Seven Samurai: Reality and Heroism

Seven Samurai is a film that certainly receives a lot of praise as one of film’s greatest epics, and after watching, it’s clear why. Beyond the surface of the samurai epic, however, many themes and commentaries can be found, ranging from perceptions and expectations of a hero to the reality of war. In a way, I feel that these themes culminate to make Seven Samurai a sort of anti-epic, in which the audience is still granted a thrilling and powerful story with all the action, but subtly, some of the themes add up to something a bit less straightforward.

PLOT

                Seven Samurai begins with a group of bandits marauding about, who decide to attack a nearby village in the coming months once their crop has been harvested and there is something to steal. As they ride off, one of the villagers comes out from hiding and runs back to the village, where he tells this terrible news. Amid much debate and despair, they finally consult the village elder, who advises them to go to the nearby town to try and recruit samurai to protect them. Though the plan is met with controversy, they agree, and a small group leaves for the town.

                Unable to offer the samurai much more than a bowl of rice initially and three meals a day during the job, they encounter no shortage of difficulty finding samurai, most denying them outright. They are at the point of leaving when they watch a samurai, Kanbei, selflessly intervene to break up a hostage situation. They follow him, eventually getting him to agree to help them. He decides that he can defend the village with a total of seven samurai, so they begin the recruiting process. Eventually, he assembles Katsushiro, a young, idealistic samurai, Gorobei, a man looking for an adventure, Heihachi, a carefree samurai, Shichiroji, an old comrade, Kyuzo, a master swordsman, and Kikuchiyo, a young, drunk buffoon.

                When they return to the village, instead of being celebrated, no one even comes to greet them. Many of the villagers become concerned that the samurai will seduce their daughters, and one villager even forces his daughter to cut her hair in order to avoid this. Kikuchiyo dissolves this situation on his own terms by ringing the alarm bell, causing the villagers to come out screaming in panic for the samurai’s aid. Kikuchiyo berates them for this, asking why they called out for them when danger came, but treated them as pariahs when they arrived. With this uneasy introduction, Kanbei and the others begin making plans to defend the village, from constructing walls to training the men to fight. During this time, Katsushiro begins a relationship with farmer’s daughter, and the samurai show their goodwill by giving some of the food they are paid with back to the less fortunate villagers, especially the children. When Kikuchiyo brings armor and weapons from the villagers that Shichiroji perceives is looted, Kikuchiyo flies off the handle, berating both farmer and samurai alike for their foul ways, and then storming off as Kanbei realizes he is a farmer’s son.

                When bandit scouts appear on the village outskirts, the samurai do their best to hide their presence, but Kikuchiyo ruins their stealth. He and Kyuzo quickly move and dispatch the scouts, and learn of the bandit hideout. These two, Heihachi, and one of the villagers ride to the bandit base and set it ablaze, cutting down the bandits as they come outside. As they escape, the villager runs back to see his wife, who had been in the hut, but when he does so, Heihachi returns for him and is shot dead. Shortly after the funeral, the bandits begin their attack, and Kanbei’s defenses prove to be worth the effort. The bandits make a few precautionary strikes and are driven off by the villagers a few times, with the samurai and farmers killing a few each time. Kyuzo bravely goes out and kills one of the three gunners and returns with his rifle, but when Kukuchiyo tries to do the same, Kanbei berates him for leaving his post (which Kyuzo did not do) and the bandits attack again. One of the elder farmers dies in this attack, as well as Gorobei, both of which Kukuchiyo takes personally, lingering at the graves. Before the final battle, Katsushiro sleeps with the village girl, causing an uproar which Kanbei and the others intervene in. In the final attack, the bandits are driven off, but not before both Kyuzo and Kukuchiyo are both killed. The final scene shows the villagers celebrating their victory, though Kanbei comments that they have won nothing: only the villagers are victorious.

CONSTRUCTING A HERO

Seven Samurai is unique for its sheer number of protagonists. While some are more static than others, everyone has their own personality and goals to meet. Katsushiro, as a young samurai, embodies the audience in a sense- seeking the ideal samurai to pledge himself to in order to learn what it is to truly be a hero. Heihachi is more static, but he shows his compassion when trying to comfort and later save the villager he offended by speaking of his wife. Kyuzo is quiet, modest and skilled- what many expect samurai to be, and Katsushiro praises him for it. Kukuchiyo desperately searches for things to make him more of a samurai instead of a mere farmer (His sword is the longest of any of the seven, he scavenges samurai armor, he steals a scroll to “prove” his birthright, tries to mimic Kyuzo’s brave excursion). Kanbei is perhaps the most complete hero and what the audience expects as a samurai- skilled and brave, but also cunning, wise, and always willing to protect and serve.

