The story happened at the end of the Warring States period, when thieves were rampant. At that time, down-and-out samurai would stay in kendo schools and temples to protect them and teach fencing. As a reward, the local samurai will be provided with a day's accommodation, and occasionally after the patrol in the evening, the samurai will lay down and go to the village for a meal. The three of them took the initiative to write an outline of the play.
This final film has influenced several generations of directors and is regarded as one of the greatest films in film history. Its director Akira Kurosawa is called the film emperor.
It's the seven samurai.
(Six plays written by Akira Kurosawa for movies)
Among the Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa created seven ideal samurai, not because of fame or greed.
The seven samurai have their own characteristics.
Kan Weibing is the core and organizer of the whole team. Although he has great martial arts and courage, he can't change the defeat of the whole battlefield by himself. He is ready to help others. When he learned that the villagers' children had been kidnapped as hostages by bandits, he took risks, shaved off his long hair, dressed as a monk, and then snatched the children back while the bandits were unprepared. When he learned that the villagers had to feed their hunger with barnyard grass and give them the best white rice in order to find the samurai, he was deeply moved and agreed to the villagers' request and tried his best to find the best samurai. After he arrived in the village, he immediately began to deploy and plan tactics. On the one hand, he has a good relationship with the villagers, but on the other hand, he also shows his samurai style. When he learned that he needed to give up the hut across the ditch, he immediately made a judgment, hell to pay. Finally, when he beat off the mountain thief at great cost, his career was successful, revealing the truth that farmers were the beneficiaries of this war. In other words, he symbolizes.
Of all the roles, Keitaro is the most immature. Even from the beginning, he was excluded from the ranks of the seven samurai, and he lacked the fierce and decisive courage of the samurai. In a sense, he is an unqualified soldier. But at the same time, he is also the least arrogant warrior. Seeing that the villagers' rice was stolen, he quietly gave them the rice money and told them not to tell anyone. He fell in love with the farmer's daughter and secretly sent her daily rice. His exuberant vitality and the pursuit of justice in his heart make him rich in the unique charm of young people.
Kuzo is the strongest of the seven samurai. He is good at fencing, and in order to find his own martial arts, he embarked on a journey alone. In the screenplay, Kurosawa defined Kuzo as Musashi Miyamoto, and he lived up to this expectation. With one stroke, he can cut down the provocative samurai with a machete, and one person can go straight into the enemy camp and grab a musket in the army, which has made great contributions to the smooth end of the subsequent battle.
Kojiro didn't write much, but he was indifferent to life and death. As a samurai, his normal mind of selling goods for a living on weekdays deeply touched us. When former good friend Kan Bingwei reunited after a long separation, but he could not bear to drag himself into the quagmire of struggle, he was embarrassed to say that he was going to fight a useless war. Kojiro, who is good at understanding others, immediately understood Kan Bingwei's difficulties and responded to his friend's request with a sincere smile.
Pingba is the keynote of the whole artistic conception. His optimism deeply touched the people around him. He is frank and positive. When other samurai were hungry and unwilling to condescend to civilians, he had already started chopping wood behind the innkeeper's inn and enjoyed it. Although his martial arts are not superb, his calm and humble attitude has painted some beautiful light and shadow on the whole dark tone.
When you meet Goro for the first time, you will be moved by his alertness and trust. He didn't even enter the door, but he saw through the temptation of Kan Bingwei at a glance. Instead of being upset, he was moved by Kan Bingwei's noble character, regardless of life and death and honor, and did not choose a person worthy of his trust. Such a spirit can't help but move people.
The role of Kichiyo Kikuchiyo is probably the most interesting in the whole film. It can even be said that the film is incomplete without him, and he is also the person who can best represent an era. From his experience, we can easily guess that he came from a peasant family, but in a war-torn era, his parents died at the hands of mountain thieves, and he suffered countless supercilious looks at a young age, just as Kurosawa defined this role: a person abandoned by life. He pretended to be a samurai. He repeatedly boasted about his orthodox family background to Naoto Kan and Wei Bing, and became angry because he was seen through at a glance. He thinks that the other party has humiliated himself. He yearns for the nobility and respect of Bushido, but he is anti-traditional. He hated the oppression and discrimination of the samurai against the peasants. He is warm-blooded, bold and humorous, and also builds a bridge of mutual understanding between samurai and villagers.
