Film
Yojimbo/Sanjuro: Two Films by Akira Kurosawa (Criterion Collection)
Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and its follow-up Sanjuro have proved to be two of the most iconic and influential samurai films. On the heels of their recent Seven Samurai re-release, Criterion unleashes new, pristine editions of these two—for American audiences—seminal genre classics. From Yojimbo (Bodyguard) emerged Toshiro Mifune’s scruffy, sardonic ronin (masterless samurai). With a hand occasionally reaching out of his haphazardly worn kimono to scratch his grubby beard, Mifune’s first appearance shattered previous conceptions of the nobly composed, well-groomed, effete samurai warrior.

Kurosawa took inspiration from Dashiell Hammet (The Glass Key and Red Harvest), injecting noir elements into a black-humored jidai-geki (period piece). Kurosawa had become so comfortable with the paradigm of the western that he now made John Ford movies better than Ford. Yet in Yojimbo he turned the usually ordered moral universe of the traditional western upside down and in turn, laid the blueprint for Leone’s Fistful of Dollars, (which ignited the spaghetti western boom).
Yojimbo gets off to a rousing start (e.g. an inspired bit of visual metaphor that, without giving it away, sets the stage for all the ensuing violence and chaos). The second half feels less urgent, as it leaves behind the mayhem for a tedious pulp melodrama. Regardless, Yojimbo remains essential viewing for its stylistic innovations and gritty flavor.
Kurosawa loved dialectic structure—Rashomon was his definitive treatise on thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Yojimbo and Sanjuro are both dialectic meditations on class, order and human nature—and in classic Kurosawa efficiency they exist in antithesis to each other, making similar points in dissimilar milieus.
To his stately framing, suggesting an orderly world, Kurosawa introduces anarchic elements. Yojimbo follows rival, lowlife bands of gangsters who ravaged a desolate town, and the ronin who plays one against the other. Mifune’s character smoothly rafts along the anarchy the gangs created with their feuding and restores order. Considering all the bloodshed, order requires a high price.
In Sanjuro our scruffy hero stumbles into a well-to-do Samurai estate—one replete with elegant camellia flowers gently scattered about the otherwise symmetrical palace. Sanjuro, as our hero calls himself, helps a group of young, naive samurai rescue their master, who has been kidnapped by a rival. Sanjuro has given up propriety since he’s well aware that its folly brings only more bloodshed. While the young samurai look down at this unkempt wanderer who eschews samurai decorum, they are helpless without him. What makes this follow-up to Yojimbo both ironic and dialectic is that Sanjuro provides the chaotic element himself. He subverts the hierarchical, orderly Samurai clans, and his subversion seems the only hope of resolving conflict and restoring order. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the villainous foil to Mifune in both films. His presence is as charismatic as Mifune’s, if not quite so idiosyncratic. And wait till you see how they end their rivalry—possibly one of the most explosive film endings ever.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Erin Carlson's I'll Have What She's Having: How Nora Ephron's Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy
By Colin LaidleyDEC 19-JAN 20 | Books
The endless parade of anecdotes is intermittently entertaining and interesting. Ephrons fantasies were painstakingly crafted; Nora had to completely OK every single look, down to the cut of the shoes, Tom Hanks recalls. Stories of deciding on certain minor details like Kathleen Kelleys tousled hair or Harrys chic bohemian loft provide a window into both Ephrons visiontroublingly elitistand her character as a filmmakercollaborative, but self-assured and obdurate. Unfortunately, they do not get the commentary they deserve, and cumulatively these stories amount to neither a portrait of Ephron nor an appraisal of her legacy.

Site and Sound: The Films of Ha Gil-jong
By Jesse CummingDEC 19-JAN 20 | Film
Has work always embodies a prickly relationship to the state and assumed social conventions. (Its worth noting Has lifelong commitment to such agitation, including his participation in the anti-government protests of the 1960 April Revolution, before his turn to filmmaking.) If the filmmakers oeuvre remains thrilling and unique 40 years later it arguably hinges upon such dissidence, complimented by a style which uses western points of referenceparticularly European arthouse onesin service of a distinctly domestic cinema responding to questions concerning South Korean society, politics, and cultural policy.
Communion and Expression: “21st Century Japan: Films from 2001–2020” at Japan Society
By Jaime GrijalbaFEB 2021 | Film
Japan Society and the Agency for Cultural Affairs proposes a perfectly cinephilic survey of the century so far that favors the deep cut over the known masterpiece, with the likes of Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Kore-eda sharing the spotlight with younger filmmakers to forward a Proustian snapshot of the past two decades of Japanese cinema.

Prison Films and the Idea of Two Worlds
By Evelyn EmileJUNE 2019 | Film
On the southwest corner of Washington Square Park, the logic of the carceral state plays out over a game of chess. Nahshon Thomas, an aging black man with thick, plastic-rimmed glasses, invites passers-by to come to the chess table, and a young, white teenager takes up the challenge. The older man sits with steady posturea testament to his confidence and calm focus. He takes a drag from his cigarette as he makes his next move.