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Seven Samurai
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On the 30th Anniversary of Seven Samurai (1984 lecture notes) We
ought to have richer foods, richer films … I thought I would make
this kind of film, entertaining enough to eat, as it were. Style In Kurosawa, we discover a poetics of displacement: a thematic, entirely eloquent on the film’s surface, of the individual moving within and breaking away from the pack, the unified mass movement of a like-minded crowd – and sometimes being reintegrated, by force, back into the crowd (as with the villagers who want to rebel from the samurai training to save their own houses). The mise en scène choreography, on this level, is like dance: the attraction and repulsion of bodies. The acting performance is highly stylised; artifice is exaggerated. And not only in the agitated yelping, shaking and hurling of Toshiro Mifune! Every detail of gesture, motion, posture, bearing has been systematised, drawn into a pattern of comparative difference. Key characters have their own identifying tics, like wise Kambei (Takashi Shimura) running his hand across his bald dome in order to reflect or withdraw for a moment. It will make you recall, at certain moments, the body language of silent film comedy, such as the street scene in Buster Keaton’s The General (1926). In terms of its overall stylistic parameters, Seven Samurai invests a huge amount of inventiveness into the matter of visibility and its opposite, invisibility. People, actions, props move (or are moved by the frame) into and out of sight; some things are hidden, creating an off-space not beyond but within the shot. Examples abound in virtually every scene: the swift execution and rescue performed by Kambei in his introductory scene; the dethroning of Kikuchiyo (Mifune) from the recalcitrant ‘old nag’ he vainly tries to master; the reappearance of Kikuchiyo ahead of the samurai group after his remarked-on disappearance. In an exceptional example, the burning of the bandits’ harem, Kurosawa goes all Baroque, Josef von Sternberg-style: veils and cluttered deframing confuse the usually clear lines and dimensions of his cinema-world. Important mention must be made, too, of the keen role played by sound in Kurosawa’s mise en scène conceptions. Hardly less than Robert Bresson in the 1950s and beyond, he was conceptualising cinematic action in terms of sound cues and atmospheres: the introduction of Heihachi (Minoru Chiaki), for instance, through his nearby wood chopping; or the frantic scene built around the village’s percussive alarm signal. Note that every samurai who dies is felled by the ‘modern’ sound of a gunshot – and we never see the act of a bandit aiming and firing. Death comes from nowhere; or rather, it arrives from a scary, technologically altered future. Note, too, the extreme care taken with the geographic orientation of the spectator within the fictional landscape (comprised, as in most films, by ingeniously patched-together bits of diverse locations and studio-built sets). North, South, East, West of the village; the location of the bridge, the flood, the wall, and the left-open entry-point: all this is drawn, discussed, marked off, and kept crystal-clear for the viewer – as is the number of bandits left to be killed at any specific stage of the battle. In the reading for Seven Samurai – a panorama that provides a useful map of different critical methodologies at different times in different places – one finds Noël Burch, in the early 1970s, staking a particular, formalistic position on Kurosawa: he disapproves of conventional approaches (such as the writings of Donald Richie and Joseph Anderson) that fault the director for sometimes displaying a “too obvious” or exaggerated technique, a failing that is mostly redeemed by a well-judged “expressive” function that serves the characters and the story. To Burch – previewing a larger polemic concerning Japanese cinema in his subsequent book, To the Distant Observer (1979) – this is a hopelessly classical, and even ‘Western imperialist’ view of film language, a wish for an illusory ‘transparency’ of form. We don’t need to buy into every premise of Burch’s polemic to accept his basic thrust: film form (or style) is in itself powerful and performative, evident and spectacular, generating much of Seven Samurai’s pleasure for us as viewers. Some of its finest bravura moments are not far from say, the cinema of Samuel Fuller in this regard. Narrative Paradox: the film, as narrative, seems both taut and leisurely. How can this be the case? Because it adopts a large-scale structure of blocks, which we can give tags like exposition, recruitment, training, battle … The film takes its time with each block, until it is exhausted, fully explored in its permutations and ramifications. And then there is an often sudden leap forward in