Samurai Code & the Code of the American West
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Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is an example of the circularity of film genres in the world cinema. Kurosawa was influenced in his samurai films by the motifs and icons of the American Western film, which was very popular in Japan as elsewhere, and in turn his Seven Samurai would become an influence on later American Westerns, notably the remake of Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven. A comparison of the two films, though, shows very different aesthetic attitudes and also very different industry structures. The Kurosawa film is an ensemble piece in which the director shapes the movement of the film like an epic ballet, while the American version is structured more as a star vehicle with a number of opportunities for each featured actor to shine in his own segment to appeal to different segments of the audience. Noel Burch notes that Japanese cinema is fundamentally different from the dominant form in Western cinema, and some of the differences are evident in comparing these two films. In spite of the fact that the John Sturges Western uses Seven Samurai as its source material, the underlying themes are different, and the script develops the seven fighters in a different way as well. Westerners tend to view the samurai film as a form of Western because that is an easy way to categorize the films and because there are elements of similarity. Of course, the most obvious of these is that they are set in Japan's past as the Western is set in America's, but there are basi
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uiding force on his films, and in a real sense he is the "star" who makes all decisions and whose reputation draws an audience. While American directors may be just as dedicated to doing the job and to getting others to do theirs, American films are shaped more around the actor than the actor is shaped to fit the material. In Kurosawa's films, taken as a whole, East and West meet in a unique form. Kurosawa often adapts what would be considered a form firmly based on a sense of reality and imposes a Japanese mysticism on that form. Kurosawa builds ideas and tension through a juxtaposition of images which impose a sense of fate and even doom, depending on the film and the period in the filmmaker's life when it was made. Kurosawa is best-known in the West for his series of samurai films, and here the iconography of East and West are most firmly mixed, while in some of his more experimental efforts, such as Do-des-ka-den, the iconography of Japan may be so heavy as to baffle most Western viewers altogether.
As Desser notes, the precise relationship between Kurosawa's expression of the samurai film and the motifs of the American Western are uncertain: "To the Japanese mind, the self-sacrificing hero is the most admirable hero of
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Approximate Word count = 1732
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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