A Film Canon

Musashi Miyamoto collapses the revolution in samurai status ushered in by the Tokugawa Shogunate with the reconfiguration of masculinity in the aftermath of WWII, opening with "a great battle between east and west" that associates the older, militaristic code with horizontality and immanence, and it's imminent containment by etiquette, aesthetics and spirituality with verticality and transcendence; a dialectic between field and tree, plain and mountain, that ultimately locates bushido at the point where nature gives way to whatever lies beyond it. As a result, the eponymous samurai's (Toshiro Mifune) education takes places as a gradual disentanglement from nature, to which end Inagaki spends the first half camouflaging him with cool blues and greens, surrounding him with a seething, organic mass that imbues everything with the indeterminacy of dawn or dusk, and, finally, enwombing him in the amniotic, sumi-e murk from which his rebirth commences. Gestated by a tree, and fertilised by a priest, this process is largely elided, apart from a spectacular expenditure and exhaustion of that skulking animality that works best with Mifune's hyperbolic, theatrical acting style, as if Inagaki were simultaneously proposing a revolution in his screen persona, and the historical cinema with which it is interchangeable, possibly in the direction of a more Western romanticism that, combined with the fantastic Eastmancolor, makes for a much clearer precursor to Star Wars than The Hidden Fortress.