events: note how many interrupted actions (such as the attempted seduction of Katshushiro [Isao or Ko Kimura] by Shino [Keiko Tsushima]) populate the film’s unfolding. As commentators have pointed out, Kurosawa likes, as a rule, to use plot ellipsis as often as possible: a scene that we enter in medias res, or that we skip altogether, only to hear it breathlessly recounted in the following scene. This gives Seven Samurai a touch, at times, of comic-book narrative form – another triumph of stylisation. The film constantly uses iteration, variation, repetition-with-difference – just look at the running-gag of the entry-test which incoming samurai must undergo. Or the way the samurai’s flag is made, kept indoors, but later hauled out in a rage (by Kikuchiyo) for public planting on the mountain. Or the perfect pay-off to the wood chopping gag. And Kurosawa uses, just as often, what is called foreshadowing or (as I like to call it) flagging: something, such as a prop or a site, is seemingly off-handedly included in the flow of action before it is turned to more significant and dramatic use later. This list includes: the burial mound; the field of chrysanthemums; the outlying house with the water-wheel; and even the samurai’s self-made flag itself! There are various strategies of narrative expectation, guess-work and suspense deployed by Kurosawa and his co-writers. For example, the samurai recruitment seems to stabilise itself at no. 6, until the 7th (Kikuchiyo) re-asserts himself – and this character has already been ‘dismissed’ from the recruiting procedure, not once but twice! Or recall the start of the story, which is almost a joke about the very existence of the narrative: the bandits look down upon the village and ask each other: “Should we attack now?” No, they’ll wait until the barley harvest is done. Just as well, as there would be no film, no tale of the seven samurai to tell! It's what narratologists point to as the all-important mechanism of delay. A minor but important part of the narrational texture comes from an almost Hitchcockian dive into points-of-view and differential positions of knowledge. This especially ties itself around the hidden relationship of Katsushiro and Shino: Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi) sees them, and later the father, Manzo (Kamatari Fujiwara), spies them and takes brutal, punitive action against his daughter. A strange, ultra-melodramatic note in the proceedings of that scene: everybody exits the frame one-by-one, leaving a sobbing Shino in the muddy downpour of rain! Also note, in a different register of dramatic suspense, the splendid sequence in which Katsushiro is told to hide in the field and simply observe how Kyuzo (apparently asleep) and Kikuchiyo (up a tree) manage to effortlessly overwhelm the enemy in just a few, lightning seconds. Theme This might prove disconcerting to some critics (and viewers) who expect to dig for depth in cinema – and who assume that this search is a major criterion of artistic or aesthetic quality. But try to orient yourselves differently in the face of Seven Samurai: its busy surface-texture is a tissue of formulae drawn from diverse traditions Eastern and Western: samurai legends, the Western genre, the war film, silent cinema … The process of characterisation in the film is very visible, physical. It’s another case of comparative repetition-with-difference: the various lead figures embody one or another trait of the samurai ‘code’ (wisdom, precision, good humour, acceptance, force, youth, experience … ). The villagers are concentrated in a handful of emphasised characters (Manzo, Shino, the ever-fearful Yohei [Bokuzen Hidari] and the militant Rikichi [Yoshio Tsuchiya]) who are similarly differentiated in terms not only of their looks, age or ability, but also their central psychological traits or drives. At the bottom of this hierarchy come the bandits, who are scarcely differentiated at all beyond the leader with his flamboyant headgear. They are savage, animalistic, bloodthirsty – typified (in a brilliant touch) by the agitated movements of the horses they ride. The samurai and villagers, by contrast, are united in this: they keep their feet on the ground during the ultimate battle. When the villagers slash a sword or spear, or wield a bow and arrow, we see their action; by contrast, the gunfire of the bandits, instantly abolishing all traditional fighting distance, is never seen: only heard as a sound, and viewed in its mortal consequence. You can say that Seven Samurai is a film of stereotypes, but be careful: that’s not necessarily a pejorative description. These stereotypes are brilliantly animated by Kurosawa – and that’s one definition of a certain kind of cinema: the animation of types. Besides, note the extra-special moments where characters suddenly and surprisingly exceed their type, often in melodramatic bursts: the tears