A Film Canon

The Hidden Fortress translates Seven Samurai's basic preoccupation - the delimitation and transgression of three contested zones - into widescreen, thereby rendering it's centrifugal condensations largely redundant, and expanding the zones from components of a village, to the three regions through which General Rokurota (Toshiro Mifune) and two peasants (Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara) have to pass, in order to restore disguised Princess Yuki (Misa Uehara) and her fortune to their rightful throne. By foregrounding the peasants, and their experience of the world as a perpetual low-angle shot, Kurosawa elevates their backdrop to galactic proportions - especially the various fluidities that shape their largely passive trajectory. Encompassing hordes of samurai, masses of slaves, and the river where they first discover the gold, wrapped in bark, these all flow cosmically down from the horizon and, in the process, fuse the horizon with the sky, as if to take the increased remoteness of the widescreen horizon to it's logical conclusion; a waterfall of space. As a result, tension tends to be generated from figures descending from the air, rather than from the more kinetic, polarising action of Seven Samurai, with the result that the audience ultimately finds their most appropriate surrogate in the princess who, forced into muteness to disguise her aristocratic accent and vocabulary, is forced to confront the inherently visceral, debilitating, pursuant power of images themselves. Even the iconic duel - the prototype for Star Wars' jedi fights - occurs as a series of pauses and stases textured by movement, rather than vice versa, while the spectacular Fire Festival rituals provide the vortex that Seven Samurai's frenetic, climactic whirlpools couldn't quite contain or describe.