Dolores P. Martines, Remaking Kurosawa. Translations and Permutations in World Cinema (Recovered 1) PDF

Remaking Kurosawa
10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

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Remaking Kurosawa
Translations and Permutations in
Global Cinema
D. P. Martinez

REMAKING KUROSAWA
Copyright © D. P. Martinez, 2009.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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ISBN-13: 978–0–312–29358–1
ISBN-10: 0–312–29358–5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martinez, D. P. (Dolores P.), 1957–
Remaking Kurosawa : translations and permutations in global cinema /
by D. P. Martinez.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0–312–29358–5 (alk. paper)
1. Kurosawa, Akira, 1910–1998—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Film
remakes—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN1998.3.K87M37 2009
791.4302⬘33092—dc22 2008039877
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.

Contents
List of Figures vii
A Note on Japanese Usage ix
Acknowledgments xi
Prologue xiii
1 Setting the Scene 1

2 Portrait of an Artist as Filmmaker 19
3 Rashomon: The Problem of Subjectivity 31
4 Remaking Rashomon: From Subjectivity to “the” Truth 43
5 The Battle of the Sexes: Or, the One Scenario when
Subjectivity is Acceptable 65
6 Permutations on the Theme of Murder:
The Search for Solutions 75
7 And on Television . . . 97
A Short Interval: Rashomon and the Desire
Lines of the Imagination 107
8 The Group Western 113
9 The Lone Hero 141
10 Cloning Kurosawa 161
Conclusion: Thinking with Films 173
Notes 183
Bibliography 195
Index 211


Figures
1 Masago Confronts Tajômaru, Rashomon 42
2 Masago Confronts Tajômaru, Misty 42
3 What is Truth? End Shot from Les Girls 72
4 No Welcome in the Village, Seven Samurai 112
5 No Welcome in the Village, The Magnificent Seven 112
6 The Finale to the Robin Hood Act,
Referencing King Arthur, A Bug’s Life 134
7 The Not So Magnificent Seven, Galaxy Quest 139
8 Yojimbo Requests Two Coffins, Yojimbo 146
9 No Name Requests Two Coffins, A Fistful of Dollars 147
10 John Smith Looks into the Funeral Parlor,
Last Man Standing 147
11 Princess Yuki Sleeps, The Hidden Fortress 168
12 Princess Leia Awakes, Star Wars IV 168


A Note on Japanese Usage
The Japanese terms in this book have been Romanized according to the
modified Hepburn system, where long vowels are marked with the
macron ^. I have used English spellings for commonly used Japanese
terms, as well as for the repeated use of film titles. The names of Japanese
actors, writers and others have been written with the surname followed
by the given name, except in the cases of well-known figures such as
Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune, and Takeshi Kitano.


Acknowledgments
The seeds for this book were planted many years ago when I was a stu-
dent at the University of Chicago and a member of the European film
society. As one of the society’s projectionists, I showed anything and
everything that fell into that category. Life became more exciting when
we merged with Doc Films and all “foreign” films became part of my
projecting remit. It was during those years that I rediscovered Akira
Kurosawa, whose films I previously had seen only on television. In 1982
Doc Films held a Kurosawa film festival and I then had the opportunity
to meet Audie Bock and Donald Richie, whose own critical engagement
with the Japanese filmmaker inspired my continued interest. Donald
Richie, over the years, has been a supportive mentor, always making time
to see me when I am in Tokyo.
Nearly two decades later, in 1997, when I was asked to put together a
film course for the new Anthropology of Media Masters degree in my
department (SOAS), I immediately thought of Kurosawa and how I might
approach his work anthropologically. Thus was born Translations and
Permutations, Towards an Anthropology of Film (the final course title
suggested by Ronald Inden in a passing conversation). I taught this course
until 2005 when, after a sabbatical year at the University of Tokyo sup-
ported by the British Academy and Japanese Society for the Promotion of
the Sciences, I was ready to pull together my thinking on the topic,
reworking a draft manuscript I had written in 2003–2004.
My analyses of the films discussed in this book benefited from the
involvement of the many Masters students who took the course over the
years. Their discussions, insights, and original research into films and
filmmakers enhanced my own thinking. I owe an immeasurable debt to
all those students, but it was, oddly enough, some of my non-media stu-
dents who offered very concrete support. Charmaine Chan interviewed
Christopher Doyle for me in Hong Kong; Fumie Nakano photocopied the
Japanese reviews of many films for me in Tokyo; and Silke Niehausman
endlessly discussed translation as a process and concept with me. During
2003–2004, discussions with Donald Richie, and my dear friend Noriyo

xii Acknowledgments
Hayakawa, as well as with any Japanese academic willing to lend an ear

were always fruitful. Mark Nornes also gave me some interesting insights
into translating films when we met in Tokyo in 2004. Critical engage-
ment with seminar audiences in the United Kingdom (SOAS, Oxford and
Nottingham), Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, and New Zealand led me to
further develop my ideas. Along the way, Louella Matsunaga, Hidetaka
Matsunaga, and Yuka Kodama-Pomfret helped double-check crucial
Japanese dialogue.
A long ago summer spent working for Clark Productions preparing
and translating Japanese television programs for transmission on
Channel 4 in the United Kingdom taught me a great deal about the
processes of editing and subtitling. But it is the filmmakers I know well
from my involvement with the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Film
committee who set me on the path to considering how directors look at
film. Over a decade of preselecting films for the RAI Ethnographic film
festival with Peter Getzel, Paul Henley, Michael Yorke, Howard Reid,
Felicia Hughes-Freeland, Tom Sheahan, and Marcus Banks, among oth-
ers, have changed how I look at any film: I now think more about tech-
nologies and techniques. Of course, it is the filmmakers that I know only
through their work to whom I owe the greatest debt, but I must signal in
particular Tom Tykwer and George Lucas, both of whom took the time
to read what I had to say about them. I did contact the other directors
mentioned in these pages, but they showed no interest in responding (or
were puzzled at being contacted by an anthropologist).
I must thank my usual two sounding boards at SOAS: Kit Davis, the
colleague who always asks the right questions, and Stephen Hughes, who
reminds me of what anthropologists have written on film, providing
essential mini-tutorials. The SOAS IT department has cheerfully worked
on solving my problems with visual material; while Jens Franz, anthro-
pologist and media expert extraordinaire, always came to the rescue.
Finally, my deepest gratitude is to my husband, David Gellner, fellow
anthropologist, my toughest critic, and expert proof-reader. This book is
dedicated to him and our three children, Nicolás, Martín, and Sofía,
who along with having to bear Spanish names in England, have also
learned to ask “Now which film does this remind me of?” whenever they
see a movie.

Prologue
Films Are Good to Think (With)
That films are good to think with has not escaped many modern cultural
theorists. Scholars as diverse as literary critics, Marxist writers, social
geographers, philosophers, sociologists, and feminists—often overlap-
ping categories—have all used a film or discussed film genres in order to
illustrate the ways in which cinema can reveal aspects of lived reality.
Films have been used to discuss the way in which all narratives are polit-
ical (Jameson 1992, 2006), to illustrate the condition of postmodernity
(Harvey 1990), to reveal the human unconscious (Deleuze 2005a,
2005b; Žižek 1991, 2001), or to raise issues about the continued subju-
gation and future potential of women (Braidotti and Lykke 1996;
Haraway 1991). Rare amongst the ranks of serious thinkers who have
tackled the subject of films as good to think (with) have been social
anthropologists. If anything, when anthropologists have studied film,
they have tended to think “around” the subject, looking at the processes
of filmmaking (Powdermaker 1950), social contexts (Varzi 2006), audi-
ence reactions (Caton 1999), or the experience of seeing a film (cf. Wilkes
and Askew 2002, for examples of all these approaches)—they have not
used films to think about broader issues to be found within the disci-
pline of social anthropology. This book, however, is an anthropological
attempt to think with films about globalization.
The core of this book is an analysis of four of Akira Kurosawa’s1 films
that have been remade, in most cases more than once, and mainly by
non-Japanese directors. Film remakes are a subject even less associated
with the discipline of social anthropology than straightforward film
analyses; however, since they raise issues of cultural context, transcul-
tural translation, and the knotty problem of narrative creativity, remakes
should be seen to lie firmly within anthropology’s remit. In order to make
this argument, I will be examining issues to do with narratives as they
move around the globe and, while written from an anthropological point

xiv Prologue
of view, I also will deal with the issues that are deemed important to
scholars from both film and Japanese studies.
So what does anthropology bring to an analysis of films and global-
ization? Encroaching on the domain of film studies, which is highly reli-
ant on textual analysis, would seem to land the anthropologist firmly in
territory that has been well mined by others. Do we need to add an
anthropological approach to film studies? This is a fair question to ask
of a discipline that has built its methods on the foundations of field-
work, participant observation, and comparison, that are normally done
in small-scale societies. We could also ask: how can something as large
as “the global” be the subject of a single study? Moreover, the most
interesting aspect of the global for anthropologists has been how to
locate it within the local (Lal 2002) or how to trace its effects through
diasporas, as much current research on Bollywood is aiming to do.
However this is not a book based on diaspora as global flow, local resis-
tance or acculturation (Tobin 1992), frictions (Tsing 2005) or accom-
modations, nor is it based on audience studies, although I do talk about
and have talked to a fairly small group of people who can be said to con-
stitute an audience; that is, I have talked to filmmakers about their
responses to seeing a film. What I am interested in is the fact that a film-
maker’s response to seeing a film is often to make their own film. It is
striking that interviews with or biographies about any contemporary
filmmaker will mention some film-viewing experience that propelled
them toward becoming a director.
It is this impulse to make a film, inspired by watching films, which is
part of what this book is about. In short, I want to explore, in a Lévi-
Straussian sense, how “films are good to think (with),” in the first
instance for filmmakers and, in the second, for anthropologists. For
Lévi-Strauss (1962) it was “animals” that were good to think, in relation
particularly to totems and taboos, in order for us to understand how
distinguishing between animals provides “a natural model of differenti-
ation for human beings to create differences among themselves” (Tambiah
1985:207). I would like, in a structural inversion, to argue that films,
especially remade films, are good to think with in order to understand
the ways in which humans ignore perceived differences and assume the
possibility of similarity across cultures. When directors decide to remake
a foreign film they may be attempting to erase difference, to restore the
film to “the seamlessness of a coherent, intact, and consumable image
(and sound)” (Wills 1998:150), but they do this assuming that something
about the film, generally its story, will appeal to a new audience. These
assumptions about translatability, the possibility of understanding, the
making of conceptual bridges to bring the translation about, are crucial
to understanding this book (Ricoeur 2006:4).

Prologue xv
My approach also owes something to Deleuze’s point that
a theory of cinema is not “about” cinema, but about the concepts that
cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts
corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general
having no privilege over others, any more than one object has over
others. (2005b:268)
Within this book I want to expand this point to include the idea that
what people make of films—as opposed to specialists’ theorizing—is a
subject in and of itself. At one level, the way in which watching the films
of others inspires a new film is easy enough to trace through the process
of translation, remaking and referencing (that is alluding to, paying hom-
age, parodying, adopting visual techniques, or even resisting), and this
book will follow some examples of this for selected Kurosawa films. At
another level, it is the problem of meaning—that is, what does it mean
that films seem to flow around the world endlessly being made, watched,
remade, and acting as sources of inspiration—that lies at the core of my
analysis. While it is correct to say that anthropology is the study of
human beings, their activities and societies, we social anthropologists
make not only human bodies and societies our core subject, but also, in
the most complex of ways, it is the human mind that interests us.
Anthropologists study the ways in which human beings construct a
sense of relatedness out of biological functions, build economies on ide-
ologies, make the abstract into something concrete, give meaning to sym-
bols, and tell stories that reveal how we think. As postmodernists, we
often forget or chose to ignore Lévi-Strauss’ (1963) work in this last area
because, in the end, his analyses of myth always ended as a discussion of
binary oppositions; yet it was his combination of Freudian analysis and
deconstruction that laid the foundations of much of post-1960s literary
and film analyses. Jameson (1992), in his attempt to understand mass
culture as reiteration, how all art has become commodity, falls back on
Freud as well in order to understand the “desire” to repeat that seems
central to modernity. It seems that if anthropologists want to reclaim
their position as students of the human imagination—that creativity that
makes humans human, the ability to see and make difference where, bio-
logically, there is a large tendency to genetic similarity—we need to
reclaim some of these techniques and not be afraid of the paths they lead
us down. Thus the short answer to the question “What is this book
about?” is: The human imagination on a global level.
As Crapanzano notes: “Although anthropologists have treated the
imagination in one manner or another in much of what they have writ-
ten, they have done so largely by indirection” (2004:15). It could be

xvi Prologue
argued that it is by indirection only that we can study the human imagi-
nation—“imagination” tends to exist inside individuals and normally we
can only trace it through its products. To study it globally adds to the
conceptual difficulties. For example, a recent anthropological attempt at
charting the global imagination, Allison’s Millennial Monsters (2006),
argues that the world’s soft power center has shifted from the United
States to Japan. Allison makes her argument by tracing the global imag-
ination through its material manifestations, the toys and games from
Japan that now are marketed throughout the world, but with a key focus
on the US-Japan relationship, ignoring much of the globe in her “global.”
This fusion of material culture with an acknowledgment of global econ-
omy (the subject of another recent attempt to look at Japan and global
flows by Bestor 2004) owes much to Appadurai’s (1996) seminal article
“Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” and this
deserves some discussion here.
Appadurai argues that we exist in an era of disjunctures, which, if we
examine the areas that he labels “scapes”—ethnoscapes, mediascapes,
technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes—we can see how global cul-
ture is neither worldwide nor a single culture.2 What I find interesting
about his various ‘scapes is how each is implicated in the other: films,
part of his mediascapes, for example, cannot be understood as objects
without also considering the financial, ideological, technological, and
cultural aspects involved. We may chose to ignore the way money was
raised to make the film (although is becoming more and more important
for some), 3 but film criticism and analysis, in the end, focus on the ideo-
logical, cultural/historical and even the technological. By examining how
all the various ‘scapes come together, we also get the sense of how some-
thing like a global culture and a global imagination might exist not as
centers or separate poles that represent monolithic hegemonies, but as
continuous processes that are constantly changing: last year Pokémon
(1999), today Pirates of the Caribbean (2003, 2006, 2007), tomorrow
Harry Potter (2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007), next week a Simpson’s
episode or Bollywood production that fuses elements of all three. Thus
the concepts of soft or hard power seem irrelevant to me, since the com-
plexities of the relationships between culture, technology, politics, ideol-
ogies, and economics are too intricate to be reduced to these terms.
Napier, in a recent analysis of the history of Western artists’ engagement
with Japan, takes a similar stance (2007:8, 18–19). In short, we should
not assume that global culture is static, singular, or firmly centered in
one place, and yet, many writers on the topic of globalization begin pre-
cisely from this premise or provide an analysis that looks at two poles on
a continuum as does Allison. For anthropologists such an approach
comes from their practice of documenting the experiences of others

Prologue xvii
through participant observation, the experience of globalization may feel

as if it is singular, hegemonic, and occurring at the cost of local culture
and identity and it is only fair to analyze this experience. However, in
order to provide a more nuanced analysis in this book, I look at the pro-
cess by beginning with Kurosawa’s work rather than vice versa and
including non-Hollywood films.
In chapter one, I begin by assuming that the film business is global,
but the caveat is, of course, that some countries’ film industries are more
global than others. Outside of the United States and Europe, Japanese
and, more recently, Chinese films enjoy the industry’s recognition while
Korea, Iran, Mexico, Brazil, and Thailand are not far behind. Canadian
films are often seen as just an inexpensive way to make a Hollywood
film. India’s films are famous for being spectacles of a postmodern sort,
but do not necessarily enjoy completely global success, while some coun-
tries have only sporadic recognition: Egypt, Taiwan, Vietnam, or Turkey
fall into this category. Aside from hardcore film buffs, immigrant com-
munities, and cultural studies experts, global recognition has escaped
Indonesian, Nigerian, or Ghanaian films (and yet Africa hosts one of the
largest film festivals in the world, FESPACO). The global, as Hannerz
(1992), amongst others, would have it, always appears to fracture along
lines of politics, economics, and more ephemerally, because of what I
would call “perceived cultural similarity.” Perceived cultural similarity
can be explained through a simple example: when in 1983 I asked
Japanese friends why I had never heard of the hugely popular Jackie Chan
before, I was told that since Hong Kong was an East Asian society, Chan’s
films translated more readily for Japanese audiences than they did for
Westerners, so it was obvious that he would be well known only in East
Asia. While time has knocked that theory a bit, the fact remains that
Jackie Chan’s Hollywood films never wowed audiences in the West as
much as his early Hong Kong films did audiences in the East. The global
is relative and it is on this premise that much of current anthropological
theory rests.
And yet . . .
There are always subcultures and through their fandoms there is a
seepage, a process of osmosis, that brings the foreign film into main-
stream culture: the film festivals in the United Kingdom or United States
that show African or East Asian or Middle Eastern films; the martial arts
fans who know all the new stars before they have a crossover hit in the
West; the shops that specialize in films for immigrant communities that
might be visited by others; the intelligentsia who prefer “foreign films”;
the Internet communities that download and share films across the globe;
and, most importantly for my purposes, filmmakers, producers, schol-
ars, and critics who watch everything they can get their hands on. Slowly,

xviii Prologue
then, some films—in the past, mainly the foreign “art” film, more
recently, the horror film—cross over into the mainstream. Thus while
Appadurai wants anthropologists to think about the disjunctures that
make the global, the differences that make poverty, reinforce national
identities and religious affiliation while fuelling adherence to the local,
what interests me about the creative aspect of films/narratives that travel
is how they bridge disjunctures. We can think of this seepage, the cross-
over, as an example of “desire lines”—the lines made by humans as they
traverse the countryside, connecting points outside of established paths
because that is the way people want to travel.
Desire as an expression of human imagination, rather than something
that must be managed or repressed, is also important in understanding
how narratives are made, and how they make and unmake human con-
nectiveness. Why do we tell stories? It is useful to think here of the place
narrative holds in the study of human beings. For scientists such as
Dennett (2004), it is the human ability to narrate that creates human
consciousness, it is what makes us human and unlike our fellow pri-
mates. For psychologists, such as Bruner,4 narratives are a way of know-
ing the world and he divides the forms of narrative into two: that of
“action” and that of “consciousness” (1986:14); or the rational/scientific
and the imaginative that includes fiction. Each form makes different sorts
of knowledge: both make our social realities. It is precisely here that sci-
ence, psychology, literary, and film analyses venture into the terrain of
anthropology, which is concerned with how human societies make their
own realities. The modern world of filmmaking is an important part of
this and yet, as I have noted, we anthropologists have—by and large—
ignored films and the stories they tell.
I also am curious about how it is that the stories that human beings tell
become narratives that not only make social reality, but also form bridges
across societies, moving in time and space. The post-1980s anthropolog-
ical notion that anthropology should avoid universalizing or generalizing
(Marcus and Fischer 1986), that it should eschew grand theory-making
strikes me as too parochial in the face of empirical evidence that human
beings spend a great deal of time essentializing and generalizing; commu-
nicating despite the “impossibility” of translation (cf. Ricoeur 2004),
while continuing to make borders, to create barriers that insist on differ-
ence. I do not agree with Iwabuchi (2002), for example, who argues that
a local media becomes global only if it is “odorless,” that is, if it has so
few discernable foreign elements in it that it can travel because it fits into
what is a homogenized, and thus by implication, second-rate, global cul-
ture. I would rather argue the converse: that if we look carefully at what
looks like a homogenized narrative, we will find points being made about
cultural and social similarities that should give us pause to think; that if