Perhaps because of Japan's geographical relationship, for China people, they are not very afraid of unrest, but just run away, but the Japanese do not have such extravagant hopes. The narrow island country means they have nowhere to run, so in Japanese culture, there are only winners and losers, the strong and the weak.
At that time, Japanese society was in great turmoil, and samurai were expelled as ronins. Except loyalty to the Lord, most of the time, samurai have no special moral standards. They have a natural sense of nobility towards farmers, and don't think that the other party is from the same world at all, so they often oppress and exploit farmers, and farmers are also afraid and hateful. The class between them is almost an unbreakable obstacle.
In the film, the samurai and the villagers formed a unique relationship. They agreed to the villagers' demands, not so much for a few meals as for sympathy and samurai justice. Although they tried to get on well with the villagers.
However, except for the peasant Chiyo and the fledgling Kenshiro who are willing to really communicate and contact with the villagers, other samurai still associate with the same samurai class. Subconsciously, I still feel that I am not the same passerby. I just cooperate with the villagers out of the responsibility of a samurai and the pursuit of justice, and I don't feel that my purpose is to protect these villagers.
On the one hand, villagers need warriors to protect themselves and regard them as their saviors, but on the other hand, they are afraid of them and regard them as mountain thieves with legal status. This contradiction is most prominent in two scenes.
The first time was when I first entered the village. Afraid of the arrival of the samurai, the villagers not only hid the food tightly, but also hid in their own houses, afraid to show up, completely equating the existence of the samurai with bandits. This situation gradually broke the deadlock, until the Qing Chiyo lied about the bandits' attack, but the farmers still didn't trust the samurai. All their young women hid, fearing the abuse of the samurai.
The second time was to find the armor of the fallen soldiers.
When the samurai learned that the villagers had a large number of armor and swords for the fallen warriors, they were furious and almost became the conflict point of the whole story.
Kurosawa, on the other hand, used the peasant Ju Chi as the representative to tell the origin of the fierce contradiction between samurai and peasants: "What do you think of peasants? Do you think they are bodhisattvas? This is a joke. Farmers are the most cunning. They want rice, but don't give it to them They want wheat and say no. In fact, they have everything. If you open the floor and have a look, you will find many things, such as rice, salt, beans and wine ... look deep into the valley. There are hidden rice fields. They are honest on the surface, but they are the best liars. They will lie anyway! As soon as the war started, we killed the defeated soldiers and robbed them of weapons. Listen, the so-called peasants are the meanest, the most cunning, the most cowardly, the most cruel, the most imbecile and the most murderer. But ... who made them like this? It's you, it's your samurai, you all go to hell! What do you ask farmers to do for war, burning villages, ravaging fields, enslaving, insulting women and killing rebels? What should they do? 」
It is this passage that directly changes the tone of the whole story and gives it double contradictions.
The first contradiction, of course, is that the samurai and villagers collectively fight against mountain thieves, that is, foreign forces, which is also the core contradiction of the story. All the plots are based on this, but once the external forces disappear and are eliminated, the second contradiction hidden under them begins to be exposed. A samurai is a used knife. Once the enemy is destroyed, this knife is worthless. The so-called cunning rabbit dies, and the running dog is familiar.
At first, the Qing Chiyo was a bridge between warriors and villagers. He recognizes the identity of a samurai but is rooted in the values of farmers, so everyone can live in harmony. But his death means that the samurai and the villagers can no longer understand each other, so the intersection disappears and parallel appears.
In essence, samurai and villagers are not pursuing the same thing.
Warriors are for fame, villagers are for survival. To some extent, it can be seen as a contradiction between realism and idealism. So, who is the ultimate winner? With the end of the battle, the three men looked at the pile like a hill, and Camby said silently, "We failed again, and those farmers won.
In fact, this can also be regarded as the inevitable decline of the samurai class. Samurai is a rootless wind, sweeping the earth, but even if it is fierce, there will be a day in the past, but farmers are a solid earth. Even if layers of sand are blown off repeatedly, revealing bare stones below, they will still live tenaciously.
