Seven Samurai

 
I just picked up the new Criterion Blu-ray of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.  There on the left is the head of the gang of rogue mercenaries, played by Takashi Shimura, whose remarkable range is swiftly comprehended when you lay his starring turn in Ikiru – as a weary, bespectacled, morally muddled middle-management gnome – alongside the role he plays in Seven Samurai.  Here, as Shimada, the leader of the samurai band, he’s a unique combination of strength, courage, leadership, and cautious wisdom – the sort of individual who provides a handy fictional yardstick against to measure pretty much anyone – oneself, one’s boss, one’s President or Prime Minister.  He’s so damned wise and full of strength that you’d think he’d be annoying, but there’s something in Shimura’s quiet, sad eyes that humanizes him.  His unflappable courage never seems superhuman or like a put-on; it’s simply the attitude of an experienced professional who has seen battle many times before and who is too busy to give excessive thought to personal safety.

In classic ensemble-movie tradition, Shimada’s fellow samurai embody various types – the Rookie Kid (Isao Kimura), the Master Swordsman (Seiji Miyaguchi), the Loose Cannon (Toshiro Mifune).  The other three members of the team are a little less defined, not given much in the way of subplots of backstories, relying more heavily on the actors’ presence than on the screenwriter’s pen to establish them in our minds.  You’d think that in a big cast like this, with so many rowdy soldier-of-fortune types, you’d want to sow some dissension between them for the sake of dramatic grist – but they all get along pretty well and never stray far from their collective purpose.  Kurosawa and his writers presumably felt that the central situation – a village of hapless farmers perpetually preyed upon by a ruthless mini-army of bandits – was sufficient to provide conflict, and so, in fact, it is.

Of Mifune’s performance much has been written, and I think the most salient characteristic of his role to a Western audience is the enormous physicality of it – which is also seen in his depiction of the bandit in Rashomon.  Mifune’s body language is hugely expressive, every gesture outsized, and it’s used both for leavening moments of slapstick humor and to convey the ferocity of battle in the final act.  Equally important is his exasperation with the pretensions and peccadilloes of the other samurai and of the villagers themselves; he’s the guy we identify with much of the time, because he embodies our own skepticism of heroic tragedy.  The affinity between Kurosawa and Shakespeare is well-known (his adaptation of Macbeth into Throne of Blood is maybe my favorite Shakespeare film of all), and here he borrows a classically Shakespearean technique, using a comic or grotesque figure to bring elevated drama down to earth.  What’s also notable about Mifune’s self-styled samurai, Kikuchiyo, is that he is a self-created man: lacking any family pedigree to place him “legitimately” in the samurai class, and not evidently having any particular military training, he’s a samurai only because he says so and because he wants it badly enough.  His presence reminds us of the innate absurdity of many class distinctions, yet not everyone has Kikuchiyo’s spirit to punch through: one of the film’s more poignant subplots shows class-consciousness foiling a budding romance between the youngest samurai and a farmer’s daughter.

I’ve seen the film many times, but upon this latest viewing, a few observations sprung to mind.  First, the writers are enormously, supernaturally, breathtakingly patient in setting up their story.  We are more than two hours into the film before the first true battle between samurai and bandits occurs!  Until that point, there have been brief snippets of action – most memorably in the opening scenes, as Shimada shows his mettle with a bit of selfless heroism, and Kyuzo the swordmaster shows his with a senseless killing that he only reluctantly commits – but the vast majority of screentime is devoted to setting up characters, establishing the plight of the village and its geographical layout, and lulling us into a peculiar rhythm that seems to oscillate between pastoral comedy and grim military preparation.  Very few modern filmmakers have – or, perhaps, can afford to have – this sort of patience in setting up a story; James Cameron comes to mind, though I will tread carefully making any comparisons between Seven Samurai and, say, Titanic, lest tomatoes hurled by angry cinephiles fly at me through the tubes of the Internet.

When the action finally comes, it’s relentless – a long, pitched battle broken up into two major sequences with a brief nighttime respite between them.  This is a very complex sequence juggling numerous plotlines and characters and action beats, and it flows so organically that we might almost dismiss it as artless.  But even if you aren’t tracking every story thread carefully, or watching the kinetic framing and furious pans that Kurosawa and his cinematographer, Asakazu Nakai, sustain for something like a half an hour, it’s hard to miss the ferocious energy of this sequence.  Much of it comes from the sheer grit and grime of the setting – by the end, as terrified horses wheel and whinny amid sloshing puddles and driving rain, as the samurai slip and slide in the muck and drench their clothes, we are uniquely impressed with the unavoidable messiness of warfare.  The sequence is violent but not bloody; few, if any, squibs are used, and the actual killings have a sort of dumbshow, theatrical quality that I can’t help seeing as a blemish now (along with the generally sparse sound design, lacking the full-featured use of foley effects and ambient noise that we’d expect nowadays as a matter of course).  Kurosawa was to remedy this bloodlessness in later films in spades – most notably in the memorable climactic swordfight of Sanjuro – but it takes a bit of an adjustment to go with the flow here, particularly in early scenes.

I was again on this viewing, as I always am, deeply moved by the funeral scene in which the first fallen samurai is mourned by his companions and by the villagers.  There’s a stoical, wind-beaten quality to this sequence that hits me on some atavistic level, stirring an almost Homeric sense of glory and tragedy and poetry.  Kurosawa frames and cuts the sequence almost as Eisenstein might – packing the frame with throngs of extras who take on an iconic and collective characteristic, using each cut for maximum emotional effect, riling up our feelings so that a chill runs down our spines.  Beginning on a note of sadness, the sequence suddenly becomes unexpectedly stirring as Kikuchiyo plants the samurais’ homemade flag atop a village house and a haunting solo trumpet fanfare sounds.  As Kurosawa cuts to the suddenly uplifted faces of the villagers, given new strength by this defiant gesture, you can feel your heart swelling on the cut, your emotions clay in the hands of the skillful filmmaker.  Yet suddenly, there’s Kikuchiyo’s disgruntled face again, undercutting the whole thing – taking us away from highfalutin emotions of Glory and Honor and back to the very personal pain of a friend and comrade lost forever.  It's an arresting, elemental piece of filmmaking.

The more I study filmmaking the more I’m convinced that good command of blocking is one of the things that separates the master director from the merely competent.  Anyone can stick a camera on a dolly and push it down a hallway or toward a person who’s standing still (well, almost anyone can – must resist temptation to slag Kevin Smith).  But controlling the bodies on the screen, moving them in concert with camera movement and using their motion to motivate the camera’s pans and dollies, imparts a uniquely cinematic, pictorial energy to the proceedings.  Also, of course, blocking is a very subtle but essential way to underscore what’s going on dramatically in a scene – how the characters relate to each other, who is in a dominant or submissive position, who is talking about whom, and so forth.  Watch, in Seven Samurai, the way Kurosawa manipulates large groups of individuals within the frame.  In particular, the villagers seem to run to and fro as their fragile whims and fears direct them; they make a striking visual contrast to the individualism of the samurai themselves, which is highlighted by the samurais' frequent presence in closeups and the fact that they get the lion’s share of the dialogue.  When the villagers are armed with bamboo spears, they become a great bristling vengeful mass, surrounding the bandits’ horses, poking fearfully but relentlessly at their assailants, a sort of vast irritable worm that coils to protect itself.

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