Seven Samurai Origins and Influences
Transcript
00:00The samurai film, as you might imagine, is enormously popular in Japan.
00:13Samurai are sentimental figures, they're figures of great affection and respect and reverence.
00:19So you put these characters in a film, and if you have it be a film that heroizes their
00:25life, romanticizes it, glamorizes it, infuses it with a lot of action, you've got the makings
00:32of a popular hit.
00:34Samurai represented a human ideal of nobility.
00:38But what Kurosawa, for example, is looking at is the samurai in terms of personality,
00:43in terms of individualism, and in terms of what it means to be an authentic and a good
00:48human being.
00:49He finds the best qualities of being human in the samurai.
01:18I think Seven Samurai is the most important samurai film for two reasons.
01:22It had as great an impact in Japan as it had in the West.
01:27For the West, Seven Samurai is the film that introduced the samurai film.
01:32To the West, it demonstrated that the Japanese cinema was not just the kind of exotic, picturesque
01:38films like Rashomon or Gate of Hell, but that the Japanese could make a dynamic, exciting
01:44action movie.
01:46In Japan, Seven Samurai proved that there was still a space for the genre in post-war
01:52Japan.
01:53It proved that there was something that the samurai film could say to post-war Japan.
01:59So Seven Samurai reestablishes the genre in Japan.
02:04Kurosawa's aim was fundamentally socially critical.
02:09He was not happy about Japan in the 20th century, and he became less and less happy
02:16as the 20th century went on, and as Japan changed fairly radically after the period
02:22of American occupation.
02:23I mean, this was at a time, 54, the occupation had been over two years, that people were
02:30beginning to feel the need to identify themselves again as Japanese.
02:36There was a feeling that they wanted to reassert themselves in a different way, not with the
02:40army this time.
02:41There was a need for a sort of a self, and this is one of the things, because the self
02:47in Seven Samurai is a very, very decent one.
02:51Look at that final scene, for example, and a very honest one.
02:55It gave the people a kind of identification they might not have had otherwise.
03:00I think that's one of the reasons for the rapture of its reception.
03:06And feudal Japan is a very stratified society.
03:36People are assigned places in society by birth.
03:39It is almost unknown for people to cross from one category to another
03:44because Japan just ain't like that.
03:46You live and die where you're born.
03:48There's no social mobility, as we would say now.
03:51Japan was a series of fiefdoms,
03:54and each fief had its own army of samurai.
03:58Samurai are attached to a daimyo, or feudal lord,
04:01and samurai are retainers who live under the protection of that lord
04:05and are concerned with protecting his land
04:08and fighting wars against rival daimyo who want to destroy him.
04:13In culture, the samurai were supposed to be loyal and brave and true to his lord,
04:18willing to kill himself at a moment's notice.
04:21So there's something about that ultimate sacrifice
04:24that speaks to the real spirit,
04:26that, you know, what does sacrifice really mean
04:29if you're not willing to take it the whole way?
04:31And so the death of the hero is really the sign
04:35that the samurai spirit is alive and well when the samurai is dead.
04:40On the other hand, samurai were also basically bureaucrats.
04:44They were the mid-level politicians of their day,
04:49secretaries of state, of agriculture, you know, things like that,
04:53which isn't very glamorous at all.
05:01And then there's bravery, honor, discipline,
05:06and the ability to train yourself physically.
05:12In short, all samurai have the qualities required of a soldier,
05:20such as a sense of responsibility.
05:22And that sense of responsibility is special.
05:25I think Bushido is a combination of all of those qualities.
05:28Bushido is the code of the warrior.
05:31It's almost a mystical kind of a concept in Japan,
05:34and you develop yourself by studying martial arts,
05:37the art of the sword, the art of the bow,
05:40but you also study calligraphy, you study Zen Buddhism,
05:45you study the fine arts,
05:47so you are a cultivated individual all around.
05:50Bushido allows you to reach your highest expression as an individual,
05:54but they are only that by serving others.
05:57The code of Bushido, at its best, and there were abuses of this code,
06:01but at its best, the code of Bushido means much more
06:04than just being a warrior or fighting or being even good at swordplay
06:08and being clever, manipulative, outwitting your enemy.
06:12It also means a transcendence of selfishness,
06:15a transcendence of individualism.
06:17Well, that's exactly the same theme that we find in Seven Samurai,
06:20because what the samurai do is sacrifice themselves
06:24to defend the peasant village.
06:27An integral part of Bushido was the sword of the samurai.
06:31The sword of the samurai was the personification of his being.
06:35Only the samurai, among all the classes in Japan,
06:38were entitled to carry swords.
06:40This, in fact, is what distinguished them, along with their topknot,
06:43is the fact that they were bearing these weapons.
06:46So the samurai would, in fact, carry two swords,
06:50a longer sword for dueling and a short sword for the symbolic idea
06:56that he could be or would commit ritual suicide at a moment's notice
07:01by using the short sword to cut himself open.