Prologue xix
we examine in detail, as this book does, the narratives that both build
bridges and then proceed to burn them while retaining some memory of
the connection, we will understand something about human nature.
It was Simmel, prescient in so many ways, who had some interesting
observations to make on these processes in his “Bridge and Door”:
Because the human being is the connecting creature who must always
separate and cannot connect without separating . . . and the human
being is likewise the bordering creature who has no border. The enclo-
sure of his or her domestic being by the door means, to be sure, that
they have separated out a piece from the uninterrupted unity of natural
being. But just as the formless limitation takes on a shape, its limited-
ness finds its significance and dignity only in that which the mobility
of the door illustrates: in the possibility at any moment of stepping out
of this limitation into freedom. (1997:174)
This book also attempts to trace the tension between making connec-
tions, seeing similarity, and then asserting difference. It is, in itself, an
effort to build a bridge out of diverse materials: anthropology, film stud-
ies, postmodern theory, and my understanding of Japanese society. It
traces, from the “authentic” remake through to the way-out-there-
permutations, the desire lines of the human imagination. I have had to set
some limits to its scope, but even a focus on four films has led me down
interesting paths. To begin with, in chapter one, I want to make some
more detailed points about films and narratives in the global before
examining some aspects of Kurosawa’s life and work in chapter two.
Chapter three begins the analysis of Rashomon (Rashômon, 1950), not
only the first film to bring the Japanese director to Western attention, but
also a film that raises many interesting issues in relation to subjectivity,
social reality, and a postmodern take on “the” truth. Chapters eight to
ten look at Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954), Yojimbo
(Yôjinbo, 1961), and Hidden Fortress (Kakushi-toride no san-akunin,
1958), picking up and elaborating on various aspects of the analysis
developed in relation to Rashomon, concluding in a discussion of the
ways in which humans come to know and understand their world.


1
Setting the Scene
In order to write scripts, you must first study

The great novels and dramas of the world. You
must consider why they are great. Where does
the emotion come from that you feel as you read
them? . . . You must also see the great films. You
must read the great screenplays and study the film
theories of the great directors. If your goal is to
become a film director, you must master
screenwriting.
—Kurosawa 1982:193
The course on which this book is based began with a simple premise:
that Japan, so often called a nation of copiers, was also a nation cop-
ied from and that one of the best examples of this was the way in
which the films of Akira Kurosawa had influenced non-Japanese
filmmakers. As an anthropologist, I soon realized that such a simple
thesis required discussion of a much more complex series of concep-
tual issues. First, copying in the eras of modernity and postmodernity
has been considered to be an inferior art, the poor man’s craft next to
the original artist’s creativity. That the film industry has long remade
films is seen as an indication of the fact that it is popular culture
and opposed to the realm of high art. This is certainly one of the
lines offered by the adherents of the Frankfurt school such as Adorno
(1991) when considering popular culture.
This negative view of the copying relies on a misreading of
Benjamin’s seminal essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical

2 Remaking Kurosawa
reproduction” (1973). A careful reading of the essay reveals that

Benjamin saw film as having the power to reach into the viewer, like
a surgeon, and my reading of this is that films, through such incor-
porations, acquire different meanings both between the filmmaker
and audience as well as for different members of the audience. Films
are not straightforward bearers of dominant ideologies that brain-
wash the audiences, but are something else altogether. They are, in
Bakhtin’s (1981) terms, dialogic: they engage us in conversations. For
most members of the audience, the dialogue is between them and
friends: “What did you think of the film?” In this age of easy Internet
access, some audience members go online in order to discuss, debate,
critique, ask questions, provide answers, and ponder the meaning of
films they have just watched or have become obsessed with. For other
audience members, the dialogue is a conversation with the medium
itself that fuels their own creativity. To “copy” a film then, reveals
the impulse this process seems to spark in some people: the desire
to somehow make art of one’s own. Thus, in looking at remakes of
Kurosawa’s films I have had to consider the issue of copying, and
have had to look at the process of transformation that is involved
in remaking as well. I will be discussing these issues in detail as we
consider the films.
Kurosawa’s work also raises a second issue: that of cultural trans-
lation. It is currently assumed that translating stories, customs, ideas,
attitudes, religions—anything—is problematic. As mentioned in the
prologue, the anthropologist Appadurai (1996) argues that we exist
in an era of disjunctures, which, if we examine the areas that he labels
‘scapes, we can see how global culture can never be a single culture,
but always produces local responses. The implications of these dis-
junctures are various: the realization that the future might exist
elsewhere—if you are poor in Africa, for example—; the slipperiness
of identity for migrants; and the relegation of certain parts of the
world to theme park status, quaint places for the wealthier Northern
Hemisphere tourist to visit. The world might be full of commodities
we can buy from just about everywhere, but that does not mean we
understand anything about the people who produce them.
I also noted in the prologue that I think it important to consider
the way in which disjunctures are constantly being bridged by human
activity. We need to think about the way in which people use slipper-
iness (Carrithers 1992) to communicate or construct new identities
and how these processes seem to inspire creativity. What theorists
who follow Appadurai do not consider is the way in which humans

Setting the Scene 3
make “bridges” that become conceptual “places”—locations from

which something new can be generated.1 In this book I want to con-
sider how it is that the film industry in general and films in particular
do this.
Films may well be mere representations of reality, shadows on a
screen, but they have a material existence; they are made, bought,
sold, consumed, regurgitated, and so on, and all by real people. As
Jameson argues, this “materialisation” is “woefully misunderstood by
much contemporary Marxist theory,” which negatively relates materi-
ality to the “false problem of value” (italics in the original, 1992:16).
What really matters is how “materialization is a key structural fea-
ture of both modernism and mass culture” (Jameson 1992:17). A sec-
ond point then is that this concern with the materiality of moving
images—illusions made concrete by their continued existence both
in the popular imagination and in the work of filmmakers—should
be of greater interest to anthropologists especially. I have discussed
elsewhere (Martinez 1998), how I think that the mass media should
be incorporated into anthropology and will only briefly restate my
position here in relation to films: it is precisely because films are open
to both symbolic analysis and concrete contextualizing that they
constitute the stuff of anthropology. To make the point clear, before
examining the case of Kurosawa’s films, I need to discuss some basic
issues to do with the film industry as global, the identity of artists as
local, the question of retelling stories, and the problems inherent in
translation.
The Local and the Global

In the early twentieth century, the film industry became global long
before globalization became a buzzword. While the first fifty years
of the twentieth century saw the world divided into economic and
cultural blocs—the British Empire, German—dominated middle
Europe, the French Empire, the Hispanic world, the growing imperi-
alism of the USSR, East Asia and, on the margins, the Americans—
almost from the moment movies began to be made, silent, and later
sound, films crossed borders and traveled to wherever it was possible
to set up a screen and crank a projector.2 It may have well been people
in Hollywood who immediately recognized the implications of this:
cinema was, after all, an immigrant business in the United States.
So while in France, Japan, Shanghai, Bengal, Bombay, the United
Kingdom—to name just a few places where local filmmaking has

4 Remaking Kurosawa
deep roots—directors, technicians, and actors were quickly forming

film companies and making movies, in Hollywood there was already
a global focus. Hollywood producers were asking not just where
their films could be marketed, but from where would they get their
next great director, cinematographer, or new star. From the 1920s
onward, like some assembly line, the studio system remade already
successful European films, hired and fired talented European direc-
tors, imported, put on a diet, and remade the great European stars.
Occasionally, a Latin American or even Japanese actor3 made a career
in Hollywood, but the artistic focus was on Europe, while the busi-
ness focus was on the rest of the world.
By the end of the Second World War, Hollywood was, and was rec-
ognized as, the center of the film world, and thus was challenged, in
some places, as a far too dominant cultural force. France, for exam-
ple, has long fought a battle against “the American film,”4 supporting
local filmmaking both financially and by legal measures, limiting the
number of “foreign” films that can be shown at any given time. It was
from a surprising place, however, that Hollywood’s dominance was
challenged, if only in a small way, in 1951—Japan.
When Kurosawa’s Rashomon (Rashômon) won the Golden Lion
Award at the Venice Film Festival, the reactions were various: not
really a good film, yes a surprisingly great film, well, a confusing
film, and so on. Harrington (1987:141) noted at the time that the
. . . success of Rashomon in the United States is most interesting, for

it reveals, to one who knows how to read between the lines of praise, a
reluctant acceptance of its obvious excellence.
Snobbery will always lead Americans to admire the qualities of
a French, English, even Swedish film. But when an Oriental country
like Japan, whose customs often shock Americans (as primitive and
backward), makes a film which technically and artistically surpasses
the best Hollywood productions, then the amazed American critics
feel uneasy and seek facile explanations based on external influences.
(italics in original)
Not only was the Japanese film a revelation, but its director was
happy where he was. Not for him the migration to Hollywood to be
incorporated into the already changing studio system. His one invi-
tation to make a film there (Tora! Tora! Tora! 1968) proved to be a
disaster because Kurosawa had developed his methods and cultivated
his team very much at home. Moreover, his international fame gave
him the power to make in Japan, for almost a decade, the sorts of

Setting the Scene 5
films he wanted to make. So like Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, or many

of the French auteurs, Kurosawa’s incorporation into the global busi-
ness of Hollywood was piecemeal—distribution contracts, copyright-
approved remakes of his films, and, almost from the beginning, the
incorporation of his visual style by up-and-coming filmmakers.
Since the 1960s, the dismantling of the studio system has forced
Hollywood to become global in a sense that makes it necessary to
question the supposed cultural imperialism of the American film:
few movies seem to make it into the marketplace without being glob-
ally produced—financially, technically, or in terms of human input.
An “American” film might be made in Malta and the Yucatan; have
its special effects done in the United Kingdom or Czech Republic;
be produced by United States, European, and Chinese backers; be
based on a Greek epic and be made by an German director work-
ing with an Italian cameraman; might well star any number of
actors who are not U.S. citizens; and come out of a studio actually
owned by a Japanese corporation. The business machine for get-
ting these films out and around the world appears to threaten the
smaller industries that still operate more or less locally and “the”
Hollywood film has come to be seen as a Godzilla-like mass medium
that squashes all its competitors. The current cultural studies inter-
est in vibrant local cinemas that appear to subvert the hegemony of
the Hollywood product often ignores the fact that local cinema is
invariably locked into a love/hate relationship with Hollywood, as
well as being economically dependent on the big companies should
they want global distribution. Local cinemas want to reject, satirize,
remake, or parody the dominant style of Hollywood, and without
this Other to work against, they could not develop their own iden-
tity. Moreover, it is the constant incorporation of other cinemas,
other visions, other talents that makes Hollywood, whatever that
may now mean, continually successful. Neither the global nor the
local could exist as distinct cinemas without the presence of the
other. In short, the local and the global cinemas of today constitute
each other. There are those who might point to the hermeneutic
films of the old USSR or China before the 1990s as contravening
the assertion that the local and global constitute each other, but
even the ideological rejection of “the American film” (cf. Oshima
1992) points to the way in which the dominant Hollywood film
could be an absent presence. This process is one we do not yet well
understand, although by using the example of Kurosawa I hope to
unravel/reveal several aspects of it.

6 Remaking Kurosawa
Global Citizens or Cosmopolitanism

Kurosawa is not the only director to occupy a place of importance in
the history of film—a book about remakes, translation, and global
processes could be written about the careers of Antonioni, Bergman,
Hitchcock, Truffaut, Eisenstein, Lang, Buñuel, or Fellini to name a
few. Like Kurosawa, these are all “foreign” filmmakers who gener-
ally stayed at home and not only directed, but often wrote their own
film scripts, frequently worked with the same film-crews and had
strong relationships with particular actors. Aside from the fact that
I, as a Japan specialist, have long been interested in him, the focus
on Kurosawa is justified by noting that we cannot write about his
career without taking into account his position in a postwar, postin-
dustrial, late capitalist setting—a setting that presumes the existence
of global processes and networks (cf. Cazdyn 2003). As Kurosawa
himself pointed out, in the quotation above, even to want to be a film
director means to immerse oneself in the literature and films of the
world as well as in one’s own culture. A great film director has to
be a citizen of the world. This statement implies that the culturally
bound filmmaker will never create memorable works, a point that
could be debated. It is more important to note that filmmakers learn
from many sources and try to do something of their own with this
knowledge. The use of knowledge in this way has led me to reformu-
late the term “knowledge capital.” Generally used in business, knowl-
edge capital can be defined as “knowledge that a company possesses
and can put to profitable use” (http://dictionary.bnet.com/definition/
knowledge+capital.html). In relation to filmmakers I would define
knowledge capital as “knowledge that an artist possesses and that
can be put to profitable use in their own work.” Of course, the use
of knowledge capital leads to profits of other sorts, but I want to
distinguish it from cultural capital, which relies on the concepts of
value- and status-making within social networks. Knowledge capital
is not unrelated to cultural, or even social, capital, but as a concept,
it implies conscious agency and action in a way that cultural capital
does not; I will return to this later in the “Interval” section of this
book. A global citizen, or cosmopolitan, then, is someone who can
consciously use their knowledge capital for some sort of profit.
However, in the many Western books about him, it is not Kurosawa’s
ability to succeed in the global that is analyzed; rather it is the prob-
lem of his Japanese identity that is raised, a “problem” in direct con-
trast to how the director was regarded in Japan for many years before

Setting the Scene 7
his death: his work was not, somehow, Japanese enough, it was too
Western. Such pronouncements should be treated with skepticism:
how is this possible and why are such statements most often made
about non-Western, nonwhite artists? Who is it that passes judgment
on identity and in what units is identity measured? If works of art are
in part defined in terms of their ability to transcend the local or indi-
vidual (Heidegger 2001), what do such pronouncements mean? By the
end of this book I will attempt, in part, to answer this question and in
order to do so, will make use of anthropological theory.
I am not just making an argument about identity however. I will
show how other film directors, those in Hollywood and Europe, have
agreed with Kurosawa on the need to study other literatures and
other films, in fact, learning from the work of Kurosawa himself. In
order to do this, these directors have assumed an understanding of
the Japanese filmmaker and, understanding him, presumed to either
translate or rework him. I choose my words carefully here. Not only
have the films of Kurosawa been remade, but also his films scripts
have been used to make new films based on his screenplays (Last Man
Standing, 1997). Moreover, in assuming that something of the origi-
nal was understood, the many directors I will consider in the follow-
ing chapters had to be comfortable with the idea that they had some
sort of access to the meaning of the Kurosawa original. Something
about the film, visually and/or narrative, was seen to be translatable.
Even when producing a permutation—a work inspired by a Kurosawa
film—the allusion to the original is assumed to be understandable
by the audience. How is it possible for non-Japanese people, non-
Japanese speakers to assume this? What is at stake here?
The last question leads to a more complex answer than we might
expect. For the issue it raises is the post-1970s construction of a
Japanese national identity that posits its Oriental impenetrability to
the outsider, most specifically the Western outsider. Even more specif-
ically to a North American outsider. The complexity of this national
construction is worth considering because its existence is not due
solely to the fact of an Orientalist discourse, but also to a Japanese
response to that discourse (cf. Carrier 1995). As Revell (1997) has
noted, it is perhaps an irony that in constructing its Japan Inc. iden-
tity, national leaders have incorporated precisely the stereotype that
Said (1995) notes constitutes Orientalism at its worst: the inscrutable
Oriental. Patrick Smith (1998) firmly attributes the origins of this
particular construction to U.S. anthropologists and historians study-
ing Japan during and after the war—and Revell labels the image as

8 Remaking Kurosawa
“made in the USA.” Yet details of this image—the total otherness of

someone else’s society when compared with one’s own—are as old as
the hills, as Herodotus’ description of the Egyptians, written in the
fifth century before the birth of Christ, clearly shows. Given the ideo-
logical insistence of the nation-state that each state be different from
all other states (both unique and yet, because of its nation-statehood,
like everywhere else), it is no insidious plot that the creators of
Japanese identity are involved in. Or, a plot no more insidious than
that of other nation-states.
Making Identity
But who, we might ask, are the creators of these national identities?
Although the initial creators of national feeling are activists and intel-
lectuals, by the time a state is established the most obvious culprits are
politicians. In creating a nation-state, a particularly modern form of
the state in which all the citizens are bound together by the concept of
belonging to the land, cooperating for the sake of the nation, it is the
leaders of the nation who most benefit from such identity construc-
tion: “We belong to this land, these islands, and are more like each
other than we are like anyone else; therefore we will fight to the death
to protect it. We will work like demons to keep the state competitive
in a global economy.” This particular form of identity construction,
Anderson (1991) argues, was made possible by the advent of the mass
media. Without printing, and more recently, radio, film, and televi-
sion, it would not have been possible to convince millions of people
that they were more like each other than different. At the core of this,
obviously, are national education systems that attempt to make sure
that nearly everyone in the state speaks, reads, and writes the same
language while believing that they share the same history.5 Implicated
in the process, as Yoshino (1992) argues, are the ideologues, nation-
alist historians, folklorists, and intellectual elites of all sorts who con-
tinue to produce learned tomes on the subject. Yet, as Hobsbawm
and Ranger (1983) note, their work does not necessarily require the
wholesale “invention” of traditions—the creation of a unitary state
culture can only work if some part of these traditions are seen to
have their roots in the actual historical past. National myths require
a sense of antiquity to work—it is not the reality of the age of these
myths that we should question, but rather whether they had even been
important for so many people, or important at all, before the rise of
the nation-state. In Japan, for example, it is the elite practices of the