in Kambei’s eyes as he realises Kikuchiyo’s true origin, or (more understated) the tenderness with which he caresses and carries a child; Kikuchiyo exploding in bitter anger before his comrades and hurling arrows at the wall, or playing clown to an audience of laughing children, or (above all) breaking down as he carries a baby in the water, exclaiming: “It’s me!” Of such systematically calculated moments of excess, great films are made. The principal thematic issue at stake, however, is the fundamental ‘structural opposition’ of farmers and samurai. The film keeps bringing up revelations that alter our ongoing understanding of this relation: not only do the villagers regularly kill depleted, wandering samurai – and bear in mind that the bandits, too, are ‘fallen’ samurai – but they horde weapons and food, hiding them even from the seven men they’ve hired. The villagers are thus driven by a furiously focused self-interest that ultimately shuts out all outsiders. In the famous, ambivalent ending, Kambei states that the samurai have lost, and only the villagers have won: their role as heroes is a therefore bittersweet, wistful one, to just fade away or vanish with the changing tide of History. This is an element that may remind you of American Westerns including Shane (1953), The Searchers (1956) and Budd Boetticher’s Randolph Scott cycle of the ‘50s. Or, more recently, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) and the Mad Max cycle (1979 & 1981) – Kurosawa’s influence on global cinema has been wide and lasting. How to dramatise and unfold a structural opposition like this? Too many films fall into the trap of static reiteration of the semantic divide between one side and the other (however these sides are constituted and populated). What gets a fleshed-out narrative going is, above all, inventive items of mediation: particular figures who belong to both sides or no side; plot actions that bring opposites into intimate collision. Seven Samurai has all this. Kikuchiyo is the great mediator: no longer a farmer’s son, aspiring to be a samurai, and faking his way to get into the gang – but always reminded that he’s not (he’s represented by a triangle in their flag!), until almost the end of his life. The love story offers another way of staging the coming together, but ultimate separation, of the sides. Rikichi, almost an 8th samurai, is the third kind of mediator, because he is not what he at first seems to be – a rare single-guy in the farming community – and the revelation of his married status is also, simultaneously, the ultimate negation of it amidst the (real) flames. And a particular, powerful incident shows the semantic structure bending and folding, in a kind of moral calculus of narrative acts: the moment when the samurai must simply withdraw, ceding their authority over the community, and let the very old woman (literally hobbling across their frame) lead a collective act of revenge on behalf of her dead son. Note that such mediating actions often take the form of a literal, pictorial intrusion: the same happens at the end, when a serial line of framing women cross the deep-in-thought, remaining samurai. In the end, we could say, all lines of mediation are cut and, in that sense, resolved. But what a complicated resolution! Let’s linger on that final scene for a last point. In the three-level analytical model of style, narrative and theme that I’ve used here, something informs them all, but hasn’t yet cracked its own specific category of analysis: emotion. Emotion as experienced by a viewer; emotion as constructed and conveyed from the screen: they’re not exactly the same thing, but they can (and do) fuse. Kurosawa solicits and juices our emotions in so many ways. The basic story and the characters matter; so do the clearly expressive (even at moments expressionistic) touches. But the emotion that is created and carried by the filmic form has resources and mysteries that go beyond even Burch’s close-textual grasp. A case in point: in the penultimate shots of Shino singing in the line of workers (a Soviet-like touch!), the camera reframes several times, joltingly, up close, jerking with the rhythm of her movements. And it’s as if this somewhat surprising, excessive movement has caught the vibration of the swelling emotion of the ending as a whole (this is, at any rate, how I experience it). It’s an unexpected vector that transmits great feeling. Film criticism does not yet fully understand the workings of such moments; so, it needs to try harder. This our task today, and (I suspect) for many days to come. Postscript: 40 years later – on the 70th anniversary re-release of a digitally spruced-up Seven Samurai – I began from the above set of notes to formulate my audio commentary for the 2024 British Film Institute DVD/Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD release. © Adrian Martin 23 March 1984 |
