A Film Canon

The Seven Samurai transforms the fluid, vegetative tracking-shots of Rashomon into the spokes of a giant wheel, drawing a centrifugal, concentric mass around a small Japanese farming town during the Sengoku period. Narratively, this mass corresponds to a gang of itinerant bandits, and the seven ronin that the townspeople hire to to protect them; stylistically, it corresponds to Kurosawa's baroque, curvaceous depictions of air, fire, earth and water, and their embodiment in his more elaborate cinematography. In particular, water comes to represent the sense of collective and communal action that the ronin hope to reclaim from their project, and, insofar as it gestures towards a panoramic vantage point that can only be expressed through the surrogates of map, flag and graveyard, simultaneously stands in for everything about that project that defies representation. As a result, the samurais' ability to harness, divert and encompass water becomes a cipher for their ability to control exactly those temporal and spatial parameters responsible for this representative limit - most poetically in a series of short slow-motion sequences - while Kurosawa constantly seems to be challenging the limits of the frame, as if attempting to capture the tripartite division of the village - mountains, river, fields - in a single shot, as well as the film's breadth of typage. This ranges from the noble samurai leader (Takashi Shimura) to the village clowns (Bozuken Hidari and Kamatari Fujiwara), and suggests that ronin labour can only reclaim collectivity by being subsumed into agricultural labour; a farmer-samurai, encapsulated in blustery Kikuchiyo's (Toshiro Mifune) role as go-between.