                The difference in the characters of these heroes makes a very clear claim that heroes come in all shapes and sizes, and all heroic acts are not full of glory.  When Kukuchiyo leave his post in order to capture another of the enemy’s guns, he mimics Kyuzo, killing the bandits and proudly handing his prize over to Kanbei. However, while his act was brave, it was also brash, leaving a hole in the defenses and leading to the death of the very villager he had assured would be safe. Katsushiro insists he be part of the fight despite the older samurai dismissing him for his youth, and consistently tries to help the villagers in what ways he can, evidenced most obviously when he tosses them coins in light of their stolen rice. While this film has established heroes in samurai such as Kanbei and Shichiroji, it leaves room for these younger heroes to find their place as heroes. The villagers themselves becomes heroes in their own right, as by the end of the film their spears had killed more bandits than the samurai’s swords had.

HEROICS AND REALITIES OF WAR

                One thing that struck me about Seven Samurai were the battle scenes. Many times, in these sort of epics, the audience will see the heroes fighting off hordes of foes with only their skill, shrugging off wounds and putting down foe after foe. That is not necessarily the case in this film. Kyozu gives perhaps one of the few examples of this when he swiftly cuts down the bandits with all the skill and calm one would expect from a samurai warrior, and Kanbei shows this when he takes up the bow amid the battle and shoots down horsemen. Besides these moments of samurai “expectation,” the battles seem to reflect more the chaotic and frantic nature of battle. Unconcerned with the honor or fairness of their actions, Kyozu, Kukuchiyo, and Heihachi burn the bandits’ hut with them still inside it. There are women inside, many of them likely captives, but they make no attempt to heroically save them; they simply spare them from the blade as they run out of the hut. The bandits flee the scene, only to be slaughtered by the samurai waiting outside. There is no honor or glory in this: most of the bandits don’t even have a sword drawn to defend themselves as they flee. This scene best shows that the wars and battles the samurai fought were not always glorious conquests of the righteous hero fighting against the cowardly, evil bandits. In truth, the samurai here, having no other recourse, resort to a technique that, if done by the enemy, the audience would have found underhanded and foul. War is not always righteous: sometimes it’s about who’s left.

                Death is another way this film shows the realities of war well. Heroic deaths in which the hero falls with a smile on his face, knowing he has died well, do not exist. Kyozu, the samurai perhaps most composed and skilled of the seven, when shot, stumbles around, throwing his sword out of blind reaction before falling to the ground, apparently dead. Gorobei dies off screen without so much as a word as to how he died, or any parting words to his comrades or audience. Heihachi and Kukuchiyo, too, die quickly and suddenly, without a word, and without any of the glory that surrounds death. However, the samurai are not the only ones who die deaths more realistic than may be comfortable. Though some of the bandits find themselves quickly slain by the deft blade of a swordsman, more often than not, the samurai leave the wounded bandits to the villagers. Armed with nothing more than sharpened bamboo pikes, the farmers descend upon the wounded bandits like vultures as they desperately flee, eventually catching them and stabbing them to death as a mob. While we are not made to feel sympathy for the bandits, being stabbed to death with a dozen sharpened bamboo rods is, frankly, a horrible way to die. Lacking the sharp edge of a metal blade, strikes from these pikes would often take multiple strikes to pierce armor and skin, and death would be slow and very painful. The film, then, seems to suggest that there is no such thing as a glorious death, and even the most skilled may be slain in the quickest of ways.

BRINGING IT BACK

                This is not the first time Kurosawa Akira has messed with preconceptions in this course. In Ikiru, Watanabe-san, as the protagonist, is as far from a hero as we can imagine in many ways. He is soft spoken, lacks confidence, and has trouble acting on his feelings, far from Kanbei, who is played by the same actor. When Watanabe dies, he does so without a speech to the audience, or resonating final words; his death comes when the audience does not expect it, leaving them questioning. In both films, Kurosawa makes us question what a hero is and our expectations of one, and the reality that surrounds it. A hero may not be quite what we expect, and life may not only be about glory or righteousness. Sometimes, it’s just about making a difference in whatever way one can.

