Take a look at this quote from the article I handed out on Wednesday and discuss it using solid, cinematic evidence from the film:
...Kurosawa in The Seven Samurai emphasizes the unbridgeable differences between the villagers and their hired defenders. Though the townspeople and the samurai can fight in temporary alliance, they can never fight for the same goals: the villagers fight for home and family, the samurai for professional honor. The only society allowed to the samurai is their own; if civilization has no place for them, they must make a place of their own. The formation of the samurai's separate, self-enclosed society--the professional group--is the subject of some of the finest passages in Kurosawa's film...
Here is a link to the article.
If you have Hulu Plus, you can re-watch scenes on there. You can also find scenes online via YouTube, etc. It is helpful to choose a five-minute scene on which to base your response.
All blog responses are due by next Friday, June 20, as I have to get grades in!
The seven samurai by Akira Kurosawa presents it’s class differences throughout the film. The movie treats the samurai as these almost omnipotent, grand protectors. But, as evidenced by the rest of the movie, they turn out to be just as human as the people they have been requested to protect. The samurai eventually form a group and are juxtaposed with the villagers consistently throughout the second half of the movie. The villagers show resentment towards them and even go as far as hiding all of the women in the village upon their arrival. The villagers seem to hold this mindset through most of the film, “Though the townspeople and the samurai can fight in temporary alliance, they can never fight for the same goals.” That is, until the Samurai become parts of the village themselves and the class separation disappears almost entirely. By the final battle, the samurai are like generals leading their troops, the villagers, to stand against the oncoming invasion. The sense of brotherhood felt by the warriors transcends into the villagers by the final minutes of the film. The first evidence of such a class difference is established when three of the villagers witness a samurai dealing with a burglar. The Samurai is seen in a medium close up, getting his hair all cut off. The camera consistently cuts back and forth from the villagers to the samurai as they speculate about why he is doing this. Finally, the man gets up and walks to the house with a crowd behind him. He offers rice to the thief claiming to be a monk. The tension begins to build as this point but the time between cuts does not increase, as would be typical in modern cinema. The thief has the warrior throw the rice to him, thus foiling the plan. The camera backs out into a long shot of the house. In this same shot the samurai runs in and silence ensues. Then, an unknown man, the robber, exits the house and falls to the ground in slow motion. Such a sequence immediately displays the mastery of the samurai, one man doing what an entire town could not. Finally, this scene separates the samurai from the people of the town entirely. It makes him stand out against them and establishes that the class differences will continue for most of the film.
ReplyDeleteThe samurai of Akira Kurosawa's “Seven Samurai” live a separate life, no doubt. This is shown in the film through the often lonely composition and feeling invoked, especially in the end of the film. This detachment becomes most evident at the end as well. The leader of the group says that the villagers may have won but that they lost because there were deaths by fellow samurai. This is something antiquated in thought, even at the time depicted in the movie, but it is clear that this loss will never leave the samurai’s minds. The graves look like mountains, high above the living samurai who are shown to be small below it. The remaining samurai are sad and lonely with the mass pile of dirt containing the lost. Also the shot of the samurai staring at the graves with them each on a third and the sword which sticks out of the grave on a third of the frame and only the sky behind them is very important. It shows their faces and creates this lone and bare sense with the vast sky being the only backdrop. The sharp sword is in the foreground and is now just a sad marker for the dead. In terms of manipulation of the story world, the rain throughout the battle scene, and it sometimes as the only sound provided created a sad feeling and made the death and sadness to come inevitable. There is a separation between the normal people and the samurai in their deaths which is almost more sad. The people are shown as just dead in the mud and almost pathetic while the samurai, who albeit are major characters, receive epc deaths. Overall, the importance of this separation between the professional and the citizen is that although the citizen, the farmer, fights for a more noble cause, there is an immense stress put on the dwindling of the professional, the artist in the society of the film and in ours today. That is perhaps the most important message that Kurosawa conveys through the usage of cinematic techniques.
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