Setting the Scene 9
aristocrats (flower arranging, tea ceremony, calligraphy, to name a

few), combined with the folktales of one particular region6 that form
a large part of the modern identity of most Japanese.
Through their involvement in the mass business of the media, art-
ists are also prime suspects as the adherents of the Frankfurt School
would have it. Artists assume they speak to an audience who share a
language, an identity and an understanding of culture; and by assum-
ing it, they perpetuate the myth. The mass media tends to take indi-
vidual experience and present it so that it somehow represents all of
us. While anthropology is veering away from saying “the” Japanese
this or that, a Japanese novel assumes that native readers will under-
stand what may well be, in the story, a fairly singular experience. For
Bakhtin (1981) the ability of the novel and its author to do this lies
in the fact that the novel as a modern genre represents a multitude
of voices and this heteroglossia allows for individual interpretation.
Novels become dialogic both within the text and between the text
and the diverse readers. I have argued that if we follow Benjamin on
film and read him carefully, we can assume a similar possibility for
cinema; it reaches into each person and thus is internalized: it can
mean different things to different people. In Bakhtin’s terms again,
we can say that film is dialogic as well. Perhaps nothing speaks to this
possibility as powerfully as the existence of fan websites that debate
the merits and/or faults and interpretations of certain films.
Paradoxically, particularly during eras of censorship such as Postwar
Occupied Japan (1946–1952), or since the 1970s for Hollywood
(where films have to make money), films also can be rigorously con-
structed to conform to current dominant models and ideologies.7 It
is this paradox—the conformity to dominant models, which coexists
alongside multiple readings, that allows for the possibility of transla-
tion—this is what I wish to examine in detail in relation to film. Once
I have done this, we need also to consider the fact that “great” narra-
tive art (novels and films in the main) also transcends the borders its
author may have taken for granted.
The Paradox of Shared Meaning

How can the mass media both represent and subvert a dominant ide-
ology? I think that a fruitful way to approach this is to define ideology
in terms of myth (Martinez 1992). Myths, tales of origin that offer
social charters, always offer us at least two versions of the world: that
of the deities, or fantastical creatures, which coexists with the much

10 Remaking Kurosawa
more mundane human realm.8 By the very positing of these realms,

overlapping rather than separate, myth allows for the possibility of
the existence of more than one reality. So do, ironically enough, ide-
ologies; by positing one dominant view of the world, they presume
the existence of other views, other realities, that must be subjugated—
why articulate the dominant ideology in school textbooks, newspa-
pers, or other mass media if it is unquestionably shared? It is precisely
because other voices continue to exist that ideology has to be reiter-
ated in an attempt to maintain its hegemony. We might also argue
that by attempting to drown out these other voices, the dominant ide-
ology can make the opposition somehow attractive and interestingly
seductive. The other realms, other views, become both demonized
and romanticized as Others always seem to be. In Freudian terms,
we might say that they become fetishized: think of the Soviet under-
ground value placed on blue jeans, for example, while the State con-
demned the very values that blue jeans, post-1960s, represented.
By this inclusion of the Other through implication, dominant ide-
ologies do not create myths so much as become myths. They end by
representing the dominant “reality” as somehow alien, alternative,
dreamlike, a potential of what life might be like; while somewhere, out
there, is another place where things are very different indeed. Thus,
positing that ideology is myth allows us to conceive of ideology as sub-
jective and malleable in a way that other ways of defining it do not.
Novels and films are inherently part of this process. Both seem to
represent and have the possibility of shaping mass culture and yet,
somehow, both are open to interpretations so varied that they are
capable of subverting dominant myths. However, there is a tension
between visual narratives—films—which assume a relationship to
reality, and the written representation that is the novel. Novels also,
of course, have a relationship to reality, but by their very nature rely
on the readers’ imaginations to make the connection between the
everyday and what is found between the pages of the book. Films do
away with this dialogic possibility it would seem. While retaining the
polyphony that Bakhtin found important in the novel, film appears
to subvert dialogic imaginings by the simple fact of being a medium
that we see rather than imagine. The experience, it could be argued,
is more immediate (cf. Warshow 2002). This is certainly the issue at
stake when discussing violence in film—the idea that seeing violence
blurs the lines between what is imagined on the screen and everyday
life, leading to a growing familiarity with violence, making it more
possible for us to be violent (cf. Prince 2000).

Setting the Scene 11
As an anthropologist I find such arguments both culturally bound

and historically blind. Many researchers admit that the same films do
not produce the same violent response in viewers outside the country
mostly concerned with this issue, the United States (Berkowitz 2000),
and all researchers ignore the fact that less than a century ago most
humans in Western societies were familiar with violence at a very real
level in everyday life. Moreover, many people continue to live in soci-
eties where ethnic, civil, and family based acts of violence occur with
daily regularity. Thus the relationship between what we see in films
and what we do is mediated in a variety of ways (our society, our fam-
ily, our individual selves), making it firmly, in my opinion, dialogic.
There is a Japanese concept, mitate (Yamaguchi 1991), which can
help make sense of this process: mitate not only means to look at, but
to look at critically. Yamaguchi applies the term to the offerings pre-
sented to the Japanese deities: as made objects they should possess the
quality of being look-at-able and should imply a relationship to reality.
This would seem to sum up films also and what we do as audiences
involves mitate. Rare is the person who sees a film and does not form
an opinion about it.9 Let us take, for example, Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (Siegal 1956). For some reviewers it was a clear morality
tale about the horrors of communism with its insistence on individ-
ual conformity. For others, it was a very post-McCarthy tale that
warned of the unthinking conformity of individuals within the U.S.
anticommunist movement. It equated majority culture, not necessar-
ily communism, with contagion and personal subjugation. It was this
latter possibility that led to its remake by Philip Kaufman in 1978, as
well as a more recent 2007 version The Invasion (Hirschbiegel) with
its post-9/11 themes. Thus, by being open to viewers’ varying inter-
pretations, films not only succeed commercially, appealing broadly
to different groups, but involve their viewers in conversations about
the story. These conversations, to repeat, are precisely the source of
the impulse to remake, an attempt for the new author or director to
create their vision or version of the story. It is not just that new times
require new versions—an important point about historical and cul-
tural context—but that the conversation a film director, for example,
has with the story requires the remake.
To make the point clear, let us consider a story that might appear
to have nothing to do with the work of Akira Kurosawa: Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1994). The vampire myth underpins Stoker’s novel
and elements of this myth have been elaborated in countless vampire
films—a huge global genre that includes more than 300 versions of

the idea that there exist beings that exist by feeding on human blood.
The novel itself has generated various versions on stage and screen,
most recently in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Why retell
this story so many times? The impulse to retell these myths can be
traced back to the nineteenth century and Stoker’s novel, but why?
One possible answer is that the novel is clearly, in Bakhtian terms,
heteroglossic.10 Dracula is not a conventional narrative; it opens with
letters sent by Jonathan Harker from Transylvania to his fiancée,
Mina, in England. The story continues through a ship’s log, newspa-
per reports, more letters, and phonograph diary recordings. Not only
are there many protagonists—Jonathan Harker, Arthur Holmwood,
Lucy Westenra, Quincy Morris, John Seward, Mina Harker, and
Abraham Van Helsing—but also there are multiple points of view.
The supposed subjectivity of the letters sent by different characters
is offset by the assumed objectivity of the mass media in the form of
newspaper reports. The complexity of the novel allows for any num-
ber of readings and assumptions to be made by both critics and audi-
ence, generating ever-new versions of the story.
The original story can be assumed to be about forbidden sexualities;
Dracula also can be read as being about female sexuality and promis-
cuity; or it can be read as a novel that represents a British fear of the
foreign Other. It has been read as a novel about the fear of contagion
and syphilis as well. All these readings would appear to support the
status quo, the dominant ideology of the Victorian Era—sex outside
of marriage is bad, foreigners are suspect, and women are hysterical
creatures. Yet the novel also represents the very fascination with all of
the above: homosexuality, the beauty of youth, the strange foreigner,
and the alluring gamble involved in being sexually active. By its very
representation of all these evil consequences, Stoker makes the reader
curious, aroused perhaps, even, in Baudrillard’s (1990) terms, some-
what enchanted/seduced by possibilities previously only dimly sensed,
but now made concrete in the form of the mass-produced novel.
The film permutations on this theme are almost innumerable: we
have had the clearly foreign Dracula, Bela Lugosi, as well as his silent
film predecessor Nosferatu, who, Michaels (1998) argues, is a rep-
resentation of something fantastical, not present, and, ultimately,
“the phantom of the cinema” (1998:245). By representing what is
not there, cinema makes real that which is not real. It gives voice to
those assumed to be voiceless or presumed not to exist. Both histor-
ical and social change come into play in the many remakes of the
story, yet the theme of giving voice to those presumed not to exist

remains, whether they are deemed to be faithful to the original or

not. And, as more and more Western versions of the genre have piled
up, a very interesting transformation has occurred: the vampire has
moved from being a creature of evil, something to abjure, through to
someone to pity, to someone who is both glamorous and an object of
desire. It could be argued that this potentiality, the seductive game
entered into by the reader and villain, is there in the novel where
the boundary between the vampire and human is ever permeable.
Is not the vampire a being akin to ourselves? If so, how can we not
have some compassion for the creature? By the time we reach Blade
(Norrington 1998), the vampire is all of these: Blade is a human born
black vampire (in a post-1980s version of the story, born HIV pos-
itive we might say), and is a vampire hunter. The comic book hero
as enacted by Wesley Snipes could not be more seductive and hand-
some to look at—but his dedication to the cause of vampire slaying
makes it difficult for him to have romances. The possibility of his
“reverting,” either through lack of the antidote or through a built-up
resistance to it, is always present as a danger that is both real and,
somehow, sexually exciting.
Compare this to the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss
Wedon 1997–2003). First we have the sexually attractive Angel
(David Boreanaz), the Irish vampire with a soul, whose demonic
persona can be turned on and off largely at will. Along with her
“watcher,” Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), he helps the young girl
(Sarah Michelle Gellar) battle other vampires, many of whom appear
as evil and demonic, but who, like the helpless Spike (James Marsters),
also develop as characters. But more interesting is Buffy, a new incar-
nation of the young female “victims” of the original. It is no mere
structuralist inversion that makes her the heroine of these stories—we
could argue that Mina is the real heroine of the original, helping Van
Helsing ultimately to destroy Dracula. But it is also important that as
a young, somewhat brainless high school cheerleader of the 1990s,
she represents a generation seen to be at risk, because of their sexual
activity, their anomie, and the use of drugs. The constant themes of
Buffy seem to be the seductiveness of, at first, the sexually attractive
vampires, and evil; as well as—in later episodes—the addictiveness of
magical power. Thus the original plot, seemingly old-fashioned at the
end of the twentieth century and perhaps alien to the United States,
is fully domesticated in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The process has
been long and complicated, but who could be more American than a
teenaged cheerleader?

The impulse to tell a story of a young, not necessarily special, girl

with the gift of vampire slaying is also worth considering. A feminist
reading of the original novel might be one source for the Buffy ver-
sion, but there is also a tenuous connection, perhaps, to films such
as Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (Kakushi Tori no San Akunin, 1958)
where a willful young princess and her advisor must brave many
dangers to get her to safety. This story was reused by Lucas in Star
Wars, and for his version he revived the tough-talking heroine of the
1940s comedies, but incarnated her in a barely adult body. We could
see Buffy as a permutation on a permutation, a creative riff on a
Kurosawa representation of a female heroine.11
Remaking Kurosawa/On Translation

The films that I aim to discuss in this book are part of a similar pro-
cess as I have described for Dracula: they began as translations, first
in subtitled or dubbed versions that may have been edited for foreign
consumption as well; were then remade, which could be seen to be
a form of translation from Japanese to Western idioms; and finally,
have served as a sort of fount for new stories. To use terms familiar
from literary and film criticism, we can say that we are looking at
some very basic stories—a woman is raped and her husband killed by
a bandit (Rashomon); a village is besieged by bandits and rescued by
hired warriors (Seven Samurai); a lone stranger enters a feuding town
and ends a local conflict (Yojimbo); and an orphaned princess needs
to be got to safety across enemy territory (Hidden Fortress). Then we
can think about their plots—the way in which the elements of the sto-
ries have been organized—and finally the narrative techniques used
by Kurosawa to tell the story, which have first been translated, then
more or less faithfully remade, and finally expropriated, becoming
permutations of the originals. This process is fascinating in and of
itself, a sort of domestication of things Japanese we might say. To take
such a line relies on a definition of stories as 1) basic structures that
are made intelligible through being 2) plotted (e.g., how they are orga-
nized in a sequence) and that are related through 3) narratives, that is,
through an establishment of point of view, or a number of points of
view, using various techniques of storytelling and visual representa-
tion such as flashbacks, editing, and even flash-forwards.12
It could also be argued that there was nothing inherently Japanese
about the original stories and we would then get lost in an argument
about origins or in a discussion—again—of Kurosawa’s identity.

Conversely it could also be argued that the initial impulse to translate,

based on a sense of understanding the original, on its apparent plausi-
bility, makes domestication possible. In the world of film I have noted
that the sense of confidence that some directors have in remaking or
translating has to do with the medium itself: that it is visual and so
is assumed to be easier to read or understand. To make sense of this
process, it is necessary to think about what translation involves.
The “translation” of a foreign film occurs in different ways. First,
we can consider the simplest and most frequent act of translation: the
act of dubbing or subtitling, although even these techniques might
well require reediting for length, and/or censoring. In some societies,
for example, sex scenes might be cut, declarations of love toned down
in the subtitles, political opinions edited out, and so on. When we see
a foreign film with subtitles, we are already seeing another version of
the film, not merely just another copy in a different language. This
copy retains much of the original, I argue, following, again, Benjamin
(1973a), among others, who note that there are two different ways
of translating: the text that is a faithful, word-for-word translation,
and the text that aims for capturing something of the original and
rendering it comprehensible in another language. It could be said
that any translation is of the second sort, for the perfectly translated,
word-for-word text is an impossible ideal: some words and concepts
will just not translate, calling for the negotiation of meanings (cf. Eco
2003). In film, subtitling is often assumed to be more or less faithful,
but anyone fluent in two languages can give examples of how subtitles
can be incorrect: sometimes accidently because it is a poor transla-
tion; and sometimes purposely as a form of censorship.
Despite these problems, films do get subtitled and appreciated,
apparently for what they are about. A large part of this is because,
as I have noted, film is a visual medium. It is possible sometimes to
work out a plot without hearing the dialogue in film. Audiences do
this by deciphering the images, assuming that films are constructed
according to a “simple” grammar of sight as well as of sound. So a
second reason that films travel cross-culturally is that they are seen
to be fundamentally translatable as visual texts, that human beings
share a way of seeing. This notion might well speak to Benjamin’s
point about translatability being a quality that some texts have, and
that this points to a kinship of languages—not an actual etymological
kinship, but to a kinship of meaning and intent. Recall here the exam-
ple I gave in the prologue of perceived cultural similarity. Audiences
imagine that they will understand what they see, because they assume

a human affinity with the world depicted in the film (MacDougall

1998). They take for granted that the experience of being in the world
is somehow shared. Such assumptions are necessary for the construc-
tion of social reality, a point to which I will return later.
Any film that is perceived to be truly foreign, as in the case of
Rashomon for non-Japanese audiences, remains incomprehensible
only for so long as audiences do not worry away at it, asking: “Now
what was that about?” A simple check of IMDB boards demonstrates
that this sort of discussion goes on for almost any film we can think
of. Meaning may be perceived as both elusive and yet somehow possi-
ble to pin down if analyzed in enough detail. It is through these sorts
of analyses—representative of the desire to understand, to make sense
of what is seen, to forge meaning out of chaos—that imaginative con-
nections are created, culminating in the building of shared meaning.
The making of connections becomes a desire line that results in a con-
ceptual bridge where the new is born.
Although it could be argued that even the meaning acquired
through seeing is not so easily shared cross-culturally, it could also
be said that some texts are translatable because they speak to the
human condition, both in a diachronic and synchronic way. Some
stories are so powerful an evocation of the human condition that they
become embedded in folklore and/or the high literature of societies,
thus becoming part of the knowledge that is taught to children, form-
ing a template for understanding the world. These are stories that
get retold across generations and borders, for they are seen to merit
retelling even if in the same language; this is a third type of “transla-
tion” to place alongside word-for-word and negotiated translations.
These sorts of retellings are translations because they are attempt-
ing to work within new modalities of technology, or within histori-
cal moments that allow for the original to be interpreted once again
and, perhaps, in a different way. All retold stories are permutations.
However hard one tries simply to preserve old tales, in telling them
again, inevitably they become new, despite the presumed connection
with what has gone before and with the Other.
I have noted that it is also possible for visual knowledge to be a source
of misunderstanding. However filmmakers look at others’ movies in
a more complex way than audiences. They are interested not only in
how the story is represented, but in the techniques through which the
story is told. These techniques include narrative methods that rely on
the visual choices made by a director (what to represent or include in
the film), how the technology of the business was used, as well as the

editing process that pulls the final version together. Technology to a

filmmaker also means the ways in which a director chooses to tell
the story and represent the world—how is the rain made visible (rain
is very hard to film it seems); how are light and shadow used; how
does music punctuate the story; how is the camera moving; how many
cameras have been used; from what angles were the shots taken; and
at what speed? These are just a few of the questions that most audi-
ence members might not ask, but that a filmmaker will. This level of
technique is an important aspect of what is seen to constitute a great
film by a great filmmaker; the story is one thing, the mise-en-scène is
another altogether. The idea of replicating or attempting to reproduce
a certain type of atmosphere through the borrowing of technique is
another way in which filmmakers refer to each other, becoming yet
another way of making a film permutation as seen in the visual hom-
age or the intertextual reference. Kurosawa’s impact at this level of
filmmaking, as we shall see, has been tremendous.
Any discussion of one filmmaker’s influence on another has to begin
with a stated point of comparison. For the purposes of this book, that
point must be the man himself as well as some important aspects of
his historical and cultural contexts. This is not to say that I think there
is only one way to read or understand the work of Akira Kurosawa.
If that were the case, audiences and film scholars would not find
his work so riveting. Yet to trace the process of translation and of
later permutations, it is necessary to establish a starting point. Or as
Simmel (1997) would have it, to separate what we mean to connect.
Thus, my readings of the films from chapter four onward are meant to
be jumping off points, not incontestable readings, for the discussions
of the translations, remakes, and permutations that follow.