07:05So there's all kinds of clues to the fact that Kikuchiyo is not a samurai,
07:09both by how he treats the sword and the kind of sword that he carries.
07:13Kikuchiyo has an extremely long sword, but he doesn't have a short sword.
07:17So he's an oddball among samurai.
07:21But it is clear that the mystique of the samurai has centered on the sword.
07:47As a result, most of Asia became a colony of Europe and the West.
07:53I thought that Japan would become a colony as well.
07:56And so, for the next 100 years, Japan had to become stronger and stronger.
08:04And so we did our best.
08:06Well, we were forced to carry that kind of morality from above as well.
08:10It's also true that we thought that we had to be like samurai
08:18so that the people themselves wouldn't become a colony of Europe.
08:24We were forced to change our loyalty to the state.
08:27And after we were once denied that,
08:31well, we were denied it for a while,
08:34but our loyalty to the company remained the same.
08:38From that point of view, we can say that the tendency to seek identity in samurai
08:43is closely connected to the present.
09:08And there are lots and lots of stories about legendary battles
09:13and famous anecdotes of samurai history.
09:17The Japanese turn out to have an insatiable appetite for retelling of familiar stories.
09:22If they can be retold in a slightly more vivid or more colorful or more detailed way,
09:26there seems to be no impatience with, you know, we've heard it all before, nothing like that.
09:32People are only too happy to keep on consuming the same old, same old, same old thing.
09:36Out of all the popular stories in Japan,
09:40the most popular was the story of the samurai army.
09:45So, well, the story of the samurai is really interesting.
09:51The story is about a strong guy who trains himself and conquers the country.
10:02For example, the story of a farmer or a butcher.
10:07As an entertainer, I was very happy to read it.
10:11It's a very passionate story.
10:14There are a number of recurring hero figures,
10:17people who really existed in most cases,
10:20but whose exploits have become the stuff of legend, essentially,
10:23because they've been so endlessly elaborated and endlessly rehearsed
10:26and endlessly replayed and retold in different forms and different formats.
10:30One of them is Miyamoto Musashi.
10:32Miyamoto Musashi is hard to compare to an American figure,
10:38maybe someone between Jesse James and Abraham Lincoln.
10:42But because he was a famous swordsman, because he was an actual figure,
10:46because he actually wrote poetry, studied Zen,
10:51and wrote a book about the influence of Zen on fighting and on life,
10:57the Book of Five Rings,
10:59he is a kind of figure that encapsulates maybe the two twin poles of the samurai.
11:05On the one hand, he's a great, violent, famous swordsman,
11:09and on the other hand, he was something like a Zen master.
11:12So the idea of the Zen swordsman that you see in the figure of Kyuzo in Seven Samurai,
11:18he's a kind of Musashi-like figure,
11:20although you don't see him doing calligraphy or writing poetry.
11:24But that seeming paradox of a great warrior and yet a man who,
11:29when he's not fighting, is literally at peace,
11:31I think Miyamoto Musashi really encapsulates.
11:34And after 75, 80 films, a number of novels,
11:38I think for whatever reason, it's clear to say the Japanese do like their Miyamoto Musashi.
11:44And then, of course, there are stories that are not part of a particular clan history,
11:49but have become so archetypal that they are told again and again.
11:53And the example there that is most striking, of course, are the Loyal 47 Ronin.
12:00That's a tale that gets so deeply at aspects of self in Japan and the prowess of the warrior.
12:08The story of the Loyal 47 Ronin was a play in the Bunraku or puppet theater in about 1730 or so.
12:18So it has been a popular story as a Bunraku and Kabuki play.
12:22For a good couple of hundred years now, almost 300 years.
12:26These are Ronin because they are now unemployed.
12:30They no longer have a lord to serve. Therefore, they are not samurai, but Ronin.
12:35Their lord has been disgraced through treachery.
12:39And they therefore spend a great deal of time plotting labyrinthine strategies to get back at the traitor.
12:49Each one of them has a unique character.
12:53And the combination of those makes them a great force.
12:58And even though they are different characters,
13:02the one thing that connects them together is, of course, a serious sense of duty and loyalty.
13:08But other than that, there is humor.
13:11This is what connects them together.
13:16There is a sense of duty and loyalty.
13:20They acknowledge each other's strengths.
13:24I love this kind of thinking in Japanese.
13:30For now, Ronin does not have a lord, so he is free.
13:35He has a hard life, but he is free.
13:38And as a hero, it is more interesting to be free.
13:42It is not that I love Japanese movies,
13:46but the truth is that the samurai of the century lived a very boring life.
13:51That's why they didn't make movies.
13:54The seven samurai are all Ronin.
13:57In fact, most of Kurosawa Akira's period dramas are Ronin.
14:09There are two dominant categories of film as the Japanese see it in Japanese cinema.
14:16One is the jidai-geki, the period film,
14:20and the other is the gendai-geki, the present-day film,
14:24the drama set in the present time.
