Even If You’ve Never Seen ‘Seven Samurai,’ You’ve Certainly Seen Movies Influenced by It

The movie was lengthy and getting longer by the day. Worse nonetheless, the director was bent on taking pictures open air, on a mountainous peninsula west of Tokyo, and the rain, in the course of the interminably lengthy manufacturing interval between 1953 and 1954, was simply as bent on falling in heavy sheets. Earlier than manufacturing was wherever near wrapped, the price range was already ten occasions that of the common Japanese movie, and the ballooning bills led to prolonged hiatuses in taking pictures because the Toho Movement Image Firm scrambled to seek out more cash. Within the nationwide press, in the meantime, the manufacturing was already a byword for bloat and dysfunction. The director had earned the disparaging nickname “Kurosawa Tenno,” or “Emperor Kurosawa,” a nod to his authoritarian bearing—and to the best way his most formidable movie was increasing into its personal miniature shogunate. 

Seemingly untroubled by these pricey, unproductive and extremely publicized delays, the acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa would use the free time to go fishing. On one such journey, actor and frequent collaborator Minoru Chiaki requested the notoriously cussed director if he was apprehensive concerning the venture utterly working aground. “As long as my photos are hits,” the director responded, whereas dangling his line off the banks of the Tama River, “I can afford to be unreasonable.”  

Kurosawa as soon as famously in contrast Japanese cinema to “inexperienced tea over rice”: mild and healthful. With this new movie, Seven Samurai, a unprecedented motion epic, he was looking for to make heartier fare, a movie he hoped can be “entertaining sufficient to eat.”  

Kurosawa’s intransigence was rewarded. The 207-minute Seven Samurai, with its prolonged scenes of swordplay and grandly conceived motion sequences, was as modern because it was epic, drawing superlatives from critics, turning a era on to Japanese cinema and altering widespread tradition ceaselessly. Its story, characters, multicamera taking pictures and motion choreography reoriented American moviemaking for generations. Even those that haven’t seen the film itself have probably seen a model of it, whether or not in a straight remake, like The Magnificent Seven (1960), or in numerous homages, from the Steve Martin comedy Three Amigos! to Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. Immediately, 71 years after its launch, Seven Samurai nonetheless resonates. Every character appears distinctive, sketched in loving element, whereas the filmmaking itself stays bracingly vivid. Eschewing the stiffer, sturdier theatrics of Japanese epics of the period, Kurosawa minimize his motion scenes utilizing a number of cameras, giving them a heightened sense of vim and realism. Regardless of its faraway, Sixteenth-century setting, Seven Samurai felt—and nonetheless feels—disquietingly fashionable. Ultimately, regardless of the rain and the unhealthy press, Kurosawa’s masterpiece elevated not solely the Japanese sword-fight film but additionally lots of the American westerns that impressed it, proving that nice subtlety, and artistry, could possibly be discovered within the area of genres typically dismissed as frivolous, or merely entertaining. Motion pictures would by no means be the identical.

Born in Tokyo in 1910, Kurosawa was descended from precise samurai: The household traced its lineage again to warriors who had served an Eleventh-century warlord. His father, a former soldier, was pleased with this bloodline. He was a stern disciplinarian, at all times instructing his household in what the filmmaker has known as the “finer factors of samurai etiquette.” However Kurosawa the elder did allow sure lighter leisure, particularly Western cinema. As a baby, Akira studied conventional Japanese arts like calligraphy, in addition to kendo, Japanese bamboo swordplay, at which he excelled regardless of his admitted lack of energy. However he additionally spent hours in film theaters, taking in Japanese productions and Western imports. His older brother Heigo labored as a benshi: a narrator offering stay commentary and context for Western silent motion pictures screened for Japanese audiences. His brother’s work afforded the younger Kurosawa not solely publicity to an awesome many overseas movies but additionally one thing simply as necessary: free film tickets.

As a pupil within the Nineteen Twenties, Kurosawa initially devoted himself to artwork at Kyoto’s Doshisha Faculty of Western Portray. He quickly realized his skills in that subject would barely rise above illustrations for magazines, on a budget. “I might knock myself out doing this,” Kurosawa had stated, “However you’ll be able to’t make a dwelling this manner.” Movie, alternatively, would pay. On the similar time, his well-rounded pupil life was introducing him to all method of thought and literature from Europe, significantly the performs of Shakespeare, the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and the financial and historic principle of Karl Marx. All this time burying himself in Western motion pictures, literature and artwork knowledgeable Kurosawa’s strategy as a younger filmmaker. Beginning within the mid-Nineteen Thirties, he labored his means up from an assistant director at Toho, certainly one of Japan’s pre-eminent studios (then known as PCL Cinema Studio). In subsequent years, his work would proudly exhibit this broad vary of influences, together with a number of Shakespeare diversifications and a movie based mostly on The Fool by Dostoyevsky, the creator who, Kurosawa thought, “writes most actually about human existence.”  

