A Film Canon

Duel At Ganryu Island replaces the sublime darknesses of Musashi Miyamoto and Duel At Ichijoji Temple with a light, but largely muted palette, extrapolating a spectrum of browns, yellows and greys from the soil that constitutes Musashi's (Toshiro Mifune) final lesson. In the process, the redemption of nature glimpsed by the second film is generalised into a redemption of human affairs, as the Samurai's transcendence is presented as a necessary perspective for the distribution and maintenance of political, economic and agricultural justice. As a result, Musashi's communion with other people is particularly foregrounded, and organised around the two poles of jealous and patient love, and competitive and paternalistic regard; or, alternatively, around the distinction between action for action's sake, embodied by rival Samurai Kojiro Sasaki (Koji Tsuruta), and a slackening of action in the name of a more meditative, sensory and, above all, visual communion. Hence the final duel, which simultaneously takes place as an elemental collision of air, earth, fire and water; an extended piece of eye-play, in which swords are only useful insofar as they reflect the sun's blinding light, and the sheer abundance of ocular stimuli reduces the participants to silhouettes; and a reversal of the entire order of aristocratic decadence aestheticised in the second film, and politicised in this one, concluding the trilogy at precisely that nexus between nature and spirit outlined by Musashi, but refusing to disentangle it's political, romantic and religious implications from the final, luminous image.