In the end, all four warriors were shot and burned to death, and no one died in the duel with the sword. The decline of the warriors was covered with a gray gauze. When muskets gradually replaced the mountain city, the pursuit of martial arts and transcendental ideals that warriors insisted on seemed so weak and pale. They chased the distance like the wind, yearning for the distance, and finally, they became a distance.
Akira Kurosawa can be said to be a rare Asian director who is truly recognized by the world film industry. Some people lamented that with his death, a movie era was over.
The success of his film Rashomon is a symbolic representative of non-western films entering the mainstream of western films.
Kurosawa's use of the lens has reached a superb level. Both george lucas and Coppola's godfather series drew lessons from Akira Kurosawa, who was praised by Steven Allan Spielberg as "Shakespeare in the film industry".
Take a few shots for example.
The scene of the woodcutter walking in Rashomon consists of 16 shots. In addition to following the movement of the subject, we also adopt different displacement perspectives such as overhead shot, overhead shot, close shot and panorama. The Venice Film Festival called it: the first time the camera was moved to the forest.
Kurosawa is very good at explaining the symbolic meaning of action with contrast. He often uses static visual elements combined with emotional vortex to create dramatic tension.
His long lens is calm, calm and full of tension, and he is very good at using weather, light and shadow for multi-level interpretation. It can be said that in his films, there is no need for language, and the lens itself is enough to form a complete narrative rhythm.
In addition to the lens images, Akira Kurosawa's films also have the purity mentioned by tarkovsky. This purity is not reflected in the symbolic meaning of his images, but in the ability of these images to express concrete, unique and real events.
Among the Seven Samurai, the Samurai are fighting and chasing the scattered mountain thieves, while it is raining heavily and muddy everywhere, and the Samurai are wearing traditional Japanese costumes. A large bare thigh was exposed, and the leg was covered with mud. One of the samurai fell to the ground and died. The rain washed away the mud on his leg, making his leg as white as marble, and one man died. This is a factual image, without any symbolic meaning, purely an image.
The real text of a movie is not a story, but a picture. How to read between the lines with pictures and make the audience agree and participate is the foundation of a director. In this sense, I am afraid that few directors can do better than Akira Kurosawa.
He not only has high attainments in film art, but also sets an example and devotes himself to the shooting scene. When shooting the Seven Samurai, the shooting time had to be extended to February because of the delay. On rainy days, everyone needs to wear wet sandals, and the weather is very cold. Kurosawa was also caught in the rain with the actors, and finally his feet were frostbitten and even his toenails were soaked. He was afraid in later memories and said, even if someone begged me, I would be afraid.
Including his pursuit of the environment, it is said that he waited 100 days in order to shoot a satisfactory sunny scene when filming Heroes of the Warring States.
While actively expressing his feelings and values, he also explores himself inward and keeps an artist's conscious introspection.
As he said in his autobiography "Toad Oil", toads in the deep mountains have more legs than other toads, and they are ugly and don't know it. When people catch it, they put it in front of the mirror. When it sees itself in the mirror, it can't help but be scared out of oil, which is a precious medicinal material used by people to treat burns and scalds.
Yes, how many people in this world can look straight into their hearts without being scared out of oil?
Every time people look at their own mirror image, it is like facing another "me", one is me in others' eyes and the other is me in their own eyes. When they are fixed in the same time and space, you will see yesterday's me, today's me, and even think of tomorrow's me.
If we take copper as a mirror, we can dress up our own clothes; Taking history as a mirror, we can know the rise and fall; Take people as a mirror, you can know the gains and losses. Then, if you think of yourself as a mirror, you will know.
An introspective person will reflect on the meaning of his existence, so he will often feel deeply, introspect, encourage himself, warn himself and laugh at himself.
I think, only when I can convey and express what I firmly believe with an almost insane belief, but also have the courage to look straight into my heart and ask those dark corners, can such works be infectious.
Just like there is a dialogue between Huan Wen and Yin Hao in Shi Shuo Xin Yu, Huan Wen asked Yin Hao, "What are you like me?" Yin Hao said, "After dealing with me for a long time, I'd rather be myself.