2
Portrait of an Artist as Filmmaker
There is nothing that says more

about its creator than the work itself.
—Kurosawa 1983:189
Only the briefest outline of Kurosawa’s life needs to be given here.

His own book, Something like an Autobiography (1982), offers an
excellent overview of his “young” life and Galbraith’s massive The
Emperor and the Wolf (2001) fills in many gaps; for summaries of
all his films and excellent analyses of his work, Richie’s work is also
important (1987, 1996). His daughter Kurosawa Kazuko (2004a,
2004b) has recently offered two memoirs of life with her father as
well. There is a large body of Western scholarship on Kurosawa and
films, and I will refer to many of these authors in the chapters that fol-
low. There is a growing body of literature in Japanese as well, which
situates Kurosawa more carefully within the Japanese studio system
and explores his place in Japanese film history.1 Moreover, in my dis-
cussion of the films, I will refer, when necessary, to events in his life.
What I would like to stress here is how, as a product of early twentieth
century Japan, Kurosawa was in many ways a typical urban man.
Much is made of the fact that Kurosawa was of warrior stock,
and thus very Japanese, but even the descendants—or especially the
descendants of samurai—were exposed to the rapid incorporation of
Japan into the global flow after 1868. The Tokyo student of the pre-
war era was very aware of the rest of the world, widely read in non-
Japanese literature, might well be involved in leftist movements, and
probably preferred jazz to traditional Japanese music, Western art to
calligraphy, and watched both foreign and homemade films.2

So while it is true that Kurosawa, born in 1910, was of samurai

descent, like many men and women of his era (Taishô and early
Shôwa), he was educated both in Japanese traditions and Western
knowledge. That is, in contrast to the increasing tendency in the
postwar era to deny sameness with the outside world, during this
earlier period, Japan was wide open to the rest of the world. Its lead-
ers were confident that Japan could learn, adopt, appropriate, copy,
and import what it needed from outside and remain, in essence,
Japanese. Not all Japanese were convinced of this, most notably the
ethnologist Yanagita Kunio who thought that the “soul” of Japan
was being lost by this orgy of Westernization. However, Kurosawa’s
youth occurred at the tail end of this period when, along with the
buoyant buying into foreign modernization, Japan had already
imported the art of filmmaking. The first foreign films were shown
in 1898 and the Japanese immediately used the new technology to
record traditional theatre (cf. Anderson and Richie 1982). In fact,
Kurosawa’s elder brother, famously, was a film narrator (benshi), a
storyteller who interpreted the actions on the silent screen for both
foreign and Japanese films.
It is not strange, then, that while in his autobiography, Kurosawa
describes what seems a typical Japanese childhood and education,
he is also able to list, from the age of eight or so, the foreign films he
remembers seeing (1982:73–74). He was about fifteen when he took
up the study of Western art, hoping to be a painter. At the age of eigh-
teen or nineteen, Kurosawa also joined the Proletarian Artists’ League
and drifted toward a sort of radical socialism that later in his films
appeared as a generalized humanism. Oshima (1992) refers to this
episode in Kurosawa’s life as typical of his generation of filmmakers,
and, prewar, the Japanese film industry was a haven for leftist think-
ers. Kurosawa himself downplays this period of his life, saying it was
part of being young, something like a fever, but he was serious enough
in his dedication to the movement to almost die—ironically enough
of a fever—in the proverbial artist’s garret. One remnant of this time,
although never so referred to by Kurosawa himself, was his dedica-
tion to Dostoevsky, a writer whose books he twice filmed. He told
the Bengali filmmaker Ray that he always returned to Dostoevsky as
well as to other Russian novelists (Ray 2001:184). Richie blames the
sentimentality that he thinks mars some of Kurosawa’s work on the
Russian writer’s influence (private communication). It was of course
Dostoevsky’s novels that formed the basis of Bakhtin’s theory of the
dialogic novel, and it is no coincidence, I believe, that Kurosawa’s

Portrait of an Artist as Filmmaker 21
films retain the quality of polyphony that Bakhtin attributes espe-

cially to the work of Dostoevsky. 3
After his brother’s suicide, Kurosawa drifted, or so he makes it
sound, into the film industry, being assigned as an assistant film
director to Yamamoto Kajirô at P.L.C. studios in 1935. This was in
the midst of Japan’s deep economic depression (shared with the rest
of the industrialized world) and well into the growing militarization
of the Japanese government. Kurosawa went on from this apprentice-
ship to direct his first film, Sanshiro Sugata (Sugata Sanshiro, 1943)
during the war. Too unfit to be drafted, Kurosawa looks back at this
period in his life with some guilt:
I offered no resistance to Japan’s militarism. Unfortunately, I have to

admit that I did not have the courage to resist in any positive way
and I only got by, ingratiating myself when necessary and otherwise
evading censure. I am ashamed of this, but I must be honest about it.
(1982:145)
Readers of the autobiography might well wonder if his grave ill-

ness at the end of his proletariat artist period and the suicide of his
brother had not somehow knocked out his ability to resist actively.
Students of his films might well reply that resistance to the status quo
never disappeared from his work.4 Moreover, the militarization of
Japan during the 1930s had crushed the rebelliousness out of many,
but not all, of its progressive thinkers. The government’s increas-
ing censorship of the film industry in Japan becomes interesting in
this light— equivalent, perhaps, to the McCarthy era in the United
States. Suddenly the liberal, often leftist, certainly bohemian world
of Japan’s fledging new cinema was under threat and, in fear of
imprisonment, or of not being able to make films, many filmmakers
trod carefully. Despite his acknowledged feelings of guilt, Kurosawa
himself was proud of not having made a typical war film at all during
this time, directing only The Most Beautiful (Ichiban Utsukushiku,
1944) about the stoic women who work in an optics factory. 5 That
the Allied Forces (1946–1952) also practiced censorship was less a
surprise to Kurosawa than the more pleasant fact that, in contrast
to the war era, his films were now censored by people who knew
something about cinema.6
Postwar, Kurosawa appears to have had success after success,
making many films that did well at the box office, beginning with
No Regrets for our Youth (Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi, 1946) a film

that examined the real life of a leftist student executed in 1944. This
film, admired by the censors of the occupying U.S. forces, is one
that Kurosawa himself criticizes because of the added censorship of,
interestingly enough, the communist-dominated Scenario Review
Committee within the studio.7 This meant, he noted, that the script
was extensively rewritten, undermining his vision. Yet it is signif-
icant that Kurosawa’s first postwar film focused on a young stu-
dent, Ozaki Hidemi, who, unlike Kurosawa himself, never ceased
his resistance to the military state and was finally executed. It is as
if Kurosawa wanted to consider the alternatives to the line of least
resistance that he, and so many others, had chosen. It is also, per-
haps, an attempt to inscribe his own narrative, to make his own dif-
ference—a statement both about who he was and about who he was
not. Even this postwar antiwar film does not fit the expected model,
for the true hero of Kurosawa’s story is the student’s lover who ends
by rejecting urban life and returning to live with the peasant parents
of her dead lover.
Kurosawa’s desire always to find his own take on a story is an
important point, for what had his life been so far but a rejection of
others’ values? He rejected his father’s military aspirations to become
a Western-style artist, he followed his brother’s radical politics only
a short while before giving up, and then, after Heigo’s suicide, he
followed him into the film world but with a difference. Whereas his
brother had written narratives for already made films,8 and then had
become famous as a storyteller in the silent cinema, Kurosawa went
on to become the maker of his own films, the narrator of his own
versions of stories. He was a faithful assistant director to Yamamoto,
but he chose to make as his first solo film the story of the young judo
student who is overconfident of his ability and has to learn the hard
way. At the film’s end, Sugata goes onto survive a difficult trial that
shows he has learned something of spiritual value, and, somehow,
Kurosawa’s own statement about the relationship between his work
and self seems very pertinent here.
Brash, full of energy, hard drinking, with a keen artistic vision
and a deep empathy for other people, Kurosawa was slowly matur-
ing, learning to be himself. This new maturity, this self-confidence,
was to become the foundation of the rest of his filmmaking, allowing
Kurosawa to remain steadfast on the nature of his Japanese identity.
Save for one tragic moment when he too attempted suicide in the 1970s,
this streak of individualism, of a personal vision, gave Kurosawa the
strength to withstand the rejection of his work at home.

One Wonderful Sunday (Subarashiki Nichiyôbi, 1947) was next,

the film being inspired by a DW. Griffith picture. However, it was
with the discovery of Toshiro Mifune (Mifune Toshirô) and the mak-
ing of Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi, 1948) that Kurosawa seems
to have come more and more into his own. In fact, Galbraith echoes
Richie in arguing that the director and actor partnership was key
to Kurosawa’s success. In Mifune the director had found the pre-
fect extension of himself, a man not afraid of emoting on camera.
Kurosawa himself noted:
Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the

Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he
expressed himself that was astounding . . . The speed of his movements
was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three
separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and
boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I have even seen in a
Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness he also had surprisingly
fine sensibilities. (1982:161)
Kurosawa and Mifune were to make sixteen films together, four of

which I discuss in this book. Ironically, if Kurosawa’s success outside
Japan made his native identity suspect, as Galbraith notes, Mifune was
always seen as the “most Japanese of men” (2001:20) despite being
born in Manchuria, of Japanese colonist parents, and never having set
foot in Japan until he was twenty years of age. Mifune has become
the embodiment of the iconoclastic samurai for Japanese and Western
audiences alike, despite the qualities that made him atypical. He was,
according to Richie (1991:56–69), a person who always wanted to
do the right thing; to Kurosawa he was fast and emotive; and to for-
eigners such as, surprisingly, Charlton Heston, he was exceptionally
charismatic (Galbraith 2001:293). None of these qualities is normally
associated with stereotypic depictions of Japaneseness.
If Mifune, once he had broken off his working relationship with
Kurosawa (for reasons that remain unclear), continued to enjoy success
in Japan through the 1970s until his death, Kurosawa, by contrast,
came in for a much rougher time. Although his films were successful
in the 1950s, some of them topping the box office, his growing repu-
tation from 1951 with the international success of Rashomon opened
the door to criticism at home: Why did foreigners seem to like him
so much? Was there something wrong with his films? Despite win-
ning various prizes both at home and abroad for his films, changes in
the studio system meant that Kurosawa’s expensive directorial style

was becoming harder and harder to sustain. He famously always shot

with at least three cameras, to make editing easier, and filmed the
story in sequence. Kurosawa’s films were amongst the first in Japan
to go over budget and to take longer than expected to complete. As
an artist, he expected no less—it took whatever it took to make a
good film and the more famous he became, the more leeway he was
allowed—as long, of course, as the films made money—and for a long
time they did.
In the 1960s, however, the film world was under attack in Japan,
as elsewhere, by the cheaper dramas shown on television. Meanwhile
the work of Kurosawa was becoming too erudite, perhaps, to war-
rant large audiences. The closure of Daiei Studios in 1971, one of
the two studios with which he had always worked, left Kurosawa
with only the great Toho studio to back his production company and
Toho was a tough proposition in those days. After his neo-realistic
Dodesukaden (1970) did poorly at the box office and was considered
a flop as well (other films had been badly reviewed, but had done well
in the past) Kurosawa’s Japanese career appeared to be at an end. The
same was in fact true for many of his generation of directors. No one
wanted to back his working habits and the political messages of his
films now seemed outdated in a buoyant economy where the growing
middle class preferred light comedies. Even if the man was famous
outside Japan, it did not impress Japanese backers—let him go to his
outside fans, it was said, and so Kurosawa did, ultimately finding not
only admirers but also backers, first in the USSR, then later in George
Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. That is not to say that Toho did
not, later, also contribute in part to the making of a new Kurosawa
film, but never again was Kurosawa to be certain about the money
for a project
Kurosawa’s rejection in Japan had a terrible effect on him, plung-
ing him into a depression. What was he if not Japanese? In many
ways his life has been typical of many men of is era. Why tell him
now that what he did was not Japanese enough? While these sorts
of comments had been made occasionally of his films in the 1950s,
such critiques had not kept audiences away or lost him the back-
ing of the studios. Kurosawa’s own comment on this, in response
to critics who said that foreigners only liked Rashomon because it
was exotic, is prescient: “Why is it that Japanese people have no
confidence in the worth of Japan? Why do they elevate everything
foreign and denigrate everything Japanese?” (1982:187). As one of
my students, Daisuke Murakami, once commented to me, in Japan

there is a thin line between the glory of making it internationally

as an artist who has transcended Japaneseness, without necessar-
ily losing whatever Japaneseness means, and being seen as having
succeeded because you have crossed the line into no longer being
Japanese enough. Kurosawa had straddled this line from the moment
Rashomon had done so well outside Japan. Now he was confronted
by producers who used his foreign popularity as a way of refusing
him money, claiming that he was more a Western filmmaker than a
Japanese one. Even though all his new films continued to be screened
and not do too badly in Japan, this accusation was to haunt his rep-
utation until his death.
Of course, there was a terrible irony in this as well. To some extent
the Japanese critics who said that foreigners liked Kurosawa’s films
because they were exotic had a point.9 It tended to be his warrior,
jidai geki (historical dramas), which won praise and prizes abroad
(Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood). This became appar-
ent when, after two spectacular U.S.-backed forays into historical
samurai films, Kurosawa returned to what was for him an old theme
first broached in his Record of a Living Being (Ikimono no kiroku,
1955): what did the nuclear age mean for the human race? Dreams
(Yume, 1990) and Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no Kyôshikoku,
1991) deal with the topic in different ways: the former by looking, in
one sequence, at a possible nuclear future—after a series of sequences
that seem autobiographical or even of wish fulfillment. The latter
film retains some of the fantasy-like quality of Dreams in which the
old folktales told by a grandmother (Murase Sachiko) to her visiting
grandchildren are combined with their adventures in a countryside
that sometimes appears to revert to this older Japan. The heart of
the story is the visit by a half-Japanese cousin (Richard Gere), who
is so moved by the grandmother’s recounting of her experience of
the Nagasaki bombing that he apologizes to her for the act. This
shocked American critics, some of whom labeled the lyrical film as
“un-American.” While, as Richie points out, there are other more
substantial critiques to be made about this film (1996:224–226), this
is a harsh reaction to Kurosawa’s attempts to reiterate a point he often
made in his films: the victims of war are women and children—men
find glory, perhaps, in battle, but the worst consequences fall on those
left behind.
For Richie, Kurosawa’s later films were much too straightforward,
lacking irony and prone to sentimentality (1996:228), and this may
well explain their lack of critical success. Yet, in light of his life,

Kurosawa’s later films also seem a desperate attempt to return to the

modern-era (gendai geki) films that he had enjoyed making in the
1950s, the sorts of films in which his foreign-backers and audiences
seemed less interested. These films were perhaps an attempt to “come
home” to Japanese audiences who had treated his 1980s films as
somehow alien. I remember well the première of Ran in Tokyo in
1985. It was considered a film for foreigners, so much so that one
theatre ran one subtitled version daily so that the foreigners in Japan
could see it. I cannot think of any other Japanese film shown in Tokyo
for which this has happened until Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2003)
was screened.
By the end of his life, then, we might argue that Kurosawa was stuck
between a rock and a hard place. Coppola and Lucas were faithful
backers for the expensive sort of samurai action films that seemed to
glorify ancient Japan—an interesting view of a director whose work
had always depicted the corruption inherent in the feudal system.
Foreign critics and audiences, on the other hand, were not sure what
to do with Kurosawa’s attempts to deal with modern Japanese expe-
riences (neither perhaps were Japanese audiences). Galbraith quotes
two interesting interviews with Kurosawa on this:
I would never make a film especially for foreign audiences . . . If a work

cannot have meaning for a Japanese audience, I—as a Japanese artist—
am simply not interested. (2001:584)
and:
As a very normal part of my education, I have studied not only the

Japanese classics but also the Western classics and music . . . There is
nothing unusual about this for a person of my generation. But there is
some misunderstanding of my work in Japan, probably because con-
temporary Japanese have not studied their own cultural background
to the extent I do for my films. . . . I can only say that I am very pleased
that this seems to be appreciated outside Japan. (2001:584–585)
That last is a modest understatement, for much of his work was and
still is cited as enormously influential by Western and other filmmak-
ers.10 Japanese audiences were, on the other hand, forgetting the early
great work of Kurosawa, wondering why foreigners always seemed
to know about this man, who, to them, was not so very interesting
and whose films were increasingly out of step with the reality of post-
war Japan. Also, Japanese films that foreigners claimed to love and

understand went against the growing national discourse that Japan

was unique to the point of incomprehensibility.11
Ironically, of course, Japanese audiences often admire the films by
directors directly influenced by Kurosawa: Leone, Coppola, Lucas,
Spielberg, Singer, Tarantino, and Tykwer to name just a few. They
also admire the stars who calqued their performances on Mifune in
Kurosawa films—Clint Eastwood in the main, but also any number of
rough, silent, somewhat crazy descendants: Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson,
Kurt Russell, and even Takeshi Kitano who acknowledged Kurosawa’s
influence on his work in his acceptance speech for the Open Prize
at Venice Film Festival in 2003. Since his death in 1998, Kurosawa’s
place in the pantheon of Japanese filmmakers has been reassessed. But
whereas many young Westerners have at least seen the Seven Samurai,
albeit in a truncated version on Saturday afternoon television or late at
night, most Japanese young people say to me, “Hmmm, I’ve heard of
that film, but haven’t seen it.” Yet, in a sense, they do know that film,
for, as I shall argue in the rest of this book, without being aware of it,
they have been watching variations of it all their lives.
On a life in Translation
As I have argued above, Kurosawa’s life and work could be seen as
attempts on his part to distinguish his narrative from that of others.
His father, his brother, the dominant ideology of the era, his mentor
and, later, to continue to work independently with his own produc-
tion company, remaining Japanese while always acknowledging his
love of foreign film even in an era when fears of Japan being over-
whelmed by the West were great.12 We also can see how he strove
to remain true to his own concerns even when incorporated into the
larger arena of international film. This global aspect of the industry
was recently well described to me in a seminar discussion by a SOAS
student who had worked in film production:
Imagine that you are a successful Chinese filmmaker who has had a
film hit it big outside China to great critical acclaim. You’re about to
make another film—should you stay with your usual budget of about
3 million dollars, to make the sort of film that has always been suc-
cessful for you at home, or do you look for more backing, think bigger,
try to make a film that will have success abroad? The gamble could
cost you success in both places, and losing money will not make it any
easier to get the next film made.

