Son of samurai: Akira Kurosawa | Daily News

Son of samurai: Akira Kurosawa

Seven Samurai is probably the only samurai film directed by the son of a samurai: Akira Kurosawa’s father, Isamu, was a swordsman from Honshu. Why seven? The question has long gone unanswered, and there are, I suppose, two theories regarding it. The first is that being a fervent, zealous follower of the American cinema and Western culture, Kurosawa intended to pay homage to Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes. I can’t find much evidence for this anywhere, least of all Wikipedia. In that sense the second theory holds more water, especially because Kurosawa himself confirmed it: when asked by a member of the audience at an event honouring his work why he chose the number seven, he flippantly replied, “That’s all the budget could afford.” Both Lester James and Sumitra Peries participated at this event, somewhere in the early 1990s; Sumitra herself confirmed it to me the other day.

At three hours, Seven Samurai is more exciting, more exhilarating, I daresay more invigorating and thought-provoking, than half the sequels it inspired. The Magnificent Seven comes tantalisingly close to the original in terms of sheer excitement, but not even the sight of Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen readying themselves against those bandits in some poor 18th century Mexican village compensates for Toshiro Mifune and his band of ronin – or samurai without masters – displaying their swordsmanship against another set of bandits in some far-off mountain village in 16th century Japan. I don’t credit the great Pauline Kael for being right all the time, but she was right most of the time, and like other critics who preferred the original to the remake, she got it right about this one: “the greatest battle epic since The Birth of a Nation” is how she described it when she saw it in 1961.

Breath-taking

It’s far from his greatest work, of course – I would rank Throne of Blood, Ran, and Kagemusha, all three inspired by Shakespeare, the first two explicitly so and the latter figuratively, at the top – but it shows the kind of erratic, unflappable auteur he was. There are sequences in it which take your breath away even on a first viewing: the bandits pillaging the village, Mifune making his dramatic entrance, the samurai getting ready for the first fight. Some of them remind you of the battle scenes in Laurence Olivier’s adaptation of Henry V (released the same year Kurosawa’s father passed away, in 1948). Yet at their best, they bring to mind John Ford’s Westerns and, if we are to push it a bit further, the battle scenes of Sergei Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, from Stalinist Russia.

What makes Kurosawa’s battle scenes so profoundly unique is the backdrop against which they were made: unlike Olivier and Ford, who enjoyed the benefit of a commercial industry, and Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, who enjoyed the patronage of the Soviet bureaucracy, Kurosawa’s best movies came out after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the ravages of war. I can think of one or two other film industries that survived the complexities of a major war, especially a world war – like France – but Japan’s was, and continues to be, a distinctive case: it had to start literally from scratch, amidst American occupation. It is true its performing arts industries escaped this fate – especially cinema – but in the aftermath of the war the more popular media – and in Japan there was one, film – incorporated new styles. This is true particularly of Kurosawa’s work, all the way from Rashomon, the film that took Japan to Venice and then the world; it was true of many other directors too, but they came later.

The cinema has always been the art most susceptible to change and continuity. This is especially true when considering Kurosawa’s career before and after the war. In his pre-war work (much of which, I concede, seems plagiarised from American gangster and Western thrillers), there is almost a shy and reticent attitude, as though the director is not too willing to reveal his flamboyance. The war pushed Kurosawa, and his peers, to experiment, question boundaries, discard old styles, and incorporate new ones. It’s the sort of daring style that crops up in the sequence where the bandit first comes across the samurai’s wife in Rashomon: dappled in light and shade, a gust of wind awakens the sleeping outlaw the very moment it lifts up the woman’s dress and hat.

Exemplifying music

There’s a question film critics ask: to what extent was Kurosawa’s art derived and to what extent was it original? Why this question is difficult to answer in the context of not just Kurosawa’s work but the Japanese cinema in general is that there is no sharp line dividing the derived from the original. To me, this is best exemplified by Rashomon. The music is derived: it’s based on Ravel’s Bolero (which the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto reworked into the heist sequence in Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale). So, I suppose, are the camera angles, though it’s hard to say. But what of the story? One can say the plot in a film like Seven Samurai is derived, but then Japanese folklore does have its share of heroic ronin. You can’t make that excuse in Throne of Blood, which borrows directly from Macbeth. Yet Kurosawa, whose acquaintance with the English language wasn’t top-notch, famously chose not to read Shakespeare’s play, concentrating instead on its outline; it could have been based on anything, not necessarily the tale of a Scottish prince and three witches.

As critics, we are always on the hunt for symbols, for lines that demarcate reality from fiction, and of course the borrowed from the original. In Kurosawa’s case it’s difficult to draw such lines, and if you do, it turns out to be unwieldy. What’s even more unwieldy in Kurosawa’s work is that he remains, as he was back then also, the most plagiarised Japanese filmmaker in the West. In the history of cinema I can’t think of another non-Western director who paid homage to Hollywood so fervently, only to have Hollywood pay homage to him in return. It’s not merely Seven Samurai, of course: from Rashomon to The Hidden Fortress, even Yojimbo (Pauline Kael: “the first great shaggy-man movie”), US directors have been busy, if not ripping off from him, then paying tribute to him. Such tributes crisscross time and space: The Hidden Fortress is set in 15th century Japan, yet two decades after its release, it made its way to “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”, in Star Wars.

In this I believe Kurosawa was the superior of the two other auteurs associated with post-war Japan’s cinematic renaissance: Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. Both Ozu and Mizoguchi, the former more than the latter, have been described by European and American critics as being “too Japanese.” In that sense, Kurosawa’s work lends itself to appropriation and allusion more easily, as it has: I cannot think of a single Ozu or Mizoguchi film that American directors felt compelled to pay homage to. That does not lower the works of these two – some of which to me remain superior even to those of Kurosawa – but it does show how the latter’s work has become far more adaptable than theirs.

Everyone has their favourites, and my personal Kurosawa favourite remains Kagemusha. Kagemusha went rather unnoticed in the West, partly because of its length but more importantly, I think, because of its deep, unyielding cynicism. Western audiences could relate more easily to the ending in Ran, his tribute to King Lear (and one for which he actually read the play). But Kagemusha – which like Seven Samurai takes place in 16th century Japan, during the Sengoku Period – doesn’t quite have the karmic payoffs the “villains” get in Ran. That deprived Kurosawa’s film of the type of ending European and American audiences had grown to expect, even of an art-house work.

The final scene of our hero, the lone survivor of the Battle of Nagashino, attacking the enemy – even though the side for which he’s fighting discarded him after they made use of him – is shot from a long distance, separating us from not just the violence, but also the emotion. His final lunge is to no avail: the enemy finishes him off, and he dies, lonely and unloved, the river washing away his blood after he falls into it. The war is over; so is everyone involved in it. Kurosawa made many tragedies, both old and contemporary, but Kagemusha stands, I’d say, as the most Shakespearean among them: an irony, given that it was not based on Shakespeare. That’s as Japanese, or Western, that Kurosawa could get: of both worlds, but firmly rooted in the land of his birth.