BONUS ROUND: WHY KYOZU AND KUKUCHIYO SHOULD HAVE LIVED

                My blossay is effectively over, but this was bothering me and I did a little research. I know, message and plot have to do their thing, so details have to be ignored a little bit. But, frankly, Kyozu was pretty great, and Kukuchiyo I’m sure is something of what Mizenko-sensei imagines I would be if I were alive 450ish years ago. In the time period of this film (late 1500’s), Japan’s firearms were primitive at best, and were just coming into prominence in the hands of different warlords. Their strength often lay in numbers, best shown when Oda Nobunaga trained his men to fire while another reloaded, in order to essentially create continuous fire. He had to do this because the guns were painfully inaccurate, weak at the tail end of their range, and reloading was a rough process. According to Wikipedia, it was generally said that an archer could loose 15 arrows in the time it took a gunner to load and fire a single shot. Also, the powder was very susceptible to the elements, so even a moderate amount of rain could often render them useless. All this being said, consider the final part of the last battle. Kyozu is shot,  but this alone is problematic. The gunner doubtlessly would have shot a shot earlier (it’s the only weapon he seems to be carrying), so he would have needed to reload. It is raining torrentially during this scene, and as a bonus, he probably fell off his horse, since everyone else did. As such, I find it hard to believe that he had the powder dry enough to carry a charge. Even assuming he did, when Kukuchiyo rushed him, there is no actual way he could have reloaded in that period of time. And this is also assuming this bandit gun was of good make and accurate. Which everyone seems to have perfect accuracy with their weapons in this. Anyway, this ends the bonus Wieczerak rant on 16^th century guns in Japan.

                

Women, Tradition, and Chinese Film

   Women and Chinese culture have a difficult relationship, if the films we’ve seen are any indicator. In a way, all of the films we have seen, from Yellow Earth to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon have something to say about this relationship. More often than not, we see a culture in which women are at times more commodity than person, to be shipped off or even used as a bartering chip (as in Yellow Earth, for the son’s marriage), with no choice in the matter. Marriage and tradition are at the core of this issue, and the films we have seen have taken several different angles at this problem, from giving the women ways in which to maneuver around and even fight tradition to making them witness firsthand its power. The two films I think show some of the most interesting views of the female place in society are Raise the Red Lantern and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Beyond the scope of the story, the cinematography in these films serves to accent the messages the film has, and adds layers all its own.

   The opening scene of Raise the Red Lantern is one of the most powerful scenes in the movie, and makes its stance on Chinese marriage tradition clear from the start. Songlian’s face is all that is visible here, gazing past the camera with hollow eyes as she talks to her stepmother off screen. By having only her face with the traditional wall in the background, the mise en scene is focused on the human element of this question of tradition rather than the cultural side. This becomes all the more clear when the two are done speaking, and the scene continues to show the tears falling down her face despite her efforts to keep her face stoic. However, one of the most subtle yet eerie effects of the scene is the presence of tradition throughout. Though she is talking to her stepmother, the other woman does not appear on screen, instead representing the faceless, formless wraith of tradition that hovers over Songlian and women in her position. As her choice settles into her mind, traditional Chinese music begins playing louder and louder in the background as a reminder of the traditions that have brought her to this place and will drive her through the plot of the movie, against her will. Finally, the camera captures the scene as a fixed shot, never budging an inch, perhaps as a reminder of the rigid nature of the culture and tradition that about to consume Songlian.

   Songlian’s first meeting with the master of the household focuses less on Songlian as a woman or even a human being, but instead as another part of the culture- an item to be consumed. The camera is fixed for the start of the scene, and there is no music to take away from the master’s words towards her, the silence making the audience feel the same discomfort that Songlian feels. She is in the center of the shot, surrounded by several reminders of tradition, such as scrolls, silk, paintings, and, of course, the red lanterns themselves. She is, here, an item no different than the lanterns she is told to pick up- an item brought forth by tradition to be enjoyed by the master of the household. As such, the camera allows us to see more of her body as opposed to simply her face as in the opening scene, thus allowing the audience to study her just as the master does. The master, like the voice of her stepmother, remains mostly formless, as the audience never gets a glimpse of his face to give him identity. Instead, he remains a faceless symbol of traditional patriarchal power. As the scene captures, Songlian is desperate to escape this and hesitant to obey his commands, but must do so to satisfy the master and therefore tradition. The camera moves only to capture her movements; she is the object of the master’s gaze, and cannot escape it.

   Perhaps the most chilling scene of the film comes near the conclusion, when the third mistress is taken away and hanged by the master’s servants. It begins with Songlian in her room, which has changed to reflect the true nature of tradition; without the light of the festive lanterns, her room is a dark, empty place, devoid of natural light and given hollow meaning by the decorations about it. Songlian is stirred by a woman’s screams, and ventures out into the snow to follow the pursuers. Songlian acts as a voyeur, her gender and her position rendering her incapable of doing anything but watch. There is no soundtrack here; instead, only the methodical steps of the retainers and occasionally the third mistress’s muffled cries break the silence. Like in earlier scenes, the grounds themselves here represent tradition with their omnipresence, surrounding the women at all times. Here, as earlier in the film, the sheer scope of the walls often envelops and dwarfs the women, but here, the snow merely furthers this effect, the shrouding the actions of the retainers. Once they reach their destination, instead of being immediately granted confirmation, the scene lingers on, forcing the audience into Songlian’s horrified shoes as the third mistress disappears into the room. What follows is perhaps the most uncomfortable silence in the entire film, whereupon there is very little movement and no sound, and the audience merely waits for confirmation of the third mistress’s death. The silence here is made more meaningful when the third mistress’s earlier actions are considered; in her attempts to fight against tradition, she would fill the compound with her voice as it echoed off the walls, defying its size and strength by filling the empty walls. As she dies, her voice is taken from her, and she dies without as much as a scream. The men file out, and the door is locked- tradition and custom have been upheld.

