SECOND WEEK

Jidaigeki vs. Chambara
Yojimbo
Kurasawa Akira
1961


Key terms:

Foregrounding: (sometimes called "marked"):
a term used to describe some aspect of an art form where attention is called to a specific aspect of the form. This is often done by building and then breaking a pattern. The unexpectedness is "foregrounded" and hence is noticed.

Symbols:
A form which represents something else to which it has no intrinsic connection. The word "cat" for example, represents the animal, but there is no real connection between the animal and the word as there is between the cat and its footprint. Hence people in different parts of the world use different words for the animal, but the footprint remains constant from one place to another. Symbols may be cultural or individual (and according to some, there may be universal ones).

Intertextuality:
making reference to "other" texts. Something akin to a "quote". A director uses something from another film that makes the viewer make a connection with that film.

Bushido:
The way of the samurai. A code of morals and ethics, "Should not be overly fond of life or money - that is OK for a merchant, but not a samurai" says a character in an earlier Kurosawa film.

Key problems

1. If a "serious" jidaigeki film must comment on the modern world as well, is Yojimbo a serious film or is it just chambara? If serious, what point does it make about Japan.

2. In what ways was Yojimbo innovative? Difficult to know without knowing the body of previous films in this genre. (typical vs. canonical films)

3. What kind of techniques does Kurosawa use in this film which was filmed in wide screen format?

History of Jidaieki at the Time of Yojimbo

       Tohei, a major Japanese film company was the producer of jidaigeki films. These were rather artificial with "choreographed" sword fights. Kurosawa, worked for Toho, but formed an independent company which made Yojimbo. This film took an entirely different approach to the genre and revitalized it by making it more realistic.
It is hard to see how innovative Yojimbo is if you are not familiar with the earlier Tohei films. Kurosawa added realism through both visual and auditory (sound) effects, most noticeably by showing blood (which had been restricted to horror films) and producing realistic sounds such as swords cutting into the flesh. So striking was this that it gave rise to a new genre of films known as zankoku or "cruel films". Tohei was so impacted by this that they too changed the style of their jidaigeki films and the most popular after the appearance of Toho's Yojimbo was a film called Cruel Stories of Bushido (Bushido Zankoku Monogatari). Kurosawa was upset that this gore and violence became so poplar in jidaigeki films and made Akahige to prove that a jidaigeki need not have violence.

Kurosawa Akira

       Kurosawa like Mizoguchi studied painting. He feels that the image should be able to convey the story. He professes a fondness for silent films which are much more dependent on the visual. He has some distrust of the word as will be seen later in Rashomon.
       Kurosawa seems to be a believer in some tradition and somewhat hostile to the merchant class.

Yojimbo

      Yojimbo is a kind of black comedy. The film is set in Late Tokogawa period (just before the arrival of Commodore Perry) when there was a certain amount of social turmoil and the Shounate was losing ground to a developing business/middle class. There is a shift to money (not rice) and from personal allegiances and obligation to those mediated by exchange and profit.

      The Samurai class was disappearing as the nobility collapsed and the unattached samurai known as ronin were becoming more evident.

      The film is innovative not only in its visual and sound effects, but by its rather unusual musical score, and its "playing" with standard jidaigeki "cliché". For example, it was common to have a person cry out "Mother" just before they were killed. In this film, a son released in a prisoner exchange runs to his mother and cries out "mother" and she slaps him several times across the face. Later in the film one of the gangsters is about to be killed and calls out "mother" in the normal way, but it is now revitalized by the previous use of the cry.

      The film is shot in wide screen and the way in which this is used is significant. The arrangement of the rival gang members in the street; the organization of the frame in the inn when Mifune meets with one of the brothers are all ways in which Kurosawa groups people to give indications about their relationships to one another.

      The film also uses many close-ups shot with a telephoto lens (which foreshortens the distance between the main subject and background) and places the person in the scene in ways that tie people into their surroundings. The opening sequences in which Mifune (Sanjuro) appears first in the hills and then in the town. So strongly is he the center of the film that the audience has no information that he does not have. Mifune is present in every scene and hears and sees basically everything we do - or perhaps more correctly we hear and see everything he does. The images in the film however are not a subjective reality (as is the case in The Innocents with Deborah Kerr).

      Kurosawa uses several aspects of weather and nature symbolically, including wind to mark some tension of an event that is about to occur - usually negative or violent. It appears when one of the brothers of the Ushitora clan comes home with a pistol and just before the final battle when Mifune returns to help Gonji the inn keeper.

      After Mifune's beating and escape he is carried in a coffin to the grave yard where he appears ghostly (even worse when he smiles). After his recovery he is given a sward by the coffin maker which he retrieved from a dead man. All this dead/ghostly indicates the death of the samurai class (not specifically this ronin) as the real social world is turned upside down

      Kurosawa seems to feel that only through an apocalypse can the world be righted and of course such an apocalypse occurs in the film in an ever escalating set of battles.

      Finally all the evil is destroyed and Mifune leaves. So too, only an apocalypse can end the evils of the world for the film maker.

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Click on the title of the film for notes on that film:

1. Chuushingura2. Yojimbo3. Kwaidan
4. Rashomon5. Shinju Ten no Amijima6. Kumonosu-jo
7. Biruma no Tategoto8. Ningen no Joken9. Tookyoo Monogatari
10. Ikiru11. Tookyoo Nagaremono12. Osooshiki (The Funeral)
13.Ai no Korrida14. Mononoke Hime