“Twilight Samurai” (2002) and “The Hidden Blade,” (2004) the first two
installments in Yoji Yamada’s Samurai trilogy are now available from
Netflix. “Love and Honor,” the final installment, showed at the
Imaginasian Theater in New York last November and should soon be
available in home DVD as well. Although I missed “Love and Honor” when
it was at the Imaginasian, I am grateful for the loan of a press
screener from a fellow programmer at Columbia University who has had an
involvement with Japanese films for decades.
I am not sure of the 77 year old Yoji Yamada’s political associations
today but the N.Y. Times reported in 1982 that he was “a member in good
standing of Japan’s Communist Party” and usually tried to make “some
reference in his films to man’s disaffection with society.”
For those of you who think of Kurosawa’s samurai movies as
genre-defining, you are likely to be surprised by Yamada’s approach
(even though both directors were men of the left) for Yamada sees the
men not primarily as warriors but as court functionaries in a feudal
system that was about to be replaced by the capitalism of the Meiji
restoration. They are always pathetic in one fashion or another, but
find a way in the climax of each of his great movies to redeem their
honor in a display of swordsmanship against the feudal forces of
oppression. These are very class conscious films, even if the alignment
of class forces bears little resemblance to modern-day bourgeois society.
“Twilight Samurai” is a double-entendre. The hero, Seibei Iguchi
(Hiroyuki Sanada), has been nicknamed “twilight” by fellow clerks since
he goes straight home at sunset to look after his two young daughters or
to plow his fields rather than join them for drinks at the local geisha
house. The word “twilight” also describes the period in Japanese history
immediately before the Meiji restoration that brought an end to samurai
power and privilege.
By the 1800s, many samurai had descended to Seibi Iguchi’s status. They
functioned as minor bureaucrats in a decaying feudal system rather than
as warriors. Indeed, Seibei’s existence evokes Bob Cratchit rather than
Yojimbo. His day is spent in the counting house of the local prince’s
palace, where he sits and enters columns of numbers onto parchment. I
was reminded of the social function of my ancestors since Proyect is
Yiddish for the counting house of a tax-farmer, a role assigned
typically to the court Jews of the Middle Ages.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/yoji-yamadas-samurai-trilogy/
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