14:27The jidai-geki is by definition about feudal Japan.
14:31And in feudal Japan, there are the samurai.
14:34You can't avoid them.
14:36They're part of the broad picture of society.
14:39So from the Japanese point of view,
14:42jidai-geki, or the period film, is the film that encompasses samurai.
14:47The idea of a genre that somehow is focused exclusively on the samurai
14:52is a rather alien one in Japan.
14:54A period film, for example, could be about women, merchants.
14:58It doesn't have to be about samurai.
15:01Kenji Mizoguchi made a number of films
15:04that have nothing or almost nothing to do with samurai.
15:08So he's interested in other things in the jidai or in the period.
15:13You could say that a picture like Rashomon is a samurai film
15:17because there is, after all, a sword fight in it,
15:20and one of the principal characters is a samurai.
15:24But it's obviously not a film about fighting men.
15:27It's a film that is a period film in which a samurai appears.
15:31So there's a large class of historical pictures
15:34that may have samurai in them,
15:36but typically what audiences think of as the samurai film
15:40are the fight films, the films that are about combat,
15:44about the martial values of the samurai life.
15:48Then the Japanese sometimes distinguish further
15:52between the samurai film and the swordplay film.
15:56In Japan, from early times, I mean, early times in cinema onwards,
16:00there arose a genre of what I think we would now call
16:04martial arts exploitation films.
16:06This has its roots in kabuki theatre.
16:08Those are known rather demeaningly in Japan as chambara.
16:12Now that is a genre. There is a chambara genre.
16:15Chambara is an onomatopoeia for the sound of clashing swords,
16:19which is very cool.
16:21So Chambara Eiga is basically a film
16:23that doesn't really speak too much about history,
16:26much about samurai as a class,
16:28much about the situation.
16:30It's really a kind of action film.
16:33And it's movies which are probably
16:36almost entirely focused on samurai or ronin
16:39and which exist primarily for the thrills and spills of swordplay,
16:44gimmick swordplay in many cases.
16:46Films that have no larger point other than the plot, the action,
16:50what happens to the hero, his fate.
16:52And it's people who represent the Code of Bushido
16:55and they're using swords.
16:57But it's not what we would call the samurai film.
17:01I mean, I guess quite a bit of what we think of
17:04as the samurai film in the West
17:06is the more ambitious, creatively sophisticated films
17:10made by such directors as Kurosawa.
17:13And they're very far from representative
17:15of the kind of chambara genre in Japan.
17:18But they are quite representative
17:21of a jidai-geki tradition in Japan.
17:25Most Japanese films of that period are lost,
17:28but quite many survive in fragments.
17:31And if we want to know what Japanese cinema was like
17:34in the 1910s, 1920s,
17:36we can tell quite a lot about it from surviving fragments.
17:39From the very word go, Japan has been making jidai-geki,
17:43some of which involved samurai and some of which involved action scenes.
17:47As far as we can tell, as far as anybody knows,
17:50nothing more ambitious was done in the genre until the 1930s.
17:53But when you get that shift in the late 20s, early 30s,
17:56you do get a spirit that's quite nice.
17:59You had a couple of very powerful actors,
18:02Denjuro Okochi and Bando Tsumasaburo.
18:06Bando especially was kind of Mifune-like,
18:10that he was very energetic, a lot of comedy,
18:13whereas Denjuro Okochi was much more staid and much more serious.
18:17And the films are hard to come by,
18:20such as The Bloody Battle at Takadanobaba
18:23or Nezumi Kozo the Rat, which I always think is a great name,
18:27another 19th-century kabuki play turned into these films.
18:31I think those films are actually characterized
18:35by a good deal of tension
18:38between the samurai individual and the social order.
18:42There's a lot of kind of nihilism and anti-conformity.
18:48There's a great deal of a kind of rebellious spirit,
18:52whether he's rebelling from his family
18:55or in some ways even rebelling from the state.
19:17If there is this image, this idealized image of a feudal past,
19:21a cohesive, organized, peaceful, stable Japan,
19:25I think it's going to be very difficult
19:28to make a film about it.
19:31I think it's going to be very difficult
19:34to make a film about it.
19:37I think it's going to be very difficult
19:40to make a film about it.
19:43I think it's going to be very difficult
19:46to make a film about it.
19:49Very obviously, that's ripe for rereading.
19:52Actually, life was nasty, brutal and short.
19:55People suffered, there was poverty, there was injustice,
19:58there was rampant crime and corruption,
20:01most of which went unchallenged.
20:04It was far from this idyllic vision
20:07that is propagated in popular fiction
20:10and in most movies, most jidaigeki movies.
20:13So it's ripe for rereading.
20:16In these early films, we see samurai,
20:19and they are not the imposing figures of authority,
20:22these dexterous animals that you find in the ordinary chambara.
20:26These are thinking, feeling human men.
20:29The samurai ideal as a fighting machine
20:33is challenged by being humanized.
