silver nitrate notes

Seven Samurai and the Weather

19 feb 2016

Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) is the film he would later say he had been trying to make since the beginning of his career. It is the longest fiction film a major Japanese studio had produced: 207 minutes in its original cut, edited down by Toho for the 1955 Western release and restored in the 1980s. It is also the film that teaches anyone watching it what can be done with weather.

The cinematographer was Asakazu Nakai (1901-1988), not to be confused with Miyagawa who shot Rashomon for Kurosawa four years earlier. Nakai would go on to photograph nine of Kurosawa's films. Seven Samurai is the one where he and Kurosawa work out the visual grammar that would define the late-1950s Kurosawa period samurai picture.

What Nakai and Kurosawa did is use weather as geography. The film's major set piece, the final battle in the rain, is shot in a storm that Toho actually produced. Kurosawa did not wait for weather. He manufactured it. The sprinklers ran across the entire exterior set, continuously, for weeks. Mud was trucked in. The horses were kept in a state of controlled fright. Nakai photographed the battle in flat light with a neutral density filter, rated the stock low enough to preserve the rain detail, and shot many of the key setups with two cameras so that Kurosawa could cut on exact matched rhythms.

The effect is unusual for a period film. Most samurai pictures of the 1950s photographed exteriors on sunny days because sunny days were easier. Kurosawa picked rain because rain made the setting material, not decorative. When Kambei (Takashi Shimura) and his group of samurai march up the flooded hillside for the final fight, the mud pulls at their feet. The armour is heavy. The weather is the opponent before the bandits are. The battle lasts thirty-seven minutes on screen. It feels longer, in the good way.

The seven actors assembled for the samurai roles include Toshirō Mifune (Kikuchiyo), Takashi Shimura (Kambei), Seiji Miyaguchi (Kyūzō), Yoshio Inaba (Gorobei), Daisuke Katō (Shichirōji), Minoru Chiaki (Heihachi), and Isao Kimura (Katsushirō). Every one of them is given distinct blocking, distinct costuming, distinct posture. Kurosawa shot the group scenes so that anyone watching could pick out any of the seven from silhouette alone. This is not accident. This is deliberate.

The Western remakes (The Magnificent Seven, 1960, and since then) have all tried to do what Kurosawa did and have mostly failed, because they copied the plot and not the weather.

[ « prev: Paisan · next: Strangers on a Train » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Knopf, 1982.
[2] Prince, Stephen. The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. Princeton UP, rev. ed. 1999.
[3] Mellen, Joan. Seven Samurai. BFI Film Classics, 2002.
[4] Richie, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. University of California Press, 3rd ed. 1998.