Kurosawa translated his early Japanese success into worldwide curiosity with movies like Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Canine (1949), and by 1952, his Rashomon was voted the finest foreign film on the twenty fourth Academy Awards. 

Kurosawa initially conceived Seven Samurai as a slick, ingenious retooling of the stuffier custom of Japanese sword-fight photos, known as chanbara, which many Japanese critics in comparison with American westerns: easy tales stuffed with inventory characters. However Kurosawa had extra respect for Hollywood traditions than many of those critics did. He believed that, simply as administrators like John Ford had discovered a approach to dignify and exalt the aesthetic and emotional landscapes of the studio western, he too might make a sword-fight film that was traditionally detailed and immensely entertaining.

The plot of Seven Samurai will virtually actually be acquainted: Within the countryside of Sixteenth-century Japan, a gaggle of villagers will get wind {that a} troupe of bandits is making ready to assault, proper when the village’s barley harvest is due. With little army expertise and virtually no weapons at their disposal, these farmers enlist a gaggle of warriors to come back to their protection. We see the villagers recruit successive samurai, every a definite kind. There’s the wizened veteran Kambei (Takashi Shimura); the extreme grasp swordsman Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi); and the spirited, sake-glugging lout Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune)—half Puck and half Falstaff, and never truly an actual samurai in any respect. As soon as assembled, the motley squad trains the villagers within the fundamentals of warfare. Then the bandits arrive, and the samurai lead the plucky farmers via an prolonged, breathlessly thrilling protection of their village, and of their bountiful shops of barley.

It’s a easy story—therefore, partly, the near-infinite potentialities for retelling it. Movie critic Sean Gilman considers Seven Samurai the common mannequin of the “men-on-a-mission film.” And the movie was formative for a revolutionary era of American administrators. George Lucas has recalled being dragged to a screening of Seven Samurai by his movie college good friend (and fellow director) John Milius: “After that I used to be utterly hooked.” Steven Spielberg has known as Kurosawa “a real visionary.” Martin Scorsese, invoking the samurai traditions of apprenticeship and ascendancy, as soon as known as Kurosawa his “grasp.”

“Every new era of filmmakers tries to raise the genres they grew up on—make them artier, extra refined, extra politically dedicated,” Gilman says. “The New Hollywood filmmakers noticed that in Kurosawa. He made samurai movies. However he made elevated samurai movies. In the identical means, they wished to raise westerns and gangster movies.” For these American younger weapons, Kurosawa exemplified new methods of investing noir photos, sci-fi tales and shark thrillers with a renewed sense of verse and seriousness.

Although Kurosawa’s profession spanned 50 years and a few 30 movies—lots of them masterpieces—Seven Samurai stays his most influential, and most beloved. In 2022, the taste-making, canon-forming, once-a-decade ballot performed by the influential British movie journal Sight & Sound counted Seven Samurai among the many 20 best motion pictures of all time. 

Akira Kurosawa died of a stroke in 1998 on the age of 88. His physique was interred in a modest grave in a cemetery behind a small Buddhist temple overlooking the browsing seashores of Kamakura, a seaside city south of Tokyo identified greatest for its many Zen shrines. It’s a very humble resting place that feels oddly becoming: In a bitter irony, Kurosawa’s overwhelming reputation within the West partly soured his repute in his native Japan. Even Seven Samurai got here in for a drubbing from some home critics; one author griped that Kurosawa pitting Japanese characters towards one another risked compromising political and social concord within the brittle postwar interval. In Japan, Kurosawa’s movies had been typically considered macho, immature and even, in Roger Ebert’s account, “too Western.” For Kurosawa, such divisions had by no means actually made sense. “The Western and the Japanese stay facet by facet in my thoughts,” he as soon as remarked, “with out in the least of battle.” 

Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 movie Rashomon depicts occasions from 4 competing views—a revolutionary narrative system many tv exhibits have mimicked
By Sonja Anderson
 

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