20:38Now one director that really made an impact on Kurosawa,
20:42who shifted the samurai film in the 1930s,
20:46is Sadao Yamanaka.
20:49Yamanaka's fascination, I think, for us
20:52is that he brings social commentary to the period film,
20:55and that he really is a kind of precursor to Kurosawa
20:59in that he'll use a genre film to try and say something.
21:03Now the most famous film of Yamanaka's
21:06is Humanity in Paper Balloons.
21:09The central character in the film is a samurai.
21:12He's in exactly the same position as the Ronin in Seven Samurai,
21:15which is one of abject poverty and unemployment,
21:18no immediate employment prospects.
21:20And the film ends with his suicide,
21:22or actually his wife kills him and then commits suicide herself
21:25to put him out of his misery, and it's because he's been lying to her
21:29and because she understands that their position is hopeless
21:32and is never going to get better.
21:34And it amounts to a kind of social commentary,
21:37and as we've said, in the 1930s when this was made,
21:40this has a contemporary resonance
21:42which is above and beyond any kind of historical truth.
21:46I mean, he sees the samurai as one more social victim.
21:50There's no place anymore for these kind of militarist figures
21:54who basically had right on their side because of their might.
21:58So they become dinosaurs who become extinct.
22:02So by undermining, rethinking, rereading,
22:06challenging the myths of Bushido, the warrior spirit,
22:11filmmakers are implicitly offering a critique
22:15of what's going on outside the theatre in the streets
22:18and what's going on in Tokyo, what's going on in the Dutch National Diet.
22:22This was obviously a big deal
22:24because the 1930s is the rise of militarism in Japan.
22:27China is invaded first at the beginning of the 1930s.
22:30There are the first incursions into China,
22:32and Manchuria is annexed and becomes Manchukuo
22:36and becomes a Japanese colony in effect.
22:39And to make films in the 1930s
22:41which are questioning the spirit of Bushido,
22:44this martial spirit of self-sacrifice and might is right,
22:48is obviously a politically daring thing to do,
22:52and socially it could hardly be more relevant.
22:55I mean, we're talking about a film
22:57that is directly addressing the current of its times
23:00and being critical of it.
23:02Those, I think, are the precedents of what Kurosawa does much later.
23:07After 1939, when Japan is at war,
23:11though not yet with the US, of course,
23:13there is an actual decrease in the number of samurai movies.
23:17The period film is popular,
23:21but samurai are not as popular as you might think
23:25precisely because they begin to get a little anarchic
23:29and a little individualistic.
23:31And I think the wartime authorities were really reluctant
23:35to make action films,
23:37not only because they may seem frivolous,
23:40but because I think by the time of the war
23:43the genre had already a built-in kind of social commentary
23:49that the wartime could not support.
23:55For Kurosawa, making action films was a major turning point.
24:00He wanted to make a film like this,
24:03and during the American occupation,
24:06he had to ask the US military for permission to make it.
24:10And, you know, samurai,
24:13when you say samurai, it's beautiful,
24:16but it's basically something that doesn't fit in with democracy.
24:21In order to carry out your master's orders,
24:25you don't have to sacrifice your wife or children.
24:29That's the way samurai think.
24:32That's not democracy.
24:35So samurai fell to the ground a lot.
24:39The Story of the 77 Old Men
24:42was made several times a year in Japanese cinemas.
24:47During the occupation,
24:50it wasn't allowed at all.
24:53It wasn't just a film about loyalty to your master,
24:58but it was also a crime against your master,
25:02who had ordered you to kill him.
25:06Those films were directly connected
25:10to nationalism.
25:13That's why the occupation
25:16didn't allow them to make films about that.
25:20At that time,
25:23they realized that
25:26it wasn't good for samurai
25:29to criticize the negative aspects
25:32of the feudal society.
25:35That's why they didn't make
25:38samurai-like films.
25:42It's only after the war
25:45and after the return of the jidai-geki,
25:48that's to say, after the American occupation,
25:51that things really take off.
25:54The jidai-geki and samurai films
25:57came back to life in the 1950s and 1960s.
26:01That was the golden age of samurai films.
26:24Kurosawa's debut film,
26:27Sugata Sanshiro,
26:30was a great popular success.
26:33People were looking at him
26:36as a bright new hope,
26:39particularly when the war was lost
26:42and bright new hopes were needed.
26:45Kurosawa's debut film,
26:48Sugata Sanshiro,
26:52was about a young man
26:55who was a samurai,
26:58but he had a samurai-like spirit.
27:01It was a story about a young man
27:04who was trying to live like a samurai.
27:07So Sugata Sanshiro
27:10wasn't a samurai story,
27:13but it was a samurai film.
27:16This was a pattern
27:19that Kurosawa used
27:22to arrange his own style.
27:25That's how it all started.
27:49You see the body itself being thrown.
27:52He shows us this.
27:55Usually in most action people,
27:58they would have cut away from this.
28:01This is too difficult to do.
28:04But he wanted more than that.
