Chambara: A generic designation for a samurai film
Satori: Enlightenment
Chum: Sharkfood
Leading up to and during WWII, the antiquated notion of Bushido (an essentially unwritten ethical code by which a samurai warrior was expected to conduct himself) was resurrected in Japan and manipulated by those in authority to elicit unquestioned allegiance to the State in the personage of The Emperor. Honor was inextricably linked to one's loyalty. One's duty was nonnegotiable.
Following the war, film directors were charged by the Occupational Authority of the United States to foster notions of personal identity in their films, particularly "Western" notions of duty to one's own sense of fair play and justice. For a culture emerging out of centuries of subordination of one's personal identity to a rigorous caste structure, and to decades of State sponsored indoctrination demanding blind obedience, this was no small task.
 |
| Hideo Gosha on set of Three Outlaw Samurai |
Hideo Gosha's Three Outlaw Samurai is a clinic on how far those "nudges by the U.S. judges" could be taken. The film came out in 1964, almost 20 years after the end of the war, and by that time, the official US military occupation had ended and Japanese directors had much more freedom to explore the toll such changes had taken on the psyche of the nation. Gosha was not afraid to explore the darkest of ramifications. And Three Outlaw Samurai gets dark.
Don't get me wrong, much of Gosha's exquisitely crafted film is humorous and dry in it's character explorations. Three Outlaw Samurai has some of the most expertly crafted Chambara fight scenes on film along with highly-stylized camera angles, inventive framing, and rich compositions. And for the more base and bloodthirsty genre fans among us, a big climactic battle with dozens of running, screaming, katana-swinging samurai. It's a Chambara film lover's dream!
But the film is also nihilistic to its very black soul. The characters change allegiances at the drop of a hat. It is a savage world where social and familial ties breakdown, loyalty is situational, and betrayal is a commodity to be bought and sold at the whims of one's mutable conscience. What had begun nearly 20 years before as an attempt to delicately separate honor from loyalty, was now a cannonball assault on all notions of the order of things: Honor was often achieved by betrayal of those closest, and dishonor was a symptom of the disease of blind fealty to authority.
This is a film where characters seem like archetypes blown into town by the wind and in the end, they disappear behind a wall of dust. We "know" them only by their genre and type, their actions are not so much expressions of self, as they are reactions to the way one ought to behave.
The main outlaw samurai states, "The farmers acted bravely—a samurai can do no less." We have seen nothing in the film up to this point where any actions have defined what a samurai is. We have only his cold, distanced statement that implies an accepted understanding about how a samurai should conduct himself. These preconceptions are assumed by the nature of the genre itself. The director counts on the audience to already know what the character is talking about. And how these characters actually behave versus notions of how the world ought to be is where the rubber hits the road in Gosha's universe.
Nihilism, by its very definition, states that the universe has no great reason behind it and that any way we make is purely our own. And in the end, a hairpin cast into the air to see where it lands to point the way off screen, is more trusted by these world weary samurai than any socially constructed ethics born of disloyal, traitorous, and fickle human animals.
Hideo Gosha is one of Chambara's true masters and Three Outlaw Samurai is a must own for any fan. The Criterion Blu-ray transfer is exceptional.
My rating: 7 out of 7 Samurai
No comments:
Post a Comment