   The scenes in Raise the Red Lantern often serve to show the plight of women in tradition. The scenery about them is often used to accentuate and even make real the prison that tradition cast around them. The medium and long shots tend to rob them of some of their humanity, while the rare close ups reflect the human elements of their struggles. Sound, like scenery can often serve to remind the audience of the tradition running throughout, while silence can reveal the truth harshly.

   Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, takes a different approach to tradition and customs. Jen, the main character, is presented as a woman with the same plight as Songlian: she is soon to be married. However, the film and the plot both do many things to differentiate itself from Red Lantern’s message, while keeping some of the elements intact. For example, the first shot in which Jen is introduced has her standing before a myriad of Chinese furniture and scrolls, and in a traditional dress. Her entire body is present, unlike the shot Songlian has, but the context pulls this shot apart from it. Jen is objectified with the rest of the room as a part of Chinese culture and tradition, but this is merely a shot, rather than a backdrop for the entire scene. In the following scene, the conversation between her, the retainer, and Shu Lien is followed by the camera to accommodate different views. The view is not masculine, but is neutral or even feminine, as Shu Lien is understood to be the most powerful character on screen. Jen’s pleasant and even happy demeanor are far set apart from Songlian’s misery in the first two scenes mentioned above. This shot is further complimented by a scene a few scenes later, in which Shu Lien and Jen converse as Jen does calligraphy. Again, Jen is set against a traditional background and is practicing calligraphy, which Shu Lien compares to swordplay (a more masculine form). Jen again fulfills her gender role here, but at this point it has been mentioned that there is more than meets the eye with her. This shot seems to suggest that while tradition certainly exists in this world, there exist ways to circumvent it.

   The first fight scene between Shu Lien and Jen is telling of the gender portrayal in the film. Unlike even Drunken Master, in which Chan’s aunt, while skilled, has a particularly feminine fighting style, Jen and Shu Lien have a fight that would denote power regardless of gender. The action is fast and the camera moves to capture it, but the fight is one that would be expected of two master martial artists; though the artistic “flying” is abound, in this particular clip, the fighting is centered on the ground, with both combatants using a fighting style that defies gender. Though there are some examples, their fighting styles avoid moves associated with extreme femininity, such as high kicks and flexibility. In her penultimate move, Shu Lien uses sheer brute force, a more masculine tactic, to put Jen on the defensive and nearly finish her. Unlike Red Lantern, the close camera shows their power and skills despite the intimidating traditional buildings looming around them, granting them personality. This, then, is a world in which fighting is equal opportunity. Though the Jade Fox exclaims later that women can be used for sex but not to learn martial arts, Shu Lien offers a counterpoint both here and when they fight later when she beats Jen, and seems to enjoy regard as Li Mu Bai’s near equal, and is an esteemed member of her academy. Though the tradition surrounding marriage exists, fighting is a way to escape it.

   The best portrayal of female power comes briefly but without answer. Once Jen returns to Shu Lien, and then again decides to flee, she decends upon the male practitioners and begins fighting them. Shu Lien quickly orders them away so that she may fight her herself. The men, with varying expressions of shame and disappointment, do as they are told. When the scene ends, the camera’s sole focus are these two women. Again, in this scene, the film defies tradition. Whereas men traditionally are the masters of the art, here they are first beaten by a girl, and then ordered away by another woman. Though brief, this scene exhibits the respect and power Shu Lien, a woman who defied tradition in order to fight, and Jen, a woman who was doing her best to defy tradition, hold in the film and in their world. This is a world in which action may be taken to go against tradition, in which training and hard work may bring not only an escape from tradition, but a place to go without it (Li Mu Bai and Dark Cloud, respectively). Tradition exists here in the weapons, the fighting styles, and even the setting itself, but the combatants are different entirely.

   Raise the Red Lantern and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon use their cinematography and mise en scene to build different perceptions of women and the tradition they find themselves in. While one shows a prison and the other a chance at freedom, both use camera, music, and other factors in order to portray their main characters. Tradition is problematic in these films, standing as something unjust and to be escaped from if possible, though the opportunity may not exist in reality. They portray the plight and difficulties of women during the time, and in doing so, enlighten the audience of a world unknown.