28:07He wanted a kind of vitality.
28:19He wanted to make an interesting action film.
28:22He wanted to make an action film
28:25with a lot of human character.
28:28When he drew the Japanese samurai,
28:31it was a mixture of those two things.
28:36There are a lot of examples
28:39in foreign films.
28:42Kurosawa himself admitted
28:45that there were a lot of films
28:48that were influenced by John Ford.
28:51Kurosawa loved John Ford.
28:54He said he was influenced by John Ford.
28:57When you talk about the influence of John Ford,
29:00it's true that the action is great,
29:03but also that each shot
29:06has a wonderful composition.
29:09It's also true that it's a mixture
29:12of the friendship between men
29:15and the love between women.
29:18It's a mixture of those two things.
29:21It's very common.
29:25Kurosawa famously alternated
29:28period pieces, jidai-geki,
29:31and contemporary pieces, gendai-geki.
29:34It is clear that for Kurosawa
29:37there was some kind of distinction.
29:40The contemporary films on the whole
29:43were very different.
29:46However, that doesn't mean
29:49that the entertainments are not serious
29:52or not seriously intended.
29:55It's just that they're playful
29:58and they play with genre elements
30:01and other things as part of their play.
30:04One of the astonishing things
30:07about Seven Samurai is that
30:10it's not an art film.
30:13It's a thinking person's film.
30:16But he's going back to really popular
30:19genre material in Seven Samurai.
30:22We have to remember that
30:25this is not an art film genre.
30:28These are extremely popular pictures.
30:40Kurosawa thought that
30:43martial arts should be
30:46fought for the sake of the people
30:49and not for the sake of the people.
30:52He wanted to completely change
30:55the style of Japanese period films
30:58and samurai films.
31:01He saw that they could be made
31:04into a more serious,
31:07He was always adamant that he wanted
31:10to make entertaining films.
31:13He said it over and over again.
31:16He didn't want any sort of
31:19deep-think masterpieces,
31:22but at the same time he wanted
31:25a film which was much more
31:28substance if it was a period film
31:31than had been ordinarily done.
31:34But on another level, of course,
31:37he must have felt that
31:40he could do it better.
31:43He felt that they were thin,
31:46that they didn't give audiences
31:49enough stuff, enough full-bodied
31:52portrait of the past.
31:55Seven Samurai is definitely
31:58not new in giving us rebel heroes.
32:01It's not new in giving us
32:04the past as a prism
32:07through which to view the present.
32:10But what is new in this film
32:13is the breadth of vision
32:16that Kurosawa brings to the past,
32:19the true sense of epic scope
32:22that he gives to his presentation
32:25of medieval Japan.
32:29Seven Samurai does that,
32:32but it does everything else as well.
32:35It has all the aspects of chambara.
32:38If you like a sword fight,
32:41you'll like Seven Samurai
32:44because it has some great sword fights.
32:47We also have a comic film here.
32:50We see it in many, many moments
32:53of comic relief in Seven Samurai.
32:57We have all of those genres together,
33:00and of course we have a film
33:03which we have to talk about beyond genre.
33:14So what Kurosawa does
33:17is take an adventure story
33:20and he treats it seriously,
33:23some of which is anachronistic.
33:26For example, when Rikichi,
33:29the farmer whose house they lodge in,
33:32is discovered to have some great burden on his heart,
33:35there is discussion about how best
33:38to tease this out of him,
33:41how to get him to open up and speak
33:44and unburden himself of this secret
33:47that is obviously causing him such pain.
33:54This sounds like modern therapy.
33:57This does not sound like feudal Japan.
34:00That combination of a fantasia
34:03based on historical sources,
34:06modern-day psychological thinking,
34:09and swordplay elements, action elements
34:12that are designed to be exciting
34:15in the same way that they are in chambara
34:18but not at all like chambara,
34:21that's the difference.
34:27What he's doing is, he's taking one aspect
34:30of the samurai archetype
34:33and expanding it as far as he could possibly go in 1954.
34:37He wants to have the samurai be more.
34:40He wants them to be human,
34:43and he also wants them to be
34:46sort of fighting machines at the same time.
34:50He could humanize it
34:53so you became interested in people's people
34:56and not as guys wearing around swords.
34:59In the movie, you get a real range of character types.
35:02You don't have just the stock figures
35:05of ordinary pictures.
35:07Although the film is about collective action,
35:10he individualizes the members of the collective
35:13so that it's pretty clear who these people are,
35:16not just the samurai or the ronin,
35:19but also the farmers or some of the farmers,
35:22some of the other peripheral supporting characters.
35:25The audience can identify
35:28with every single one of the characters.
35:31Kiyuzo with his skill, that's the person we all want to be.
35:34Kambe, who has failed really
35:37because he's a down-and-out at the end of his life.
35:40He no longer has a job, he's a ronin,
35:43and yet he represents leadership
35:46that we all wish we could aspire to.
35:49Kikuchiyo, the character who represents class mobility.