Kurosawa was among the first to be presented with this dilemma

and, for a time, managed to make it on his own terms. His global suc-
cess in an industry that had only reached global proportions for the
U.S.A., leaving other thriving cinemas to be famous more locally, was
not totally unique, but his auterial independence from that system
was largely unparalleled. He was among the first of foreign direc-
tors to do what is now taken as commonplace: forced to look for
backing outside Japan, he found money here, there and everywhere
to continue to make his films. His film-making techniques made him
a hero to other directors, but it was his independence that spoke to a
whole new generation of up and coming Hollywood directors as well
(cf. Biskind 1999).
In many respects his life as a director could be the story of any
director—being in touch with the national zeitgeist, falling out of
favor because of failure at the box office, being accused of having lost
his touch, the comeback: it is all the stuff of Hollywood legend. But
the difference is that Kurosawa remained a non-Hollywood direc-
tor whose story was played out on the international stage while he
remained at home. Compare his case to that of the English filmmaker
Michael Powell. At the same time that he was backing Kurosawa,
Coppola tried to work his magic on the great but almost-forgotten
director, bringing him to Zoetrope studios. Powell never made a film
for Coppola, but Kurosawa, who insisted on staying in Japan, using
his own crew and writing his own material, did manage to make a
few more films. His success outside Japan cost him a local reputation,
as it has other non-Hollywood directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ang
Lee, Jackie Chan to name just a few, but Kurosawa fought against
this. Even his autobiography seems to be a carefully orchestrated
attempt to reassure the reader of his Japaneseness, right down to his
description of his “traditional arranged marriage” when, as Galbraith
notes and as Richie confirms, he and his future wife had already been
lovers. Yet he also appears to have fought against stereotypes all his
life. When his international reputation seemed to be defined only by
his warrior films, he chose to end his career by making small Japanese
films that reflected his dreams, hopes, and fears. He managed, I would
argue, to remain true to himself—what that self might be, may well
be better revealed by looking at his films.
However, the understanding of the director’s life that might be
attained by looking at his work is one of the things that can be lost
in translation when a film is remade. This makes sense in if we con-
sider remakes as a director’s attempt to inscribe his own difference

on a known story. What remains even when translated are the larger
concerns that Kurosawa shared not only with other Japanese of his
generation, but with the rest of the world: the cost of war, moral
and physical; the burden of guilt; the possibility of glory through just
action; the loneliness of the hero; and the suffering of women. Some of
these themes have translated with few problems, others have mutated,
as we shall see. But the core, a concern with social justice, remains the
singular vision of Akira Kurosawa and it is his humanistic vision that
forms the bridge which allows his stories to be retold.
The first work to be considered, Rashomon, is important because,
as already noted, it was the film that brought Japan as a filmmak-
ing nation, and Kurosawa as a masterful director, to the attention of
the rest of the film world. It is also interesting because an examina-
tion of the process of remaking the film in Hollywood and elsewhere
reveals the importance of local interpretations, historical contexts,
and finally, the way in which an understanding of the story changes
almost beyond recognition. In contrast to Seven Samurai, which I
consider afterward, the “truth” at the core of the original is almost
unbearable. The translations of Rashomon, then, are not the same
sort of translations that we get for other Kurosawa films; for this
reason, the film deserves careful analysis.


3
Rashomon: The Problem of Subjectivity
And I suppose that is supposed to be true
—Rashomon 19501
Introduction
Based on two stories Rashômon (1987a) and Yabu no naka [In a
Grove] (1987b) by Japan’s great short story writer, Akutagawa
Ryûnosuke (1892–1927), the film Rashomon opens, famously, with
two stunned men—a woodcutter (Shimura Takashi) and a Buddhist
priest (Chiaki Minoru)—sitting under the Rashô gate during a great
rainstorm. It is somewhere between the ninth and twelfth centuries
in Kyoto, Japan, during a time of civil war, plagues, and disastrous
natural events. The times are so bad, says one character, that “I heard
that demons used to live in the castle here by the gate, but they all ran
away, because what men do now horrified them so” (Richie 1987:79).
However, these two men are in a state of shock for entirely different
reasons: they have just testified in a trial and the events of the trial are
“beyond understanding.” A commoner (Ueda Kichijiro) joins them
and asks them to tell their story. Over the course of an hour or so they
do so, beginning with the woodcutter who relates what he saw three
days before in the forest.
The scene changes to a bright sunny day, we follow the woodcutter
as the camera moves through the forest in a film sequence that is still
analyzed by theorists in terms of its technical and visual brilliance.
He finds first a woman’s hat and veil, then a man’s hat, then a piece
of rope, an amulet case, and finally, the corpse of a samurai named

Takehiro (Mori Masayuki). These “clues” form the main facts of the
story. A modern viewer might, perhaps, immediately wonder what the
CSI crew2 could do with so many objects—but this film, although it
is about a crime, is also about human passion and will never give us
the clear answers that Grisham and his modern team reach each week
in their always successful search for truth. In fact, the point that both
Ginzberg (1990) and Eco (1992) make about reading clues is perti-
nent here: Sherlock Holmes-like reading of clues can tell us a very neat
story, but it may well be entirely the wrong story. 3
In addition to the “hard facts” of the hats, the rope, the amulet,
and the body, there is also one part of the story that appears immu-
table. When we hear the first full tale of the events, as told by the
captured bandit, Tajômaru (Toshiro Mifune), we are shown how the
samurai is tricked by him, ends up by being tied to a tree, then has
to watch as the bandit rapes his wife, Masago (Kyô Machiko), and
finally he is freed to fight to death with the bandit because the wife
insists that one of them must die. We will hear the story three more
times and each time the first part—tricking the samurai, raping the
wife—is taken as a given. It is only the last part of the story that
changes with each of its recitations. In the wife’s version, she frees her
husband and begs him to kill her with a dagger she offers him. When
he does nothing but look at her with hatred, she “loses her senses”
and awakes to find him dead. Perhaps she has killed him. She tries
to kill herself, fails, and ends up in a temple before being found and
arrested. She asks, “What could a poor helpless woman like me do?”
(Richie 1987:68).
The husband, through a medium, tells his version: the wife urged
the bandit to kill him because she could not run off with him as long
as her husband lived. The bandit refuses, but offers to kill her for
being so duplicitous; she runs away and he runs after her. Tajômaru
eventually returns, not having caught the woman, cuts the man free
and leaves him. The samurai, alone, kills himself with a dagger. The
woodcutter finally admits that he has called these stories lies because
he saw it all: “There wasn’t any dagger there—he was killed by a
sword” (Richie 1987:77). The story he tells is closer to the bandit’s
version than anyone else’s, save that he describes a fight between two
men who do not really want to kill each other—but who are goaded
into action by the shrill taunting of the woman. Our belief in this tale
is undercut by the commoner who points out that the woman’s dagger
was never found by the police. Did the woodcutter steal it? His hon-
esty undermined, we are given no sense as to what is the truth of the

Rashomon: The Problem of Subjectivity 33
story. At this point, the priest, all faith and hope in humankind lost
by having been a witness to all of this, has his faith restored when the
three men discover a baby and the woodcutter offers to care for it.
The film narrative is complex: the initial story is told by the wood-
cutter, but as Richie (1996) points out, we don’t know whether it
is the priest or the woodcutter who recounts the police officer’s,
Tajômaru’s, the woman’s, or the samurai’s stories. Yet by the mere
fact of presenting the stories as if told by each individual character,
we have a very clear example of heterglossia. The stories are told by
people who represent a wide spectrum of medieval Japanese society,
the samurai class (even if of a low level)4 —both male and female; the
petty official; the priest who, we assume, is learned; the woodcutter,
who by his occupation is very much on the margins of what was then
a caste-like society; the commoner, representing the downtrodden
urban man; and the bandit, who is certainly an outcaste. His rape of
the woman is not only a terrible sexual transgression, but is doubly
polluting by virtue of his very position outside of Japanese society.
There is no way, as the bandit implies that he would have done, that
he could have raped the woman and then released her and her hus-
band to resume their lives thereafter. The disgrace, as the woman says
in his version of the story, would have been immeasurable. 5 Thus, it is
not only the polyphony of the text that reminds us of Dostoevsky, but
also this attempt to represent something of the diversity of medieval
(and postwar) Japanese society. In many tiny ways the chasm between
classes is made clear: the world is full of poverty, disease, and disaster,
we are constantly told, but the samurai couple travel through a lovely
forest as if without a care in the world.
Prince has noted how Kurosawa shared with Dostoevsky a concern
with representing all levels of society:
In the work of both men, narrative becomes a vehicle of philosoph-

ical exploration; incident and action are charged with metaphysi-
cal and spiritual significance . . . Dostoevsky’s perception of a society
splintered by internal discord finds an analogue in the historical cir-
cumstances informing Kurosawa’s cinema, the encounter of East and
West and the cataclysm of war, which forever altered the social coor-
dinates . . . He does not dramatize a “timeless” Japan, an unchanging
national essence, but rather the traumas of historical transition. Both
artists share an apocalyptic sensibility. What Michael Holquist has
observed about Dostoevsky is true of Kurosawa as well. He suggests
that Dostoevsky’s work is structured by, and is especially sensitive to,
the historical dilemmas of national identity. (1991:136)

Both Goodwin (1994) and Prince argue that Kurosawa explored these
issues very much through the polyphony of his cinematic text and, as
I have tried to show, this is especially true of Rashomon where the
camera and the various narratives tell us four different stories, leav-
ing the solution to each of us as viewers in our dialogic relationship
with the film. For Goodwin, “Kurosawa’s affiliation with these traits
of Dostoevsky of extremism, psychological doubling, and paradox
did not become explicit in his cinema until after the war” (1994:60).
I would like to build on these film theorists’ discussion of Kurosawa
and Rashomon in an attempt to establish the culture of the film and
to consider a theme that Kurosawa certainly shared with Dostoevsky,
a theme on which I have already quoted him, namely, guilt.
Yoshimoto has an important observation to make of Rashomon in
his analysis of the film. He tells us that
Kurosawa said that he wanted to show a large crowd at the film’s open-
ing. According to his unrealized plan, there is a black market in front
of the Rashomon; the rain starts to fall, and as it becomes a downpour,
the crowd run away in all directions; the three characters take shelter
under the gate and start telling stories about the rape and murder inci-
dent. This unrealized version of the film would have made much more
explicit the connection between the film’s narrative and the contempo-
rary situation of Japan under the Occupation. In the existing version
of the film, the fact of the Occupation is most clearly registered in the
absence of the magistrate in the courtyard scenes . . . Consistent with
the overall design of the film, the censoring eyes of the Occupation are
formally inscribed on the film’s textual surface as structural absence.
(2000:189)
The structure of Rashomon is polyphonic in all senses of Bakhtin’s

term, but its implied dialogic Other—the court official—never speaks,
never pronounces. When the camera shows us the various narrators
in court, it is from the point of view of this official, apparently putting
the audience in his shoes. He and, by implication, we the audience are
to pass judgment, but within the context of the film we never do—we
do not, we cannot, speak. One possible interpretation of this would
be to say that each of us must make our own decision on the meaning
of the film’s events. But how are we to judge? Who are we to judge?
What other access to the events could we have that might lead us to the
truth? On the other hand, what if the silent judge were someone else
entirely who was capable of passing judgment, a saintly other, or God
himself, as described in the Grand Inquisitor story in Dostoevsky’s

Brothers Karamazov (1970)? That is, not the old Jesuit who encoun-
ters Christ come to earth again, but one of the heavenly representa-
tives who Ivan tells us were often brought on stage to pass judgment
in medieval dramas. That may well be too Christian an analogy for
Kurosawa’s work—or is it? Given Kurosawa’s reading and rereading
of Russian writers, the analogy may not be so far fetched. Moreover
Japanese folktales are full of compassionate bodhisattvas who come
to visit this world in order to help the deserving and/or punish the
wicked, and this theme resurfaces, I will argue, again in Yojimbo.
There is another reason that makes me raise the question of the
judge, and that is to consider what was originally a Buddhist concept:
the Japanese term seken. Seken is currently used to describe a Japanese
sense of the panoptic society, the judging others who pronounce on
our behavior. As members of society we are part of seken as well as
being at the mercy of it. When Richie describes the stories each of
the characters relates as caught up in the reality that they themselves
have made, he precedes this by an indirect reference to seken, “. . . this
limitation of spirit, this tacit agreement (social in its scope) that one
is and cannot become, is one feudalistic precept which plagues the
country to this day” (italics in original, 1996:76). Telling our stories,
in the face of others’ judgment, becomes impossible if we are too con-
cerned with our sekenguchi (our reputation). Our individual narra-
tives become not the truth, but an egotistical performance. This may
appear like an argument for an understanding of the person’s role in
Japanese society as one that is relativistic, or that, in Benedict’s (1967)
terms, the Japanese act in accordance with established social norms
rather than letting themselves be guided by internal principles. But
this is not what happens in the film.
The stories each of the characters tells may well be interpretative
acts premised on their sense of being judged by seken, but the events
occurred in the forest. This is the place where, as Kurosawa himself
argues, people go astray “in the thicket of their hearts” (1982:182),
the place where people go astray because they are not constrained by
seken. The tension in the film is between the internal passions that
motivated the rape and murder and the stories we are told by each
of the characters who tell us that they are responsible for Takehiro’s
death. This is the astonishing thing about the film, not necessarily its
structure,6 but the fact that when brought in for judgment, the ban-
dit, wife, and husband do not say that they are innocent. They “lie”
(according to the watching woodcutter and priest) and all say they
are responsible for the death. But why are the narrating onlookers so

sure that everyone has lied? Is it because their stories do not cohere
into a single version that reveals a single truth? This is the puzzle
that everyone has tried to solve for Rashomon. However, as I have
noted above, we should be asking another question entirely: who is
this judge who manages to get everyone to reveal what they feel? The
elements of their stories may not be empirically true, but their expe-
rience of these events is and this is shocking—from whence comes
this powerful sense of guilt? More to the point, who is it that has the
power to see so deeply into the hearts of human beings and is able to
elicit such frank, if unflattering, narratives? In Christianity, of course,
it is God. In Buddhist tradition, if not in its theology, it is the compas-
sionate Buddha. If there is common ground between the two religious
traditions, it is through the concept of compassion. This is alluded to
by the priest who says of the woman “I found her very pitiful. I felt
great compassion for her” (Richie 1987:63).
The priest also ends by forgiving the woodcutter when, selflessly,
the man offers to care for the abandoned baby. Exposed to the seken,
or gaze, of this priestly other, the woodcutter redeems himself. A far
too sentimental and somewhat problematic ending for some critics, but
a highly appropriate one given the problem of our dark hearts—how
is it that we humans ever do anything good? Only through the forgiv-
ing gaze of others is redemption possible. If Yoshimoto is correct in
calling the court the eyes of the Occupation, Kurosawa appears to be
making a plea: “Yes we are all guilty, but do not judge us too harshly,
forgive us.” He also, through the roles of the priest and woodcutter,
appears to be saying, that ultimately we will be judged on our future
actions and we will be forgiven or not by god rather than a secular
court. A Dostoevskian point if ever there was one.
Since Kurosawa’s imagined audience was purely Japanese, it is
fair to assume that there is a dark joke being made about guilt and
innocence in Rashomon. At the moment in time in which the film
was made and released, the war crime trials were being held by the
Occupation Government and most ordinary Japanese were claiming
innocence—the war and its atrocities were seen as the fault of the
country’s leaders, while the ordeals of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
seen to have made the Japanese into victims (cf. Bix 2001). In con-
trast to the zeitgeist of that era, the irony of Rashomon is that every-
one claims to be guilty. It is an interesting point that many critics of
the film seem to miss entirely. Part of the reason for this is that the
complexity of issues to do with the concept of guilt and the semantic
usage of words to convey this in Japanese are both clouded by current

