Jidaigeki drama

The impetus for the production of Seven Samurai(Shichinin no samu-

rai,1954) came from Kurosawa's interest in making a new type of jidai-

geki film.Kurosawa's intention was to destroy cliches and dead formu-

las to renew jidaigeki as a film genre that could show the past more accurately and at the same time appeal to the contemporary sensibility |of the audience. His effort to break the stalemate of jidaigeki as a genre

led to a search for accurate historical facts about how samurai actually lived in the Edo period. Originally,the film was supposed to portray one day of a samurai's life: he gets up in the morning. goes to work at a |castle,makes some mistake on the job,and goes home to commit sep-

puku, or ritual suicide. With scriptwriter Hashimoto Shinobu and pro- ducer Motogi Sojiro, Kurosawa dug into archival materials and talked

to historians. But this initial plan stalled quickly because it was almost impossible to find out any specific details of the samurai's daily life

(e.g, what kind of food did samurai typically have for breakfast? What

was their daily routine like at the castl?).The plan was soon changed

to make a film based on famous episodes from the lives of military arts masters.Hashimoto proceeded to write a script based on this new idea

and finished it in two months. But this second plan was again aban- doned because Kurosawa realized that a narrative film needs more than

just a series of climaxes. The third and final idea came from Kurosawa's

interest in the details of mushashugyo, the samurai's journey to perfect

his martial arts skills. As Kurosawa,Hashimoto, and Motogi began re-

search on this subject, they learned that samuraisometimes worked as

|watchmen for peasants in exchange for meals.Kurosawa decided to ex-

pand this historical fact into a flm in which peasants hire a group of

| samurai to defend their village from bandits. Hashimoto wrote the first

draft of the script,and Kurosawa and Oguni Hideo later joined in its

revision.!

One of the most popular Kurosawa films, Seven Samurai has been | extensively commented on by American and Japanese critics alike. The

predominant approach to the film seems to be an allegorical reading. Frederick Kaplan suggests that "Kurosawa uses cinematic technology to explore the dialectic between time and history; he deals cinematically with the past in order to deal ideologically with the present and future, and, more specifically, with class struggle and the role of intellectuals in that struggle." Bert Cardullo argues that Seven Samurai"portrays the power of circumstance over its characters' lives....The work of circumstance is interested in what surrounds the human being, and how he reacts to it, under stress. Tragedy is interested in what is im- mutable...in each human being,and the world, and how this leads to man's...destruction...The one art looks out, the other in. It is the difference between East and West,self and other."+Kida Jun'ichiro finds in Seven Samurai a basso continuo of Kurosawa fims, the ab- sence of civil society and the powerlessness of intellectuals in Japan.4 For Stephen Prince,"Seven Samurai is a film about the modern works, an attempt, by moving farther back into history, to uncover the dia- lectic between class and the individual, an effort to confront the social |construction of self and to see whether this annihilates the basis for individual heroism."'Sato Tadao found that Seven Samurai justified the Japanese rearmament; in 1954 the National Safety Force and the Mari- time Safety Board were reorganized into the Self-Defense Force(Jieitai) in apparent violation of the Article 9 of the 1947 constitution, which "renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes." Another critic suggests that the image of the dead samurai might be a reference to those Japanese who were killed in World War ll? In this chapter,instead of proposing another thematic reading of the

film,I will focus on its different aspects,most importantly its generic status as a idaigeki film. I wil first examine the history of jidaigeki as a dominant genre and then contextualize Seven Samurai in relation to that history. What isjidaigeki? How did this popular genre come about? What are some of the basic features of jidaigeki? What kind of role did it play in the development of Japanese cinema? How has it changed or remained the same since its emergence? And how does Kurosawa situate himself in the history of the jidaigeki film?

206 Kurosawa

Japanese Cinema and the Genre System

Genres as institutions are created by the film industry largely to con- trol the mode of film reception and consumption.Along with the star system and other economic practices of the film industry(e.g, the ver-

tical integration of studios,distribution divisions,and theaters), genres

|serve to minimize financial risks for the industry.The studios strive to

achieve the predictability and stability of their business enterprise by |repeatedly using in their films similar themes, story patterns, charac-

| ter types, dramatic settings,physical locations,formal devices, visual