35:52He began as a peasant, and yet he winds up
35:55in every sense a samurai.
35:58The audience can identify with the love affair
36:01between the 2 young people, Katsushiro and Shino,
36:04and the idea that love should transcend class distinctions.
36:07The audience can identify with the whole peasant village,
36:10who have lost control of their ability to sustain their lives.
36:14Everybody can identify with that.
36:16All of this fit very nicely
36:19into the person he was evolving into, which was a humanist,
36:23you know, a caring individual who insisted upon individuality.
36:27The first third of Seven Samurai
36:30shows how you go about individually
36:33creating a new kind of social force,
36:37and how very patiently Kanbei goes
36:40and finds one samurai after the other.
36:43We find the process fascinating
36:46because we realize that it's being done on human terms,
36:49it's not being done on bureaucratic terms at all.
36:52He also wanted to make a film that was true to history
36:55in a way that he admired in Mizuguchi.
36:58He wanted to make the past alive in a way that was real.
37:01He felt that films before this
37:04evolved into the kind of day-to-day aspects of samurai life.
37:08And this is part of what he meant when he said
37:11he wanted to make a real jidai-geki, a real period film.
37:15Seven Samurai is preceded by a long period of historical research,
37:19where Kurosawa and his team of researchers
37:22are looking into Japan's past
37:25and studying the nature of history.
37:28And so they found a lot of really good stuff.
37:31They found stuff about the farmer-samurai alliances in the period.
37:35What Kurosawa has done in Seven Samurai
37:38is actually to set his film in the period
37:41before most samurai films are set,
37:44and that is the era that the Japanese call Constant Civil War.
37:48He opened up as territory for filmmakers
37:52this whole fascinating and turbulent period of the 16th century,
37:56the Sengoku period.
37:58And Kurosawa, you know, made a number of films
38:01in this era of Constant Civil War.
38:03That's what Seven Samurai is about,
38:05that's what Kagemusha is about,
38:07and that's where Ran takes place as well.
38:09So Kurosawa has made this particular era a specialty,
38:12but the vast majority of samurai films,
38:14including Kurosawa's own Sei Sanjuro,
38:16take place in the Tokugawa era,
38:18when Japan is largely at peace,
38:21when class stratifications are even greater.
38:24Prior to the 18th century,
38:26the class lines in Japan were more fluid
38:29than they were after the 18th century.
38:31As we see in Seven Samurai,
38:33it's quite possible for a farmer to become a samurai.
38:36This greatly appealed to Kurosawa.
38:38He instinctively rebels against rigidity and hierarchy,
38:41and so if he's looking for a time in history
38:44to stake his own claim to as a moviemaker,
38:47he's going to pick the 16th century,
38:49where everything is chaotic and fluid and open,
38:52just like it was in Japan immediately after the war
38:55when he started out as a filmmaker.
38:57And he's interested not in real social classes,
39:00but in kind of human classes.
39:02That is to say, who is really classy?
39:04Who is going to help people?
39:06Kurosawa's interested in morality
39:09and the actions of men in battle.
39:14Kurosawa in Seven Samurai shows us
39:16that he's one of the great poets of screen violence.
39:19He's going to give us, if not more fights,
39:22than fights filmed in a way that had never been filmed before.
39:31When you see Seven Samurai, you sort of move forward in your seat.
39:35Your muscles are tense when you see this picture.
39:38Simply the physicality of Seven Samurai was overwhelming.
39:43And on a kinetic level, you're right in there with it.
39:47I've never had an experience like this.
39:53Ah!
39:57Kurosawa would have been the first to say
40:00that violence, even in the good, interesting pre-war films,
40:04was always much too aestheticized.
40:07It looked too pretty.
40:09Definitely kabuki-derived,
40:11much closer to dance in some ways than sword fighting.
40:14But even when they kind of tone it down for cinema,
40:17it's very stylized.
40:19The biggest difference that Kurosawa brought right off the bat
40:22to the Samurai film in Seven Samurai is to get rid of all that stuff.
40:26He's making a kind of abstraction of that choreography,
40:30and it seems more realistic.
40:33He really brings a new style of fight choreography to the Samurai film.
40:42We do have many of the attributes of Chambara,
40:45but they are all dignified. They're not trivialized.
40:48We feel every death, even the death of the bad guys, the bandits.
40:52We know what death means.
40:54This is one of the first of the Samurai pictures
40:57which really lets us know what death is all about.
41:01It's not decorative.
41:08Death and violence are nasty and dirty and brutish and shocking.
41:13When people die, they're dying in the mud.
41:18And although Seven Samurai isn't especially violent,
41:22both at the time and even today,
41:24it's presented in a way that no one could ever accuse it of being glamorized.
41:32These are instances of cinema's unique abilities as a plastic art,
41:36a plastic medium.
41:38You can do violence on the stage.
41:42You can do fights on the stage.
41:44You can write about them on the page.
41:46But both mediums are much less visceral.