Japanese nihonjinron theories that posit Japanese difference from

the West. That is, Benedict’s (1967) argument that Japanese ethical
behavior is based on their perception of external sanctions rather than
internalized notions of right and wrong is taken to be essentially true.
An entire book could be written on this issue. For my purposes here,
however, I will just point out that the usage of the world “guilty” in
English is historically complex and, we might argue, also currently
debased—any little thing makes us “feel guilty.” The Japanese pre-
serve a conceptual connection that is interesting: tsumi, the word for
legal guilt, is also the word for sin. This word is not used lightly.
However, the word for shame, hazugashi, is used frequently, even to
indicate something like shyness. When people feel that they have not
fulfilled their responsibilities and are “guilty” they tend to use warui
or bad—as in “I have been bad about that.” The word can be also
used to mean feeling ill and conveys this sense as well—there is, of
course, analogous usage of the term “sick” in British English to indi-
cate how guilty one might be feeling.
The issue of whether these feelings come from some sort of inter-
nal moral sense or some external pressure is another kettle of fish
altogether. Benedict (1967) based her argument on an understand-
ing of what was, in the 1940s, the dominant religion of Japan, State
Shinto, which has no doctrines about sin but many concepts of pol-
lution. In doing this she ignored twelve centuries of Buddhist tradi-
tion in Japan—Buddhism has strong doctrines on sin, responsibility,
and retribution (rebirth, time spent in hell, cf. Rambelli 2002) that
foreigners tend to gloss as karma without really understanding this
theological concept (Sharf 1995). In Rashomon, then, it is significant
that Kurosawa chooses to have a Buddhist, not a Shinto, priest as one
of its main characters.
In light of my earlier argument, we could say that Kurosawa was
interested in Dostoevsky because the work of the Russian made sense
even within a Japanese context, the Russian novels translated for him.
To use Benjamin’s (1973) terms, their “intentionality” was unprob-
lematic. Kurosawa’s interest in the work of Dostoevsky, then, is not
necessarily idiosyncratic. In fact, this interest parallels his early left-
ist involvement. As Scalapino (1967) notes, Marxism/socialism was,
for many Japanese, tied up with either an interest in Christianity or
pacifist Buddhism movements—to be involved with the left was to
admit that one had to be socially responsible not just for one’s own
actions, but in relation to others. Prince (1991) makes much of how
Kurosawa shares the concept of responsibility with Dostoevsky, but

he appears to miss the religious dimension in Kurosawa’s point of

view. This is striking in light of how often a sort of Westernized ver-
sion of Buddhism is used by Prince (and others) to explain Kurosawa’s
films and nowhere is this more apparent than in the various attempts
to make sense of the story in Rashomon.
I think it is fair to say that it was through his experience of the
war and the Occupation, as well as of his earlier experience of living
in a slum, that Kurosawa’s relationship to the Russian writer became
stronger and more apparent in his work. His early films were more
“traditionally” Japanese and if they challenged the status quo, they
did so through their focus on unlikely heroes (the women in The Most
Beautiful) or by adding a touch of humor to an old Kabuki classic
(The Men who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail). If Kurosawa was raising
questions about Japanese national identity, he was doing it very much
within the framework of traditional Japanese arts or stereotypes
(judo, the strong, suffering woman, or Kabuki and Noh). Yoshimoto
argues that many foreign critics miss the point in these films; they
become enchanted by the representation of Japan and do not “get”
Kurosawa’s deconstruction of the current ideology (2000:113). I
would push the point further—so ingrained is the image of Japan as
a “shame” not “guilt” culture, that even when guilt as a theme comes
right up and hits the viewer in the face, as it were, it gets ignored. Yet
this is the dark heart of Rashomon and an understanding of this is
essential in order to grapple with the success or failure of the film’s
remakes: The Outrage (Ritt 1964), The Iron Maze (Yoshida 1991)
and Misty (Misuti, Saegusa 1997). Interestingly, as I will argue, it is
some of the permutations on Rashomon, most particularly Reversal
of Fortune (Schroeder 1990) that best address this theme.
“. . . If Men Do Not Tell the Truth, Do Not

Trust One Another, Then the Earth
Becomes a Kind of Hell”7
As I have argued above, in their concern with the striking cinema-
tography and complex narrative structure of the film, many viewers
miss the central paradox at the heart of the story. From the very
opening of the film we are presented with characters who do not
fit their Japanese stereotypes: the priest has lost his faith; the hum-
ble woodcutter is probably a thief; the commoner definitely is; the
bold bandit is cowardly; the samurai, bristling with weapons, is

easily subdued; and the beautiful wife is not silent (a great virtue for
Japanese women) and she is possibly not virtuous either. Moreover,
a case brought before the court has failed to find the truth. Everyone
has lied. But what is the nature of these lies? Each of the defendants
says that they did it. Only Richie, in this discussion of the film, notes
the important fact that everyone is telling the truth—as far as their
subjective view of the events is honest, they each believe they have
killed. The shock for the priest and the woodcutter is that everyone
thinks they did it. The possibility that they are all lying is repeatedly
raised by the commoner, who gets the woodcutter to admit that he
saw all the events and then hints that it could have been the wood-
cutter who murdered the husband. If, as Richie playfully argues, this
is true, what does this mean? Why do the three main characters lie
and say “I did it”? Would it not be more obvious to say, as does the
woodcutter, a possible suspect, “I didn’t do it”? Why does the priest
say that “If men do not tell the truth . . . then earth becomes a kind
of hell”? Men, and woman, have told their version of the truth, so is
earth not a kind of hell?
There is no way to answer these questions without resorting
to the concept of the “eyes of the Occupation” and to recall, as
Yoshimoto (2001) tells us, that Kurosawa’s deconstruction and
questioning of national identity are often misunderstood. What if
Kurosawa is asking: “What would the world be like if we all admit-
ted our weaknesses and our guilt?” If his imagined audience was
always Japanese (European audiences not being a target for him at
this point in time), then the silent Other—not sitting in the judge’s
place, but beside the judge—is an Other who has been silent about
their own deeds. In addition, this guilt is deeply embedded within
this role of silent observer—by not standing up to the growing fas-
cism at home, all Japanese, even Kurosawa himself as he admits in
his autobiography, and should feel responsible. All the earth, or at
least Japan, is hell, because everyone, through their silence in the
past and in the present, is lying. No one is more guilty of this than
the woodcutter, our everyman, who saw everything and not once
did he try to help. By making us watch this last set of events four dif-
ferent times, Kurosawa makes us, the audience, complicit through
our silent viewing—like the woodcutter we are reduced to voyeurs
and liars.
No wonder, then, that the films wowed postwar European critics
and audiences. Who else had shared the experience of keeping silent
rather than protesting while the world around them became, literally,

hell? As a young character in Bradbury’s novel Dr Criminale argues

to its British narrator:
Perhaps you do not know what it is like to be in a world where history

changes all the time, where to have an idea or a side one day right and
the next day wrong [sic], where every choice, every thought, is a gam-
ble that maybe you win or maybe lose, where what is patriotic now is
treachery then. (2000:72–73)
In 1950 and 1951 both Japan and Europe had been through such
an era (and parts of Europe were continuing to suffer under such
regimes); it was a shared experience. In contrast, in the United States
where history was short and Americans were respectful of other peo-
ple’s deep roots, critics debated the merits of the wonderful, daring
cinematography, the mastery of Kurosawa’s editing, his technique,
the use of music, and, more often than not, came down on the side
of masterpiece despite their confusion about the Japanese story. In
Britain, a nation where history was not perceived as constantly chang-
ing, the London Times review was tough: “There are some impres-
sive moments in Rashomon—and, obscure though the plot often is,
it has pattern and intelligence—and one or two lovely shots of forest
scenery, but the general impression is one of confusion and noise”
(reprinted in Richie 1987:135).
Rare, as Richie notes, was the critic who saw beyond a sort of ori-
entalist surprise at the mastery of the filmmaking to the film’s more
universalistic message (1996:80). The story is not about Oriental rel-
ativism or pragmatism versus an Anglo-Saxon inclination toward the
truth, justice, or a single reality. It is about the conflicting desires of
the human condition: we want a single reality, while holding fast to
our subjective interpretations. We want to believe in a forgiving judge
while dreading the harsh gaze of society (seken); we want to give into
our passions while fearing the consequences. We all feel guilty about
the things we should have done, but have not. The year 1951 was the
moment for audiences, Japanese and European, to silently admit this
through Rashomon and to wonder: what if we told the truth? Would
the world be able to bear hearing the truth?8
The “heart of darkness” if we read Conrad (1994) closely, is not
the African jungle, but the human condition and it is only by lying
about this that “civilization” is created and maintained. The wood-
cutter’s and priest’s shock at the start of the film is not because every-
one has lied, it is because they have told the truth and revealed the

lies that are necessary in order to constitute a shared reality. In a

Buddhist, if not Christian sense, life is an illusion that we can only
transcend by understanding this fact. If there is a Christian dimen-
sion to Kurosawa’s story, it is that, unlike the original short stories on
which the film is based, he offers us—through the woodcutter—the
possibility of redemption through future meritorious acts.
I am not arguing here that Kurosawa was a closet Christian, but
that he shared/shares with all writers and filmmakers the impulse
toward the confessional mode of expression. Rashomon not only
reveals this desire on Kurosawa’s part, but also extends it to all of us.
While the single author’s voice may well get lost in the polyphony of
the text, Rashomon explores the impulse to reveal something of our-
selves to others through telling of our stories. We inevitably inscribe
our differences even when using the exact same building blocks of
narrative—the story we tell has to be our story. It is for this rea-
son that the sociological term, the rashomon effect, was coined to
describe the conflicting and subjective nature of witness statements;9
I shall return to this in later chapters.
I have argued for an understanding of Rashomon that is very much
grounded in the context of 1950s postwar Japan and have noted that
Europeans who had suffered similar postwar social and cultural
shifts seem to have understood the film the best. The film and its
story have endured, but my historicized reading of the film should
not be understood to be what all audiences have gone on to make of
it. So what has happened when this story became someone else’s tale
to tell? What shifts occurred when Rashomon travelled in time and
across societies?

Figure 1 Masago Confronts Tajômaru, Rashomon
Source: Kurosawa 1950. Daiei Co. Courtesy of The Criterion Collection
Figure 2 Masago Confronts Tajômaru, Misty

Source: Saegusa 1996. Courtesy of Pony Canyon Inc. Japan

4
Remaking Rashomon:
From Subjectivity to “the” Truth
The truth for some reason is always hidden from view.
—Bava 19691
Introduction
In order to discuss the remakes of Rashomon, both defining and
discussing film remakes becomes necessary. While I have argued for
a remake being a sort of translation, it must also be asked: “What
does it mean to remake a film as opposed to translating it?” Telling
stories again appears to be a way of opening up the many layers of
meaning we might find embedded in any given tale. An insightful
edited book on filmic remakes, Play It Again, Sam (1998), allows
every contributor to come up with a different explanation for this
process. In their introduction, Horton and McDougal note the plea-
sure in “repetition with a difference” (1998:6). Eberwein cites Stuart
Hall on identity production, and argues that remakes are implicated
in the “positions of enunciation” from which we speak (1998:16);
while Kolker notes the pleasure in allusion, representing a director’s
love of film (1998:35). For Brashinsky the remake should be praised
for skipping “the act of meta-aesthetic transition in which, accord-
ing to the widely accepted modernist prejudice, originality begins”
(1998:163). Later, Horton cites Branigan on narrative, reminding us
that all narrative builds on the structures of stories already in exis-
tence (1998:173). Aufderheide sees the non-Hollywood remake as a
strategy to “express both resistance to and fascination with dominant

cinema (and culture)” (1998:191). On Dracula, Konigsberg tells us

that each repeat does more than repeat, it takes the story one step
further (1998:250); while Somigli takes us firmly into anthropologi-
cal territory by citing Lévi-Strauss on myth, reminding us that myth
should be understood not in terms of which version is original, but in
terms of what is felt or believed (1998:287).
Given that the phenomenon of remaking is nearly overdeter-
mined by such a plethora of definitions, what do these diverse views
share? The answer is an acceptance that narrative is something often
reworked, but that the modernist stance on the importance of origi-
nality clouds the issue: in this case that films might well be art even
if they are not “original.” Originality, as several of the writers cited
above argue, depends on the vision of the person doing the remaking.
Remakes are often failures artistically (but not necessarily econom-
ically), yet exceptions remain. Kolker obviously thinks Scorsese’s
remake of Cape Fear (1991) is a brilliant film. It is clear that audiences
have different opinions on Dracula remakes: Was Herzog’s Nosferatu
(1979) better than Murnau’s (1922)? And why was Coppola’s faithful
adaptation of the novel a failure? Is it all in the eye of the beholder?
The impulse to remake, rework, allude to, the building up of permu-
tations results, sometimes, in the creation of something new as in the
teenage heroine Buffy. Mimesis is not just about alterity and copying,
but also about creativity (Taussig 1991). Filmmakers as artists bridge
the gap between what is familiar, known, and understandable, and
the new and not yet understood; the result is something both durable
and fragile, meaningful and yet awaiting the attribution of meaning.
This process is too often ignored in the cacophony of moaning about
the loss of originality in the modern world.
Despite its interest in the subject, no one in Play It Again, Sam
(1998) tackles, in any deep way, this human propensity to tell the
same stories over and over until they become something new. Only
Gabbard (1998:96) attempts to speak to this, noting that if we think
too much about it, there is a danger in reducing all narratives to a sin-
gle narrative. But if we avoid such total deconstruction and stay at the
level of function, perhaps we can posit some interesting possibilities.
I have already noted how the biologist Dennett (2004), for example,
has argued that it is the human ability to narrate that creates our
sense of consciousness; it is our attempt to make experience cohere
into something relatable to others that gives us the sense of being
aware of ourselves. 2 I have noted also that for Bruner (1986:11), nar-
ratives are one way of knowing the world. So everyone tells stories,

Remaking Rashomon 45
narratives, because if we did not, we could not understand our worlds

and life would not make sense. Our lives would not make sense. But,
as any anthropologist can point out, we learn to tell stories by hearing
others’ stories. Our narratives are not absolutely original because we
begin from the building blocks of other narratives. It is a process that
I call parallel identity construction: we learn to make sense of what
is happening or has happened to us because it is just like the story
of—fill in the blank with a fairy tale, film, television program, novel,
news item, or magazine article of your choice. We also learn to make
sense of things in terms of what they are not like—narratives, while
relying on the familiar, simultaneously inscribe difference as Wills
(1998) so vehemently argues for foreign film remakes. I would push
his argument further—in a parallel to the process of national identity
construction—we all need a story to tell, but to avoid being just like
the person or nation next door, there has to be difference as well. It
is easy then, to analyze retellings in terms of making difference—and
part of the sociology of globalization has come to focus on this, to
look at how the local reinterprets the global. Global ideology does
not triumph in any simple, straightforward, linear, or predictable
way. However, and this is where film remakes are interesting, there is
also an underlying assumption of sameness, of something shared, that
makes the telling again possible—this could be called narrative plau-
sibility.3 Parts or elements of a story are repeated because they mean
something to us in the first place, they make sense in terms of a shared
experience as in the example of Rashomon having added meaning
for postwar European audiences. Thus, it is important in the case of
Kurosawa and his remakes to not just to look at what has changed,
but also at what seems to remain the same.
As noted in chapter one, at the heart of this discussion is the debate
on translation. In anthropology, post-structuralist theory raises the
issue of the impossibility of understanding: by the time we have
reworded in English, for example, a Japanese explanation of kinship
terms—we seem to have lost something or perhaps created something
fictitious (cf. Clifford and Marcus 1986). What we have not done, so
this deconstructivist argument would have it, is actually to explain
anything. Through interpretation and analysis we change the original,
we get it wrong, we assert the dominance of our culture, our language.
All such critiques have a point and plausibility about them—but they
equally ignore the very empirical reality that human beings do man-
age to communicate. If we do not accept this possibility, we have to
end by assuming, as Ricoeur put it: “that misunderstanding is a right,

that translation is theoretically impossible and that bilinguals have to

be schizophrenics” (2006:15).
While clear communication remains an issue about which literary
theorists argue (cf. Derrida 1985), it does seem to happen. Something
like a shared social reality is created, even if we all experience it dif-
ferently—if it were not shared, we would all exist in a state of autism:
happy to play with blue pebbles but incapable of “reading” even the
expression on others’ faces.4 Instead, most of us express ourselves
through narratives that begin from the building blocks of the old,
but we aim to inscribe the difference that constitute our selves by
telling stories we assume will make sense to others. Kurosawa under-
stood this well and the subjectivity of experience is at the core of what
makes Rashomon a great film.
So what happens when a film director attempts to remake a clas-
sic? Or attempts to allude to a classic, pay homage to it, satirize it, or
parody it? These become acts of both interpretation and of making
something new. There is a pleasure in recognizing the similarity and
then acknowledging the new, that which is our own.
The core of this process remains the possibility of translation. Not
accurately so, but somehow truthfully so. The problem might appear
to be in producing a faithful translation, which as I have already
argued, is not the same thing as a word-for-word translation. For
example, let us consider Japanese folk tales, which, as my son assured
me when he was eleven, are not very interesting—they are all rather
samey, they all seem to have ancient grandparents, who are poor and
need to be helped. It is precisely when encountering “alien” stories
that the reader might find the need to fall back on analyzing struc-
tures (Lévi-Strauss 1963), archetypes (Jung 1990), or similarities in
plot (Propp 1968) in order to grasp what is at the core of different
narratives. Once this is done, you may end, as did my son, by saying:
“I see, it’s like the woman who wishes for more and more riches!” Yet
one famous Japanese tale needs no such deep textual analysis: Little
One Inch seems to exist in a variety of versions around the globe—
Tom Thumb being one example.
Not all stories are easy to translate then, but others seem to find
their way around the world or are created in some parallel way
(Cinderella as well as Tom Thumb being obvious examples). One
manner in which this appears to be possible is to look at the simi-
larities of human experience. Every human being has some memory
of being small and having to be resourceful in the light of this, hence
stories about tiny children. The meaning that is translatable then is

not to be found simply in structure, or characters, or even plots, but

in our innate understanding of each of these elements in terms of our
own experience: they seem to be plausible. If we have not experienced
such events directly, our experience as it is shaped by other narra-
tives forms a social memory that allows for empathy. Young Western
Europeans and North Americans have not personally experienced the
Nazi era, but have been exposed to so many narratives on the theme
told to them in so many forms that, perhaps, they understand the
situation. 5 Retellings allow us to imagine all the ways in which we
might live through diverse experiences, even when they seem to do
little more than reassure us of our difference. Reiterations, then,
create meanings and symbols that are widely recognized, although,
paradoxically, analyzing them throws up a plethora of differences.
Yet without the underlying sense of shared meaning, there could be
no possible interaction with others; we would be back playing with
blue pebbles. That this does not happen tells us something about the
human desire to understand and share meanings.
Remaking Rashomon
What is fascinating about the film Rashomon is that in its wake the
term “rashomon” has entered the English language as a description
of a certain type of plot as well as a description for subjectivity. If a
story is told from more than one point of view and told mainly in
flashback, then the film is labeled as rashomon-like or is seen to be
using the “rashomon technique.” There is often, however, a great dif-
ference between the original film6 and its descendents: generally, the
rashomon-like films or, in one case, television series, offer the audience
a final version of the truth. Kurosawa, basing his film on Akutagawa
Ryûnosuke’s stories, never offers us a final definitive “true” version of
the events. This significant difference, I have argued, has much to do
with the historical moment in which the film was made, as well as in
Kurosawa’s personal interest in Dostoevsky’s work.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the powerful European reception of
Rashomon, it was in the United States that the first attempts to make
a version of the film occurred. Initially, there was a play, Rashomon
(1959), written by Michael Kanin and Fay Mitchell, who claimed to
have gone back to the original Akutagawa stories. This became a tele-
vision play directed by Sidney Lumet in 1960 (with Ricardo Montalban
as the bandit)7 and was made into a film directed by Martin Ritt in
1964. The film, called The Outrage, acknowledges Kurosawa’s and

