Clouds of Every Shape and Hue: Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai

Those who just want a sword fight will be disappointed.

Grade: A+

Akira Kurosawa wrote and directed this action film set in medieval Japan (the Sengoku era specifically) in 1954, and it’s been highly referenced, imitated and praised ever since. You may have seen its shadows before you ever heard of Kurosawa. In Seven Samurai, poor peasants face being besieged by ravenous bandits and they hire a small band of warriors, seven samurai, each unique in his own way, to defend them. Sound familiar? The Magnificent Seven, The Avengers, even A Bugs Life all trace a similar story arc of the desperate and the outnumbered and their triumph over seemingly unbeatable odds. Spielberg said that he re-watches Seven Samurai before going to work on a new film. George Lucas said the “the art of moving pictures is on every frame of this movie.”

Those who just want a sword fight will be disappointed. Kurosawa doesn’t belong to the Michael Bay school of action films that’s just explosions, explosions and more explosions. Seven Samurai isn’t just slash and kill. It’s over two hours long but most of that time Kurosawa spends before and in between the action. The peasants wrack their brains over how to save their village from the bandits. Just give the bandits the rice? The village will starve. Go to the magistrate? That lazy bugger? Wait: hire samurai to protect us! Samurai! We’re broke! So, a village elder finally says, sitting cross-legged, staring straight at the camera like the face of a Buddha before a prostrating worshipper pleading for guidance, find samurai with empty bellies and pay them in rice. The peasants find such samurai: Shimada (Takashi Shimura) who they witness save a baby from a murderous madman by posing as a monk; his boyishly bright-faced disciple Okamoto (Isao Kimura); Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi) who kills a man with one quick stroke of his sword without one batting eyelash disturbing his face that’s fantastically rigid with discipline; Kikuchiyo (Toshiru Mifune) who struts about, swaying his arms two and thro, jumping in the air and shouting yippy like a Flintstones character lost in feudal Japan.

These four are the members of the titular seven samurai you’ll find most interesting. The remaining three (played by Yoshio Inaba, Daisuke Kato and Minoru Chiaki) are very much the: jolly in the face of possible annihilation by the bandits. Yet Kurosawa finds them all interesting. He gives them all their own scene for you to meet them and for the peasants to recruit them to their cause. In between the action, Okamoto falls for a peasant girl but holds off making love to her. One night, she leads him to a barn, lays down on the hay and tells him to act like a samurai. An insane white light is blasted across his face. It’s the fire from the collision within him of his desire for her and his fear of taking her. The samurai also get to know the peasants, share some of their rice with the peasants’ children and learn more about each other. There’s more to this action film than just the action.

That’s what makes it one of the best action films you’ll ever see. Action scenes are like Christmas. If you had them all the time they’d grow boring. The samurai do slash, stab and kill but by surrounding these violent moments with romance, laughter and sadness, Kurosawa preserves the potency of the intense action. It remains intense because it only happens a few times. Intensity is partially derived from scarcity.

Kurosawa’s attention to the people doing the slashing, stabbing and killing also makes you care about it more. You don’t care very much when you hear a man’s been stabbed on the news. He’s just a man and you don’t know what’s been stabbed. Kurosawa makes sure you know who the samurai are and who the peasants are by lingering in those spaces between the fights when they show who they are through how they treat each other and what they tell each other. You know what’s lost as the samurai and the peasants slowly start to fall in defence of the village. Kurosawa understands the best action films are about the people doing the action not the action itself. A duel isn’t very exciting unless you know the duellists.

Kurosawa first studied to be a painter before becoming a filmmaker. Seven Samurai has a painter’s eye for variance in tone and the richness it creates. The film is black and white but still is multi-toned. It’s not about the colour of the shots but the characters and the scenes. Kyuzo’s introduction scene is a spectacle of ruthless savagery. Kurosawa slows down the shot in which Kyuzo kills a man in a duel and prolongs the man’s fall to his knees and to the ground after Kyuzo has struck him down. There’s something of the same intensity in the scene when Okamoto and the girl go into the hay shed. Close ups of their faces make you feel their sense of terrifying intimacy. By contrast, there are scenes of comical misery. The peasants are amongst the most fantastic whiners in film history. In the film’s beginning, they screech that they should just hang themselves and that will get the lazy magistrate’s attention. Sometimes, Kurosawa blends the savage, the dramatic and the comedic in a single scene. During one of the film’s many battles with the bandits, one bandit is knocked from his horse. A feeble old woman then approaches him, with a plough raised above her head, ready to kill the bandit to avenge her son. She shuffles at a turtle’s speed towards the bandit. Her arms quiver as she holds the plough high enough to bash his brains out with it. “Somebody help her do it,” the village elder yells. You won’t know if you should laugh or gasp in that scene. Either way, you’ll do both before Kurosawa’s done with you.

Lucas was right. The art of cinema is in every frame in Seven Samurai. It’s an exhibition of cinema’s power to be a moving painting in which clouds of every shape and hue sail by.