"Would you be willing to do what is right, regardless of the consequences? To see good triumph over evil and use your strength and heroism to protect the lives of others? Maybe you have what it takes to be a samurai."
Thus runs the hype on the back of this "guide" to Akira Kurosawa's 1954 "Seven Samurai." The wheedling tone, the effort to at all costs attract the inattentive student, the personalization of the product -- all of this is the accomplishment of what has become a common cottage industry in the lower reaches of academe these days: the compilation of screen guides.
With film so widely taught that there are even courses on Japanese film in England, a need (or opportunity) for such escorts through real or presumed difficulties is endorsed. "Satisfy your curiosity with the ultimate film guides . . . don't be in the dark about film."
So what is the matter with this? Well, it makes a great cinematic moral statement into a classroom assignment, it turns a prime personal experience into some kind of self-improvement kit and it makes a pleasure a duty.
But what is the difference as long as the young are led to understand? Well, nothing if they are led to understand what the filmmaker would have them understand -- in this case the necessity of organized action and, as in the famous final scene, its futility. But the morality of the film is not directly addressed.
Rather, and this is among the strengths of this particular guide, the novice is led through the film by being told what to look for. Particularly good is the section on visual style where Kurosawa's means are succinctly laid out. It is shown how sound and music support these visuals. For a young person wandering into a film (any film), this kind of firm, practical, guiding hand will be grateful.
To dumb down an adult film to a perceived juvenile level, however, much is also made of Kurosawa's influence on Western directors. George Lucas is again wheeled forth; "The Magnificent Seven" once more makes its bow; and here comes Sergio Leone with "A Fistful of Dollars." We are not, however, informed that the Italian company was successfully sued for its making a precise copy of "Yojimbo." Such information would not fit in with any intention to interest the young in forced comparisons with something they presumably already know -- like Clint Eastwood.
Much more responsible pedagogy is demonstrated when the author takes on contemporary cinematic prejudices. He reminds us that "Seven Samurai" is a film of its period but that it nonetheless deserves consideration alongside the best, even though it uses none of the technologies now common. Though photographed in black and white, with a mono soundtrack, "it creates as much narrative excitement as any wide-screen Technicolor epic in Dolby Stereo."
The demands of a film guide (render simple, make familiar, reassure), however, eventually tend to defeat even someone as fair-minded and savvy as the writer of this particular guide. And, since the genre has its academic pretensions and will be used by other academics, there is much consideration given to other "disciplines."
Although semiology has had its day and its lingo is as dead as Latin, structuralism ("post" though it may be) still holds on, and there is some kowtowing made to new members of the academic family. Among these is the theory of Mifune as a male sex object. Gary Morris, writing in "Bright Light Film Journal," obliges: Toshiro Mifune is "always praised as an actor but vastly underrated as a hunk," and in the last sequence shows "his exposed ass -- one of cinema's finest -- to great advantage." Do I hear a thesis stirring?
Despite such ludicrous attempts at academic respectability, this pamphlet does indeed introduce the film. Although it gets a few things wrong -- for instance, the romaji of the title on the back cover is off -- the DVD, at least the Criterion version, is full length at 207 minutes. The pamphlet's greatest anomaly is the fault of neither author nor publisher: that it contains not a single still from "Seven Samurai."
When visuals are needed, hand-drawn copies of stills are used; the single photo, a snapshot, is of Kurosawa and Mifune on the "Yojimbo" set. Even the cover contains no production photo. This is because the present holder of rights on the major Kurosawa films is more interested in profit than it is in educating English-speaking youth. Stills are thus priced at levels beyond the budgets of publishers issuing educational texts.
The result is a true curiosity, a serious and well-intentioned book on a film that does not contain one scene from that film.
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