Hashimoto Shinobu’s original screenplay—conceding that the play

by the Kanins was actually close to being a “translation” of the film.8
However, like many remakes of Kurosawa films, the film places the
action in the West, near the Mexican-American border. This is so fre-
quent an event in the remakes of Kurosawa’s samurai films that it is
worth considering to some extent here.
When Kurosawa made a historical film, it often dealt with mod-
ern topics—as Richie notes about Rashomon, “he is holding up a
mirror” (1996:76) to society—but in a manner that made the subject
universal rather than, as it might be expected, Japan-specific. That
is, by raising the subject within the context of the past, Kurosawa
seems to be examining the way in which certain issues appear to per-
sist throughout time. Is this the same when a filmmaker transposes
a film’s action to the American West? I will ask this question, again,
for Sergio Leone’s work, which, since he was Italian, merits a differ-
ent answer. At the moment, the question is why does Hollywood take
stories set in the Japanese past and transpose them to not just the U.S.
West’s past, but to a past that takes place on its borders? One possible
answer is that the liberties Kurosawa takes with Japan’s history (he
was a very careful historian in many ways, but also acknowledged
the anachronistic elements in his screenplays) allowed him to use the
past as a sort of mythic resource. It is not just the place where cer-
tain Japanese events occurred, but also a sort of dream space—and
dreams were very important to Kurosawa’s work—where all sorts of
possibilities could be explored. In Rashomon, this dream space makes
it possible for four versions of the truth to exist. The American West
has much of this mythic quality about it—it often represents U.S.
history and values as people wish they were rather than as they actu-
ally were (the negative representation of Native Americans in many
pre-1970s films being a case in point). But if depictions of the West
are, because of their “imbrication with the very idea of ‘America’ and
‘Americanness’ ” (Buscombe and Pearson 1998:3), history as peo-
ple would have liked it to have been, the borderlines, the Hispanic
space, is a far more fantastic place altogether. The filmmaker Robert
Rodriguez has openly acknowledged this when discussing his own
work in Mexico: “Anything goes there—it’s so cool” (in Hodkinson
interview 2001).
In the borderlands, the bad guys may be more evil because they
are, clearly through their dress and accents, foreign, they can be also,
in many films, just a little bit less frightening. They are far away,
they are somewhat ridiculous, their villainy extends to actions not

normally associated with the West’s villains, many of whom have, by

an interesting process that can only occur in myths, been transformed
into heroes. The Mexican villain is not quite white, but not a “primi-
tive” Indian either—and if need be, he can be eloquent on the subject
of his evil motives. This last becomes very important in the light of
a play, then a film, based on Kurosawa’s Rashomon. While it could
be argued that it is a Japanese aspect of the film that no one explains
their psychological motivations to any great extent, it is probably best
to accept Kurosawa’s own explanation that he wanted to return to
the glory days of silent film when making Rashomon. The master-
ful visual style and powerful music are meant to make the audience
aware of the characters’ feelings in the film, but do not translate to
the stage. In theatre it is not easy to show a hot day, so the characters
have to tell us it is a hot day. This verbosity in the play is carried over
into a film that, ironically, also tries to duplicate the visual power of
the original.9
The Outrage takes the Japanese story, set in the early medieval era
and transports it to the late-nineteenth-century Mexican-American
border. It turns the samurai couple into Southern gentry (Laurence
Harvey and Claire Bloom) come to try and make a new life after the
Civil War and converts the woodcutter into a prospector (Howard
da Silva), the commoner into a con man (Edward G. Robinson), and
the priest into a preacher (William Shatner). The bandit is played by
Paul Newman, who might well have been able to reduplicate some of
Mifune’s animalistic sensuality if he had not been saddled by the need
to play a Mexican bandit. Newman’s performance is well worth com-
paring to Mifune’s. In the original film the bandit is almost naked as
he lies sweltering in the heat of the summer, sheltering beneath a tree,
when he first sees the couple. A puff of air blows away the woman’s
veil, he sees her face, and wants her—nothing might have happened
if not for that breeze he tells us. The audience sees Mifune’s reaction
to the sight of the woman in a fairly long shot: sunlight falls through
the trees onto him, looking, as he sometimes could, stunningly hand-
some. As Richie tells us in the Criterion introduction to the DVD ver-
sion of Rashomon, Kurosawa is very clever here: as the couple move
around and Mifune shifts to follow their passing, the hilt of his sword
pops up, leaving us in no doubt about his desire. Moreover, the brute
sexuality that Mifune manages to exude is important, for this makes
it possible that a samurai woman might well be seduced by such an
animal, giving into his embrace rather than being forced. It is not only
Masago’s hand, then, dropping the dagger and reaching up to touch

the bandit’s head that plants doubt in the audience’s mind about her
version of the story, but also Mifune’s animal magnetism—he might
well seduce any woman he encounters. Fans of Paul Newman would
no doubt argue that he also possessed this sex appeal, but it is not
apparent in this role. Dressed in various layers of Mexican “bandit’s”
clothing (he looks like a poor Mariachi musician) with a huge hat, it
is hard to see what there is about him that is seductive. That this is
a problem with the role and not Paul Newman is made clear by the
script resorting to having the conman describe him as a sort of brute
force of nature who seduces women all the time.
The question is, why make the bandit a foreigner? What was
Martin Ritt trying to achieve with this switch from the original
where, although an outcaste from society, the bandit is as Japanese as
the couple? Is this an attempt, in the early 1960s, to try and say some-
thing about race in the United States? It seems telling that the couple
are Southern gentry and the wife appears to fall into the category of
the Southern belle who might secretly be tempted by a man who is
not white. But if this is a weak, if well-meaning liberal, attempt to
speak to some cross-racial attraction, The Outrage pulls back from
this possibility by introducing the issue of class as well as ethnicity.
Not class/caste in the sense in which it occurs in the original where
we have a wide range of class positions presented—and perhaps this
is the problem, for by the 1960s Americans were already seeing them-
selves as essentially classless, so that a poor woodcutter becomes a
prospector who might well someday strike it rich; and an ordinary if
poor common man becomes a travelling conman—but a class differ-
ence between the husband and wife. She is not, it seems, a typical hys-
terical Southern belle, but the daughter of a seamstress, “white trash”
as the husband calls her in his version of the story. The doubt, planted
in our minds in Rashomon by Mifune’s sexiness and Kyô’s drifting
hand, is here intensified by an argument that the husband and wife
have across her and his version of events. In fact, her class difference is
so obvious, it seems, that the bandit falls for her, knowing she is more
of a woman than an effete man like Harvey can handle. This interest-
ing shift would appear to be an attempt to deal with the ambiguity of
Masago in the original story.
We never get to the bottom of the Japanese woman; she is—in
contrast to Mellen’s assertion that she is the last complete portrayal
of a woman Kurosawa was to film (1976)—the most elusive of
Kurosawa’s portrayals of women. He, interestingly enough, was a film
director who wrote and made films involving a wide range of female

stereotypes: stoic, cheerful young girls (The Most Beautiful, One

Wonderful Sunday); loyal and, ultimately tough, women (No Regrets
for our Youth, Record of a Living Being, Seven Samurai, The Lower
Depths, Red Beard); good wives and mothers (Yojimbo, Sanjuro);
scheming and possibly evil (Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, Ran); women
who have made peace with their lives (Ran, Rhapsody in August), or
even heroic in the most literal sense (The Hidden Fortress). However
Masago is someone about whom we are never sure, and this is in
part not only because of the story, but also because of Kyô’s powerful
portrayal. We never know if she swoons when Mifune embraces her,
dropping the dagger and, unconsciously, reaching up to touch him as
if he were he lover; or if she is very conscious and willingly gives in to
this man who is more immediately powerful than her husband. This
moment in the film is never retold or shown again, we are left with it
as a given fact—this is how the rape happened. She portrays herself as
“just a weak woman” in her version of events, hinting that there was
nothing she could do—as a mere woman her life has always been in
the hands of men. Why not assume, as the bandit says she did, that
her only chance at life after the rape was to go with whichever man
won her in a battle? Given the constraints of a woman’s life in medi-
eval and modern Japan, it makes it very possible that she wanted to
die; or that she wanted to run off with the bandit; or even that she
hated both men—the bandit for the rape and her husband for hav-
ing been so easily tricked—and so goaded them into fighting. Any of
these is a possibility for a woman in a society where legally she could
only exist as someone’s daughter, wife, or mother. To be rejected by
both men leaves her with only two recourses: to die or become a nun.
That she is worthy of pity, whatever her motivations or true actions,
seems important, it remains the priest’s impression of her.10
It might be that the recasting of Masago as a Southern belle is an
attempt to pick up on this point—that in the American South women
were more at the mercy of men, unable to carve out roles for them-
selves as individuals, than women on the East coast or in pioneer
communities (where they also could be, we assume, spinsters, wid-
ows, or whores). However, to introduce the class difference, as The
Outrage does, seems to add another dimension to the story: it takes
an unsolved mystery—what did the woman really do and say?—and
points us toward a solution. Of course she lied, the woman is, after
all, “white trash,” a passionate woman who married for money and
position and is now trapped in a (loveless) marriage to an ex-solider
who fought on the losing side. All four versions of the story add

details to this representation: the bandit who tells us that he sensed

her passion; the woman herself who describes her husband’s disdain
for her as longstanding, not just because of the rape, but pre-dating
it; the husband who claims she was always flirting with other men;
and the prospector who tells us that she called her husband a coward.
All these details about the couple’s life just are not there in the orig-
inal. It is as if the U.S. version could not bear to leave the woman’s
motives open to our interpretations—a mystery, subject to others’
assumptions—she has to add up to something more.
There may well have been a feminist side to this portrayal, Faye
Mitchell and her husband were well known for having written vari-
ous screenplays with strong female main characters, but this attempt
to understand the woman’s actions in terms of class and the sexual
politics of a marriage gone wrong robs the story of the power that
not-knowing gives it. It also speaks to a modern dilemma often con-
fronting women who are, unfortunately, raped; the tacit assumption
that they must have, in some way, deserved it. However sexist 1950s
Japan was, Kurosawa’s film does not offer this as the core truth of
the film. By making the state of the marriage the subject of all the
confessions, The Outrage makes the woman not a possible victim,
but somehow complicit. In fact, when the prospector tells us his ver-
sion and, pushed by the conman, also admits that he stole the dagger
(something we never know for sure about the woodcutter) because he
has so many children and so little money, we believe him to be basi-
cally an honest man. His version, in which the woman forces the men
to fight by insulting them both, is now marked out as the final, true
version—we know what happened now, despite the preacher’s calm
acceptance that we can’t ever know truth.
In terms of why this remake of the Japanese film, I have been
unable to find anything by either the writers or the director to give
us a sense of their motivations. It may have been an attempt to get at
the universality of the story by showing how it might have happened
somewhere other than Japan, although this is undermined by the
move to that other exotic imagined space—the Western borderlands.
Yet the basic assumption that the story was translatable might explain
why the main roles were recast as stereotypes, rather than against
type as Kurosawa so subtly did. The preacher who has lost his faith,
the cynical conman, the downtrodden prospector, the Mexican ban-
dit, the effete Southern gentleman, and his unhappy hysterical wife—
they are all stock characters in Westerns. Perhaps this version exists
because the original was so great a work of cinema that it demanded

its translation into a version without subtitles, as Wills (1998) argues

for U.S. remakes of French films. Possibly—but it was a wordy stage
play first. The remake might be a response to the original as read by
the critic Davidson (1987), who posits the woman and her husband as
Japan, both violated by the foreign-seeming bandit and the final scene
with the baby as representing hope for the nation’s future. By mak-
ing the woman responsible in The Outrage, a point might be being
made about Japan as represented by the lovely Kyô Machiko. This
last, rather interesting, possibility can only work if we were to know
what the Kanins thought of the original.
For the moment, we are left with a mystery—what in 1960s U.S.
society required this theatrical and filmic remake? It seems not to
comment in any way on the censorship of the McCarthy hearings
(Martin Ritt had been blacklisted); there is nothing to hint at U.S.
experiences of Korea, or in the film, of early Vietnam, so the possi-
bility of it being a comment on subjective and wider political truths
seems remote. It is not a revisionist Western; there already had been
a few, but the great era of reinventing the West was not to happen
for a few years more. It is not really about race in the end although it
is about class and inappropriate marriages; the portrayal of the wife
seems to owe much to Tennessee Williams. Yet the film pre-dates the
feminist revolution that arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so if
it points to a cultural unease about the state of marriage and the posi-
tion of women, it is somewhat prescient.
The more convincing possibility, to my mind, is that the film is
nothing more than a desire to offer a solution to the original’s enigma
and what subject is considered to be more enigmatic than a woman?
But a feminist reading leaves us with this as the film’s own outrage:
the implication that it is all the wife’s fault. If there is sexual tension
in the marriage, caused by infidelity and guilt, the focus has shifted
from all human guilt to that of modern women’s—an interesting view
to take in 1965 American society.
A Japanese-American Romance
One more possible reason for the 1960s remake of Rashomon was
that the United States had begun, once again, to admire the art of
Japan. Johnson (1988) outlines the various ups and downs of the U.S.
love-hate relationship, as it could be put, with things Japanese. The
recasting of the Japanese as “good” guys and our “allies” occurred
quite strongly during the Vietnam War era and there is no doubt that

the work of Kurosawa, generally admired by U.S. critics, and seen as

box office success if remade by Hollywood, helped this process along.
This makes the 1991 remake of the Akutagawa story as Iron Maze by
the Japanese director/producer Hiroaki Yoshida an interesting con-
trast to Ritt’s admiring homage to Kurosawa’s film.
The year 1991, just before the burst of the economic bubble that
had made Japan the most powerful country on the planet, saw the tail
end of an era of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States that had
been apparent from the late 1970s. Not only were the Japanese aware
of this feeling, it could be argued, they were pleased at this sign that
they had made it. Buying up U.S. property and even a Hollywood stu-
dio, the Japanese business elite seemed not to care what the Americans
thought or felt—or so the United States thought, and this is clearly
expressed in Crichton’s Rising Sun, which was later made into an
even more orientalist film by Ridley Scott (1993).
Iron Maze is a television production backed by, among others,
Oliver Stone. The title refers to a moribund steel mill near Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, very much rundown and on its last legs, which is bought
by a Japanese conglomerate. Sent to close the deal is the boss’ son,
Sugita (Murakami Hiroaki), who arrives with his blond American
wife, Chris (Bridget Fonda), in tow. This is what we learn from the
story told by Mayor Peluso (John Randolph), related in flashback just
after the opening scene in which Sugita’s body is discovering lying—
lit by a very beautiful ray of sunlight falling through the tumbledown
roof (perhaps the only real visual reference to Kurosawa)—in the steel
mill. All the U.S. dislike and fears about the Japanese are revealed
in this story; not only are the Japanese buying up U.S. landmarks
and businesses, they are also taking American women. Worse, Sugita,
against the wishes of his father and business partners as well as the
Americans, wants to tear down the mill to build an amusement park.
The sense that the United States has been reduced to Japan’s play-
ground could not be stronger in Iron Maze. Everyone, as it says in the
film’s trailer, has a motive for killing Sugita.
The film’s writing credits, however, refer not to some modern
U.S. crime novel, but to Akutagawa’s short story (Yoshida and Tim
Metcalfe are credited with the screen story and Metcalfe with the
screenplay). The tale quickly segues into “In a Grove” territory: first
to confess to the murder is Barry Mikowski (Jeff Fahey), a former
steel worker who works in the Pittsburgh hotel where Sugita and his
wife were staying. Caught by the Sheriff, Jack Ruhle (J.T. Walsh), he
tells of his encounters with the couple. During the confession, Chris

Sugita rings from her car phone and appears to confirm the story—
Barry raped her she says and then killed her husband. Barry denies
raping her and tells a story of a growing romance between them just
before Chris rings back and admits that she lied about the rape. She
tells a tale of an unhappy marriage. Her husband, handsome and
cultured in Japan, is, in the United States, boorish, drinking too
much and cruel to her. The narrative takes many twists and turns,
finally resolving itself when a badly injured but not dead Sugita tells
a story that, interwoven with Chris’s confessing to attempting to kill
him, is marked out as the final version—a version accepted as true
by the Sheriff. The key to the mystery is Barry’s relationship with a
young boy, Mikey (Gabriel Damon) to whom he is a sort of foster
father.
It could be said that the film is, at the core, an exploration of male
rivalry. This is not just a story of business competition gone wrong, but
of wounded male pride: the Mayor’s whose promises of new work in a
new steel mill to the unemployed men of the area turn out to be empty;
of Barry who has lost his children and wife when he lost his highly paid
job in the mill, but who can still woo Sugita’s wife away from him;
and of Sugita who not only loses his wife, but is constantly battling
his father who does not believe in his vision of an amusement park.
The Sheriff, to whom everyone lies, has his pride as well. “Everyone’s
always asking me that,” he protests at the end of the film. “First they
lie to me, then they ask me what I’m going to do about it.”
The film’s ending is interesting and just as misogynist as that of
The Outrage. Chris leaves Sugita and returns home to her small
American town and clearly working-class life, while the building of
the amusement park goes ahead. The last shot of the film is of Sugita,
Barry, and Mikey, playfully throwing stones at the crane that is dis-
mantling the old mill; all boys happy together, the tension created by
the presence of a woman resolved, and business problems solved. The
message seems to be that the United States is happy to do business
with Japan as long as it is on an equal footing and that no one tries to
run off with their women.
By having the characters tell their tales to a visible judge, in this
case the police officer who is only a minor character in both the
short story and Kurosawa’s film, it can be seen that Yoshida’s version
is not only set in a politically different moment—a moment when
Japan was powerful—but in a psychologically and historically differ-
ent moment as well. Gone is the sense of being judged by an unseen
power, of pleading guilt to a silent and, perhaps, merciless presence,

and in its place we have the ever accessible, friendly, wise figure of
the small town Sheriff. The setting, in this sense, could not be more
American—in the heart of the United States, Pennsylvania, one of the
first states—but also could not be more traditional, the Sheriff being a
key figure in so many Westerns. He is not the hard-boiled private eye
of the film noir—interesting, given that it is in the new wave of film
noir that the convoluted flashback or rashomon technique is most fre-
quently found—but refers to the heroes of the police procedural, films
in which the bad guys are caught through the hard work of honest
cops who employ the logical and fair procedures of the criminal jus-
tice system. The small town cop, in this case, being the more human
and approachable face of the city police (a point made humorously
in the Coen brothers’ Fargo, 1996), is able to take the time to listen
to everyone’s stories before deciding what the truth is. In this sense,
it must be said that the story is fully domesticated into an American
version despite its Japanese director and original story line. Subjective
versions of the truth are but lies that people will eventually recant in
order to finally tell a truth that seamlessly melds into a larger, more
coherent narrative acceptable to all.
There are many ironies in such a reading of Iron Maze. The
notion of egos molded by a rigid society and leading to the subjectiv-
ity of Rashomon’s characters is what Richie finds important in the
Kurosawa film. However, the black joke of everyone pleading guilt in
an era when many Japanese were proclaiming innocence is, as I have
argued, lost in such a reading of the film. While both The Outrage
and Iron Maze play with the notions of sexual guilt and the lies that
married couples tell themselves, each other, and the people around
them, the more general sense of guilt as a condition of humanity
(very Dostoevskian) is missing. What remains however, no matter
how you read Rashomon, is that no one has captured better the curi-
ous fact that all experience is subjective and that a single truth is very
hard to arrive at than Kurosawa. The social construction of reality
as a natural outcome of human interaction seems an impossibility
in light of this fact and yet human beings continue to believe in sin-
gle truths, even in postmodernity. This complex conundrum appears
unacceptable in both the faithful remake of the film, The Outrage,
and its later permutation claiming to be a version of the Akutagawa
story, Iron Maze. Yet, as we shall see, this is not some East/West or
U.S./Japan divide, for the next version of “In a Grove,” a Japanese
television production this time, is closer to the Yoshida film than the
Kurosawa version.