41:48In cinema, you can do it with a great deal of visceral power,
41:52and Kurosawa was a key filmmaker in showing how that could come about.
42:03Whether it's strategic use of close-ups or long shots
42:07or just the dynamism of his editing,
42:09Seven Samurai's techniques, as much as its themes,
42:13really, I think, push the genre forward.
42:16Seven Samurai marks the big visual change in Kurosawa's work.
42:19He's now going more and more toward the use of longer lenses in his films.
42:23During the big fight scenes,
42:25he can use the telephoto lenses to kind of get under the horses,
42:29in between their hooves,
42:31to plunge us into the chaos of that battle
42:34in a visual way that is really quite unprecedented,
42:37both in Kurosawa's own work
42:39and I think also in the samurai genre as a whole.
42:44Fire!
42:50A natural accompaniment of the use of the longer lens shots
42:55is the use of multiple cameras as well.
42:58So he's doing a lot of the action scenes in the movie now
43:01with multiple cameras.
43:08Kurosawa, in this film,
43:10essentializes the use of slow motion in scenes of physical action.
43:16It's not enough just to drop a slow motion shot into a sequence one time.
43:22What you need to do is drop it in several times
43:25so that you create a dialectic tension
43:28between normal speed action and slowed down action.
43:32The dialectic tension is more than what you get from either shot alone.
43:37You create an electricity that arcs across that edited sequence.
43:44I think Kurosawa uses the techniques that he's been developing up to this point
43:48and elaborates upon them and is more emphatic about them.
43:52An example would be the contrast between silence and sound.
44:00When Heihachi and Kyuzo and Kikuchiyo go to the Brigham's Fort,
44:06what I love about that scene is, first of all, there's not a second of dialogue.
44:11And yet everything we want to know about that scene, we know.
44:15And that is, this is a woman that has been captured,
44:19but now she sees a time in which that suffering, that moment, is over.
44:28WHISTLING
44:35So many things are said, so many things are felt, so many things are implied.
44:40Not a word is spoken.
44:47Kurosawa is a filmmaker who knows the power of the visuals, the power of editing,
44:53in this case, the power of sound, precisely because it's the power also of silence.
44:59And I think that you could look at Seven Samurai as a clinic in cinema.
45:03He uses every technique we could possibly think of.
45:06Kurosawa is showing what Eisenstein's theory of montage indeed suggested.
45:11Editing can contain theme.
45:14Editing can show the meaning of what a director wants to say in a film.
45:18We see it in the match-on action repeatedly in that film,
45:21particularly in the scene at the end of the film before the final battle.
45:25Many of the motions, a character is standing and moves to a kneeling position,
45:29and Kurosawa will show that action in two shots rather than in one.
45:33We see it in the length of the shot pieces, the short pieces.
45:36Kurosawa will always break up an action where somebody else might show in a single uninterrupted take.
45:42Kurosawa breaks it up, breaks up the action, fragments it in order to create an emotional effect.
46:01This is a film about the venality, corruption, fallibility, stupidity,
46:06covetousness, fear, timorousness, cowardice, all those things,
46:11bad aspects of humanity are displayed before us in abundance.
46:16Many of them are loaded onto the peasant characters in the film rather than the samurai or the ronin,
46:22but nonetheless the ronin are hardly seen to be blameless either.
46:25However, there is some kind of triumph of humanity.
46:42The final moments of the movie are among the great majesties of cinema.
46:46You can take that last little coda and just put it on a loop
46:52and watch it again and again and again,
46:55because the dialogue is at once so terse and so suggestive.
46:59Again we've survived, again we've lost.
47:09Kambe knows that the farmers are the victors.
47:12They're the ones who are going to carry on.
47:14They're the ones who really will survive.
47:16They're the ones who really will triumph.
47:18They're the ones who really will triumph.
47:20So that rather rueful acknowledgement that in victory may lie defeat
47:24tempers the humanism of the film and makes it infinitely more sophisticated.
47:30It is brilliantly integrated.
47:32It's produced by the drama.
47:34It's in no sense tacked on.
47:36It comes organically from what we know of these people,
47:39who they are, how they interrelate,
47:41what they've been through together and indeed separately.
47:44Now that's why the film is so touching.
47:48Kurosawa!
47:53Kurosawa is quick to show that there is no place for the samurai
47:58in the farming village.
48:00I mean, what would they do after all?
48:02Are they going to become farmers?
48:04Of course not.
48:05But the possibility that people in power have helped those less fortunate
48:11is really something that I think the film really says.
48:14It's not just the crossing of boundaries.
48:17It's not just the way that Japan may become more democratic.
48:21It's that people in power have chosen to try and do some good,
48:26and in this case, they have succeeded.
48:29And he's not being pessimistic in this movie.
48:32He's being direct, and he's also being inspiring
48:36by giving us characters like Kanbei
48:38and giving us a glimpse of the paradise that might be ours
48:45if we were able to live differently.
