The following notes on Seven Samurai were written by Mattie Jacobs, PhD candidate in Film in the Department of Communication Arts at UW – Madison. A new 4K DCP of Seven Samurai screens on Saturday, February 8, as part of our series of restorations featured in last summer’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival. The screening begins at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!
By Mattie Jacobs
What’s most striking about the group of samurai, the six other warriors assembled by Kambei (Takashi Shimura) who will follow him to save a village from warring bandits, is that they’re all failures. Far from a “band of elite warriors” that have since become a trope of the action genre, the samurai that gather to follow Kambei and protect the village are an unlikely group. Kambei is weary from battle after battle, all of which he claims to have lost, and now drifts through the land as a ronin, a samurai without a lord to serve. The other men he gathers, like old friends and veterans of failed campaigns Gorōbei (Yoshio Inaba) and Shichirōji (Daisuke Katō), or the cheerful but uninterested-in-fighting Heihachi (Minoru Chiaki), similarly miss the mark of the samurai ideal. Only the expert swordsman Kyūzō (Seiji Miyaguchi), stoic and capable, seems fully prepared for the battle ahead. Finally, to round out the group comes Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), a quasi-bandit himself masquerading as a samurai and unable to be dissuaded from coming along, eager to fight almost anyone.
These motley individuals each in their own way showcase Kurosawa’s desire to explore beyond the lone invincible warrior characterization that had begun to dominate the samurai (chambara) genre. Instead of a perfect samurai, the men struggle between their ideals, desires (for love and for recognition), and their past losses against a code that says they should prioritize reputation and honor above all else. The seven individual warriors succeed against bad odds and lopsided numbers, organizing the village of farmers over the season before the bandits return. They construct fortifications, train the town in self-reliance, eventually culminating in a battle that repels the invaders. Though they win at high personal cost, they all manage to follow and fulfill a code of Ninjō, the samurai value of knowing and doing what is right that Kurosawa found missing from earlier samurai films that placed a high value on martial prowess and the typical warrior mentality.
The careful editing of the film highlights Kurosawa’s focus on the samurai film as a place to work out the tensions between violence and honor, between action and the flow of nature. David Bordwell points out how Kurosawa introduces extreme stillness into what had been often a tradition of quickly cut action sequences for samurai; often Kurosawa would have his actors simply stand still for long periods of time, sword raised, before a blow is struck, or entire groups will remain motionless, the camera still, until something will motivate the need to move. Action sequences are, at a large scale, interspersed with quiet contemplation, a rhythm that scholar Stephen Prince ties to Zen Buddhism (one of Kurosawa’s interests). “Rapid pacing requires the foil of extreme immobility,” Bordwell notes, and these rhythms dominate smaller, non-action scenes as well.
Kurosawa will often, for instance, avoid showing a blow, cutting to show the effect of the hit instead: as an arrow flies towards a horse, sure to strike, we cut instead towards an area in front of the running horse, it eventually falling into the frame. Kurosawa notes, in his autobiography, Something Like an Autobiography, “the most important requirement for editing is objectivity. No matter how much difficulty you had in obtaining a particular shot, the audience will never know.” The action sequences in the final battles of Seven Samurai, from Kyūzō’s off-screen attacks to the simple editing rhythms of a sword strike or an arrow hit, reveal this commitment.Seven Samurai, as well as Kurosawa’s other jidai-geki (period-dramas, often Samurai films set in the 11th or 16th centuries), are stylistically indebted to the American Westerns that could be seen before and after WWII – especially those from John Ford. Some scholars, like David Dresser and Stephen Tao, have even referred to the post-Kurosawa trend of the “Eastern Western,” movies that combine the legacy of the Western and samurai movies and reworking their tropes in ways that would influence both Hollywood and Japanese films.
Kurosawa’s unshakeable influence is evident in the form of many of the Westerns that came after, most obviously in Josh Sturges’ Seven Samurai remake, The Magnificent Seven (1960), or European action spectaculars like Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966). However, Kurosawa’s stylistic fingerprints, including how to shoot and edit action cinematography in alternatingly intense and calm rhythms, are most clearly visible in later films from Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969, a sort-of radical reworking of Seven Samurai) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) will be screening at the Cinematheque next month, and both films resonate with Kurosawa’s eye for action punchiness coupled with narrative stillness Peckinpah also reworks Kurosawa’s themes of honor and nature, showing how a character’s actions on screen build an audience’s understanding of who that person is.
During its long 148-day production, many times the standard schedule for a film at Toho, Kurosawa was forced by the studio to twice stop filming Seven Samurai. It was far over budget, eventually coming in at half a million dollars, and its plot had expanded beyond its initial script. During these pauses in production, Kurosawa would leave the set, avoiding an extremely hostile film press. He would decamp to the countryside and go fishing, patiently waiting for the frenzy of the shoot to continue. The film’s 207 minutes show how the villagers are ravaged by bandits, plant again, and await with dread a harvest that will have the bandits return and destroy all they’ve worked for. These rhythms of stillness and action, building and waiting, provide the structure for Seven Samurai. Make sure to take a breath during the intermission as we wait for the bandits to come back.