Film Culture (1956)

other Japanese films; it is the beauty of actuality, of tangibility, of the thought behind the faces you see, and of the reasons behind the motions of the bodies. It takes more skill to produce such individual beauty than to astonish us with what we are usually shown as ‘‘photographic beauty’’, and Kurosawa’s crew and cast should be commended along with him. Trained as a painter, Kurosawa doesn’t need color for his art. Some of the cast are already familiar to us. Mifune, the bandit of Rashomon, plays a farmet’s son who pretends to be a samurai, partly to escape the crushed life of the farm. This would-be samurai throws the genuine samurai of the film into sharper relief. Shimura, a remarkably versatile actor who plays in every Kurosawa film, has the role of Kambei, the first samurai to accept the farmers’ offer, a role played with patience and wisdom. The film reminds its audience, Japanese and American, that the term “samurai” originally meant “those who serve.” In breaking with the traditional Japanese film and its attitude to violence, Kurosawa strikes more deeply—at Shintoism, the hero-worship out of which the glorified sword film developed and froze. Kurosawa has saturated his film with a philosophy antagonistic to Shinto: Zen-Buddhism, a religious practice that abhors the hero-leader, and dedicates every act, even the edge of every sword, and the tip of every arrow, to the selfeffacing mission of good. The distinction between the heroes of the film and its villains is shown in the mentality behind each lunge and stroke. The purest represenation of the Zen attitude is in the character of Ryuzo, a taut and sensitive figure that would be a monument to noble modesty if he were not an extremely human being in a Kurosawa film. How strange if the film should make converts to a philosophy only through example and without ever stating or naming itself! When a proffered bowl of rice on a film screen can make you weep, it must leave some impress on you that lasts longer than the film. Even the style of the film reflects this peculiarly Japanese esthetic: its art conceals itself in a manner that increases its power. This may be the nearest cinema has come to “the artless art,” the Zen ideal that has permeated the best Japanese arts of the past. Friends of mine, both in London and here, have pointed to the possibility of an ingenious parable beneath the fifteenth century surface of The Magnificent Seven: an allegory of Japan’s relation to modern Western civilization, and it is true that the film can be read in this way—as well as in other ways. It has become the mark of a lasting film to offer itself on several levels of enjoyment, not only to different spectators, but also on tepeated viewings. I can testify that with each viewing, Kurosawa’s film has meant more to one viewer. But each time you watch the village defense being prepared, you gradually forget that only a few poor farmers are involved, far in the past. The tiny war expands in meaning and leaps into the present. This becomes a film of the behavior and heroism of men and women, any time, anywhere, in crises. It is perhaps this element in it that accounts for the film’s unprecedented success in England. These people change and grow as you watch them; you even feel an eye-witness of social change. The samurai-stratum is no longer a static unit; individualities within it come to light, with varying motives and with varying means of attaining their aims. Though always stated with clarity and force (how clearly the strategy and fighting are shown!), there is nothing in the film that can be called simple. The conflicts among the allied peasants and samurai make a dramatic element as forceful as the conflict between allies and bandits, and has the effect of making the alliance firmer. In seeming contradiction of the film’s universality, it offers more understanding of Japanese life and thought than has any other work to come to us from that extraordinary country. 2 To hear ourselves arguing the merits of Moby Dick, one would think that the blind villagers had again gathered, to report on Huston’s elephant-whale. No two arguers praise or damn the same things in the film. No two arguers seem to have seen the same film—until you realize that the confusion comes, as it has for a hundred years, from Melville’s book and not from Huston’s film. We are all eager to identify an effective film with the book that it appears to derive from, and our talk about the film is actually a grand chowder of interpretations of the book, memories of 5