsider is Kikuchiyo, but as the final scene suggests, none of the samurai fit into the world that is taking shape. The guns we see and hear in this film are correct for the early 16th century Japan, but they also signal change. The world is passing and leaving the samurai behind. This is, perhaps, why the final shot gives us the cemetery with the graves of the four samurai who died in battle. This film is an elegy for a time of honour and bravery and community.