48:54Kurosawa is saying,
48:56Who are we? Who have we been? What can we become?
49:00Raising the most fundamental issues.
49:02Kurosawa raises the most fundamental issues
49:04of what it means to be a Japanese through this film, Seven Samurai.
49:09Kurosawa finds the best examples of the samurai class
49:12in order to make his claim,
49:13What is best about being human?
49:15It's unselfishness.
49:17It's not caring about your own survival.
49:19And in Seven Samurai, it means
49:21not caring even about the survival of the samurai class.
49:29There is a statement at the end of the film
49:31about the reappearance of class hierarchy.
49:34And this is where the tragedy of the movie comes in,
49:37the tragedy of history that Kurosawa uncovers
49:40when he looks into the past,
49:41is that the history of humankind is a history
49:45in which separation and alienation and exploitation
49:50and fights, wars, have been there throughout time.
49:55So he has to honor that truth of history
49:59at the end of the movie.
50:00And he does in this visual poetry
50:02of the separation of the classes.
50:04And it's also about the historical evolution of the classes.
50:07The farmers will survive.
50:09The samurai are a doomed class.
50:11Not yet.
50:12They're going to be around for a few more centuries.
50:14But the poetry of the linkage in the final camera move
50:17up to the top of the hill
50:19is an unforgettable visual metaphor.
50:39Samurai.
50:40Samurai.
50:41Samurai.
50:42Samurai.
50:43Samurai.
50:44Samurai.
50:45Samurai.
50:46Samurai.
50:47Samurai.
50:48Samurai.
50:49Samurai.
50:50Samurai.
50:51Samurai.
50:52Samurai.
50:53Samurai.
50:54Samurai.
50:55Samurai.
50:56Samurai.
50:57Samurai.
50:58Samurai.
50:59Samurai.
51:00Samurai.
51:01Samurai.
51:02Samurai.
51:03Samurai.
51:04Samurai.
51:05Samurai.
51:06Samurai.
51:07Samurai.
51:08Samurai.
51:09Samurai.
51:10Samurai.
51:11Samurai.
51:12Samurai.
51:13Samurai.
51:14Samurai.
51:15Samurai.
51:16Samurai.
51:17Samurai.
51:18Samurai.
51:19Samurai.
51:20Samurai.
51:21Samurai.
51:22Samurai.
51:23Samurai.
51:24Samurai.
51:25Samurai.
51:26Samurai.
51:27Samurai.
51:28Samurai.
51:29Samurai.
51:30Samurai.
51:31Samurai.
51:32Samurai.
51:33Samurai.
51:34Samurai.
51:35Samurai.
51:36Samurai.
51:37Samurai.
51:38Samurai.
51:39Samurai.
51:40Samurai.
51:41Samurai.
51:42Samurai.
51:43Samurai.
51:44Samurai.
51:45Samurai.
51:46Samurai.
51:47Samurai.
51:48Samurai.
51:49Samurai.
51:50Samurai.
51:51Samurai.
51:52Samurai.
51:53Samurai.
51:54Samurai.
51:55Samurai.
51:56Samurai.
51:57Samurai.
51:58Samurai.
51:59Samurai.
52:00Samurai.
52:01Samurai.
52:02Samurai.
52:03Samurai.
52:04Samurai.
52:05I've never had an experience like this before, in which the past was so completely contemporary,
52:11in which I could understand from my contemporary viewpoint and my sort of, you know, not very
52:16good understanding of Japanese culture, could nonetheless understand that Kurosawa was showing
52:21people themselves as they were right now, that his use of history had contemporary relevance.
52:28And what is it that Kurosawa is reflecting upon about present-day Japan?
52:33Well, he's reflecting now about ten years after the Allied occupation, and imposed upon
52:39Japan as a new constitution and a new political ethic and ideology of democracy and individualism.
52:47So one way of understanding Seven Samurai is Kurosawa reflecting on the outcome of that
52:53experiment.
52:55Does individuality take root?
52:57Does it not?
52:58Is it a possibility?
53:00Is democracy a possibility?
53:02In other words, is it possible for people to live in a state of equality, one with another?
53:09Or if not, why not?
53:11But I think the ethic of the movie is that you have to reach for it.
53:15And it's that democratization movement, in which Kurosawa supported a great deal, that
53:20he really is interested in.
53:21So it's as much a film about post-war Japan as it is about feudal Japan, and of course
53:27that should be the case.
53:28No artist really wants to make just a film about the past if it has nothing to say about
53:32the present.
53:33I think what Kurosawa began to see as he went back into the past and as he watched giant
53:38corporations take control of Japan and the state hand power over to them, he began to
53:44feel that the things that were entrenched against his heroes were getting more powerful
53:50and they were not.
53:51And so he comes to a point not long after this where the films begin to get a lot darker.
53:57We're in a world that is a world of predators, but a world without Kambe.
54:05It's a touching film because at this time in his career, Kurosawa did believe that things
54:10could change.
54:11And he stopped believing that after a while.