Yojimbo
Q1) Choose an Asian film from WEEKS 1-6 of the course and provide a critical analysis and account of its press/critical reception and/or marketing (in its country of origin, overseas, or both).
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Yojimbo
BY MUSTAFA I. ABDELMAGEED
As Kurosawa himself once pointed out, the story of Yojimbo is so simple it 's a wonder nobody thought of it before. A quick summary of “Yojimbo”, The film stars Toshiro Mifune as Kuwabatake Sanjuro (30-something year-old Mulberry Field). Sanjuro, a wandering ronin (masterless samurai), strolls into what seems to be a deserted town. Sanjuro, seeking to both rid the town of the gangs and earn a profit at the same time, offers up his services as a yojimbo (bodyguard). Moreover, Kurosawa had successfully turned what seems like an all Japanese based film into a westernised phenomenon and a source of inspiration to other major films such as Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964) starring Clint Eastwood. In this paper, I will be looking at the initial responses that the visuals in “Yojimbo” had received over the past 50 years or so since its release and also understand whether or not reading of the film had shifted over time, and of course, whether or not Kurosawa benefited from the making of Yojimbo. [Smoliak, 2009]
In 1961, ‘Yojimbo’ was Akira Kurosawa’s most popular film at the time. Kurosawa was deliberately combining the samurai story with the Western, so that the wind-swept main street could be in any frontier town, the samurai (Toshiro Mifune) could be a gunslinger, and the local characters could have been lifted from all the extras off a western film in the 60’s. [Ebert, 2005] The films “A Fistful of Dollars (1964)” and “Yojimbo (1961)“ are similar not only in the realm of cinematography, and extra- diegetic sound, but also in the domain of mise-en-scene and movement (a subdomain of mise-en-scene). The western genre had a great influence on Japanese
______________________________________________________________________________
Yojimbo
BY MUSTAFA I. ABDELMAGEED
As Kurosawa himself once pointed out, the story of Yojimbo is so simple it 's a wonder nobody thought of it before. A quick summary of “Yojimbo”, The film stars Toshiro Mifune as Kuwabatake Sanjuro (30-something year-old Mulberry Field). Sanjuro, a wandering ronin (masterless samurai), strolls into what seems to be a deserted town. Sanjuro, seeking to both rid the town of the gangs and earn a profit at the same time, offers up his services as a yojimbo (bodyguard). Moreover, Kurosawa had successfully turned what seems like an all Japanese based film into a westernised phenomenon and a source of inspiration to other major films such as Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964) starring Clint Eastwood. In this paper, I will be looking at the initial responses that the visuals in “Yojimbo” had received over the past 50 years or so since its release and also understand whether or not reading of the film had shifted over time, and of course, whether or not Kurosawa benefited from the making of Yojimbo. [Smoliak, 2009]
In 1961, ‘Yojimbo’ was Akira Kurosawa’s most popular film at the time. Kurosawa was deliberately combining the samurai story with the Western, so that the wind-swept main street could be in any frontier town, the samurai (Toshiro Mifune) could be a gunslinger, and the local characters could have been lifted from all the extras off a western film in the 60’s. [Ebert, 2005] The films “A Fistful of Dollars (1964)” and “Yojimbo (1961)“ are similar not only in the realm of cinematography, and extra- diegetic sound, but also in the domain of mise-en-scene and movement (a subdomain of mise-en-scene). The western genre had a great influence on Japanese
References: •Smoliak, Kevan. ‘Kurosawa in Review’. http://kurosawainreview.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/yojimbo-1961.html Retrieved on 19th August, 2014. •Ebert, Robert •Miyao, Daisuke. (2013) ‘The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema’. Duke University Press. p.g. 256 •Van der Heide, William •Jarvie Charles, Ian. (2014) ‘Towards a Sociology of the Cinema (ils 92) International Library of Sociology '. Routledge. p.g. 107 •Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro •Galbraith IV, Stuart. The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. New York: Faber and Faber, 2002. •Kurosawa, Akira. ‘Akira Kurosawa: Interviews. Conversations with filmmakers series. University Press of Mississippi, 2008 •Verevis, Consrantine