. . . and the Metamorphous into a Revenge Tale

Losing the unseen judge, the court scenes, the very sense of trial, and
possibly, retribution is a tack also taken by Saegusa Kenki’s—who
normally works in Japanese theatre—remake of the film, Misty
(Misuti, 1997). As with the play by the Kanins and Yoshida’s film,
Saegusa and his cowriter, Inoue Yumiko, claim to have gone back to
the original stories by Akutagawa, but of course, they also acknowl-
edge Kurosawa (Yamaguchi 1997). This film is extremely beautiful,
a clear attempt to do in color what Kurosawa and Miyagawa Kazuo,
his cinematographer, did with the shadows and light in black and
white. It was shot on Yakushima, an island that is protected as a
heritage site, and full of amazing landscapes that rival the forest out-
side Nara in which Kurosawa shot Rashomon. According to Richie
(personal communication), a huge indoor set also was built in order
for Saegusa to play with light, in contrast to the “set” for Rashomon
where Kurosawa had to achieve his effects by getting his cast and
crew to cut down trees in the almost virgin forest. If it is possible to
argue that Rashomon uses medieval Japan as a sort of dream time
while filming in a purely realistic manner, Saegusa films the story as
if it were all a dream: there is no larger context that allows us, the
audience, to get to grips with the story’s events. We have no stunned
priest, woodcutter, or commoner as our guides to the narrative, and
so we are left with a sense of having hallucinated everything. Given
the film’s title, Misty, this may be no accident. However, as we shall
see, I think the title could also refer to another film.
The other changes in the story are significant and do not come
from Akutagawa, although they appear to be an elaboration on the
story that is told about the bandit in all versions of the tale except
Iron Maze: he once killed a woman and a girl; in The Outrage these
women become a mother and daughter that he raped. In Rashomon
we are left wondering if this crime is attributed to Tajômaru, but is
not necessarily one that he committed—his boastful reputation lead-
ing to people pinning all wrongs on him. Misty, however, opens with
the brutal rape and killing of a woman, who seems to be a shamaness
dancing with a traditional mirror. This scene is intercut with that of
a child, in theatrical make-up, perhaps also dressed to act as a sha-
man, outside the shrine/hut (it is not clear which it is), literally beating
a masked bandit into the pond. The man goes under the water, but
not before the child has seen a red lizard tattoo on his right arm. The
camera cuts between the rape and murder and the child beating the

bandit in a sequence that is confusing: it is not clear how many men

are involved. The dark opening scene has that sort of nightmarish
quality about it. The voiceover, however, is firm: “My mother was
killed. The Red Lizard killed her. That evening I became all alone.”
From this dark scene we are taken, by a travelling shot, to a beau-
tiful spot by a river. A lovely young woman, Masago (Amami Yuki),
is traveling with a young man, her husband, Takehiro (Kaneshiro
Takeshi). As in The Outrage, it seems, the couple are newly wed and
traveling toward a new life—something that Rashomon does not
indicate. A gang of young children appear and steal all the couple’s
baggage. Eventually we are shown the children gathering in their
camp in the woods, they are part of a gang run by an older man
(Toyokawa Etsushi) who sits in a tree nursing his wounded hand.
This man takes a bit of red cloth the children have stolen and wraps
up his injured hand. Back by the river the husband is washing his
wife’s injured knee. The shot of his hand on her bare legs is meant to
be very sensual but also tender: “Protect me,” she demands of him
at this point. He promises and then starts to undress her. Cut to the
bandit, then to the couple making love in the woods. Somehow the
bandit has found them and spies on them using a mirror that has been
stolen from the woman, he plays with Masago, caressing her hand
with reflected light. She becomes aware of the voyeur and responds,
moving her hand, letting the light catch up with it, while her husband
remains unaware, on top of her.
Much is made in the film of the play of light, and the mirror is espe-
cially important. Mirrors are very symbolic in Shinto religion, they
were one of the three jewels given by the original deities to the ancient
Japanese; mirrors can also be shintai, or receptacles in which the deity
can manifest itself. This is an interesting shift from Kurosawa’s ver-
sion where Buddhism is so dominant. Even the original story includes
not only a priest but the idea of the woman looking like a bodhisattva
(in the story the bandit says she looks like one to him). The link in
Misty to ancient Shinto mythology is reinforced by the film’s sense of
timelessness. Rather than being of a specific time, the setting—the
forest and river—is somehow primeval; the children are like some
feral society of primitives; and eventually a troupe of bizarre traveling
artists will stumble upon the murder scene. We seem to have moved
from a bad dream to a mythic ur-time or even theatrical time within
the film. Saegusa might well want us to see all three of these liminal
spaces as the same; in doing this, however, the story loses much of its
force. It is no longer about events that might happen to any innocent

traveler gone astray in the forest, it becomes a story about this partic-
ular young couple who find themselves in a very special place.
And the events drag themselves out. A night passes, it is the next
day before the couple encounter the bandit face-to-face as he comes
through the forest, the mirror flashing in his hand. “Give it back,”
demands Masago. Rather than return the mirror, the bandit plays
with it until the husband draws his sword and the two men fight,
standing knee deep in water. The fight eventually takes the men out
of the water and into the forest, chased by the woman. Just when it
seems that Takehiro has won, a flight of birds startles him. The cam-
era cuts from the birds to the husband, fallen. Then a pan down to
show that he has been bound. Masago reaches for the sword to defend
herself and tells the bandit “Die”.
In the next scene a group of travelers find Takehiro, now dead.
They examine the body and realize that a child is watching them.
They chase the child, catch it, and find a severed hand. Then, another
cut to the interior of a fire lit room, it is night and raining. A nun
speaks to the young woman, reassuring her and saying that she does
not need to talk of the terrible events if she does not want to. The girl
insists on telling her story: “That man wasn’t human, he was a beast.
He raped me, he also violated the heart of my lord.”11 Her rape, as
she tells it, takes place in the rain, the sky dark, the wind blowing as
she loses her fight to resist the bandit. After her violation she finds the
sword again, cuts her husband free and touches his face. He rejects
her, she weeps and he suggests that they commit double suicide. She
refuses, but he puts the sword into her hand and takes a dagger in his.
He forces her to agree and she kills him, but he fails to wound her as
he dies: “He didn’t take me with him.”
Looking out at the night sky, the scene shifts to the bandit, in a
prison cell: “I killed him,” he says. In his version, the wind is blow-
ing and autumnal leaves are falling, but it is not raining. As in the
Akutagawa story and the Kurosawa film, in the bandit’s version
the woman tells him he must fight: one of the men has to win her. The
men fight, but not wholeheartedly; the bandit keeps seeing the woman
in place of the husband fighting him. Finally he kills the husband.
The third version is told to the travelers by the child who found
the samurai before he died (as a medicine man finds the husband in
The Outrage) and hears the story from the almost dead man. In this
version the sky is full of thunder and lightning, if it is raining, no one
seems to be getting wet (in contrast to Masago’s version where she
ends up bedraggled); his wife only resists the bandit for a little bit

before she gives in and walks away to lie down. “Please close your
eyes,” she says to him, “I’ll close my eyes . . . it will be as if I’m being
held by you.” But he watches while they make love and, in between
flashes of lightning, she appears to be caressing the man. The child
says: “The samurai said ‘I saw it all. I didn’t keep my promise to my
wife. I saw hell.’ ” At the end, the bandit asks the woman what to do,
and she cuts her husband free. She asks him: “What shall we do?”
“Forget it,” replies the husband. She argues against this and gets him
to agree to a double suicide, it would be the only way to forget it. He
stabs himself and hears her calling him “dear” as he lies dying.
It is the next morning before we hear the final version. The travelers
are taking the bandit, the woman, and the child to the city where they
will be taken before a judge who will try them. As far as they can tell,
everyone has been “Telling lies.” They begin their journey and when
they reach the river where all the events began, they stop. The bandit
accuses the child of being wrong: “The samurai lied, I killed him.”
The child says that he couldn’t have since his hand was wounded—he
didn’t have the strength to kill the man. The woman suddenly real-
izes that his right arm is in a sling and touches the stump. She says:
“I loved my man, he died, this man killed him.” She runs away, the
bandit escapes his captors and runs after her, they end by fighting in
the river, the bandit beating her, one-handed, until the other men drag
him away. The scene cuts to her lying in a pool of light; “My loved one
died,” she says “My beloved was killed.”
We are taken back to the men fighting in the forest, she has the
sword that she puts down and, going to the bandit, she lifts his red-
wrapped hand and looks at it. She kisses him. The tied up husband
is bewildered as he watches. Masago puts the bandit’s hand on her
body and then takes his face in her hands. She kisses him again,
kisses his hand, and slowly unwraps the bandage to look at the tat-
too of the red lizard there. A red camellia flows down a river12 and
the bandit and Masago are naked in a shadowy woods, making love.
When it is over, the bandit leaves, the wife cuts Takehiro’s bonds and
he says: “You had to do that to save us. Let’s go. We’re alive.” He
sits her down and tries to clean her dirty feet: “You got dirty. Don’t
worry about it.” He obsessively rubs at her feet while she begs him
to stop. When he does not, she takes the sword, and with one thrust,
kills him. A green light falls on her face, she weeps in the present.
Then back to the story. She screams, a scream exactly like that of
the child who beat the bandit at the opening of the film. The bandit,

standing in the river, hears the cry and sees the camellia going by. He
cuts off his own hand.
Now the bandit is in another prison cell, he is given a last meal.
There is a shot of a spider falling from its own web, and a red light
falls on the bandit. He smiles as the music from the sex scene wells up.
He thinks of the woman, walking against a purplish light. She turns
to the camera and smiles.
I have gone into rather more detail with this film than the others
because, true to Kurosawa’s own version, it is an intensely visual nar-
rative. There is little dialogue and lots of symbolism, but, as already
noted above, it is mostly Shinto symbolism. It is as if Saegusa wanted
to be sure that his version was fully Japanese, a film that could not be
accused of pandering to the West in its telling. The other obvious dif-
ference from the original is that the woman tells her story twice and
the second time we are led to believe that she is telling the truth. Her
mother was killed by Red Lizard; somehow, although she saw only a
masked man that night, she senses something about this bandit. His
bandaged hand fascinates her and she takes the first opportunity to
unwrap and examine it. The story becomes not so much about sub-
jective interpretations of reality—although there is much of that with
the changing weather in each version—but a tale of vengeance. She
kills her ineffectual husband who did not keep his promise to protect
her and who seems to have been driven mad, his heart broken by
witnessing the lovemaking, and blames it on the bandit. In the mean-
time the bandit, true to his character, is already boasting of having
killed the man. We can only speculate as to why he cut off his own
hand—some impulse to symbolize his emasculation by the woman
who appears to have strange powers? The story seems to be full of
what Barrett (1989) has called Japanese archetypes—the avenging
woman being one of these. Rather than deconstructing the characters
as Kurosawa subtly does, Saegusa and Inoue give them to us as rather
one-dimensional young people. The husband is young and madly in
love, while the bandit is dark and brooding, nothing indicates that he
is a coward. The wife seems silly, with her mystical mutterings about
the mirror, but in the end she seems to have something of demonic
about her.
If the story is meant to be a sort of mythic dance, it does not quite
achieve this. We are also left with many unanswered questions: Why
does she take so long to work out who the bandit is? Why does not she
kill him? We get some indication of why she killed her poor husband,
but was this necessary in order to set up the bandit? Why does the

bandit cut off his hand? More to the point, why does the woman tell
two different versions of the story? The first one, to the nun, comes
after being told that she does not have to talk—is it meant to be a
rehearsal of her lies? As with The Outrage we are left with a film that
hinges on the character of the young woman, but we do not really
know who she is—Southern white trash is a more detailed descrip-
tion of the character in the Outrage than we get in Misty. The fact
of her mother’s death is terrible, but does it justify the death of her
husband? It is as if she is the murderous woman from Play Misty for
Me (Eastwood 1971)—another film in which a woman kills men,
although in this case it is because they reject her.13 If the film is meant
to portray the female as timeless, enigmatic, dangerous, and beyond
human ken, it manages this to some extent, but why bother?
One answer to this question has to do with a Japan that both
has greatly changed from the postwar era country Kurosawa tried
to represent, and yet which continues to hold onto some notion of
“ancient” continuities. Despite many changes to society and equal
rights for women being updated constantly in the law, Japan remains
a deeply gendered society in which women are more often than not
represented in the mass media as sexual objects; they exist only as
the subjects of men’s fantasies. Misty is not much of an observa-
tion of this trend, although there are other films, such as Audition
(Oudishion, Takashi Mike 2000), which clearly do comment on this
state of affairs. While the female producer of the film, Ibiza Nape,
and its female cowriter, Inoue, both make claims for the strength and
pride of Misty’s heroine (Yamaguchi 1997:118–119), in fact the film
seems to fall into the very trap offered to us by more male-centered
films: full of gratuitous sex scenes, it presents the woman as both
willing sexual victim and terrifying aggressor. Yet no amount of mak-
ing the woman an active avenger can make the film feminist in any
sense—the killing of the young husband is totally unnecessary, she
could have walked away. If, because of his wounded hand, the bandit
could not have killed anyone, Masago could have killed him herself.
But she lets him go and later, she lets him beat her—another favorite
theme in Japanese sex fantasies. As a revenge film it seems to have its
priorities all mixed up.
Moreover, the sense of responsibility, of guilt, in which Kurosawa
implicates the audience as voyeurs, in Misty applies only to the bandit
who sits brooding in a tree if that—it is no longer a communal sense
of responsibility in which all of us partake. Without the court, there
is no sense of a higher authority, the audience actually becomes the

judge, but what is there to judge? If the Red Lizard killed her mother,
then the woman is avenged. But we have no idea why the man became
a bandit in the first place. Have some events or the inequalities of
society made him into a man who not only robs but rapes and kills
women? In the Kurosawa film we know that it is a time of great
upheaval and poverty, the sort of time when men turn to crime, but
this does not seem to be so for Misty. If circumstances have not made
the Red Lizard, perhaps he is meant to be all men. If so, we are talk-
ing of “rape” and its consequences in its purest sense. It is almost as
if Saegusa took Kurosawa at his sardonic word—when asked why the
film was so successful, Kurosawa said: “Well, you see . . . it’s about this
rape” (Richie 1987:11). Saegusa makes the film about the rape and
murder of Masago’s mother (who in the original short story is very
much alive and testifies in court), and the consequences take years to
make themselves felt—although in a weird example of filmic time,
the bandit seems to be not much older than the couple he encounters.
The original film was not just about a rape, but about how this was
experienced by all the people involved in the events and these people
are clearly members of a feudal society that is in turmoil. We know
nothing about the world outside the lovely forest in Saegusa’s film.
Misty tries to achieve the original film’s subjectivity by changing
the weather in each retelling, yet this simple ploy does not achieve
what Kurosawa managed to do: in the same place, with the same
light, everyone still thought something different had happened. That
is the secret of subjectivity—we can point to hard facts that are incon-
testable and yet read them in very different ways. In Misty even the
hard fact of the weather is contestable. This may well be an attempt to
be postmodern—externalizing the internal state of the characters—
but since we know that our inner states do not affect the weather,
it is pure fantasy and, being fantasy, the horrific story is robbed of
all its power. Perhaps everything in the film is a dream? Perhaps all
the characters are really Shinto gods enacting some primordial event?
The mirror and rainbowed light (rainbows also being important sym-
bols in Shinto) hint at this, for, despite the dominant imagery of the
mirror, this is not a story that holds up a mirror to modern Japanese
society. That it could have done this—it could have been about men’s
attitudes toward women and how patriarchal principles embedded in
society make women resort to all sorts of strategies in order to sur-
vive (one possible reading of Rashomon that seems to have inspired
The Outrage)—seems a sadly missed opportunity. But set in this
mythic, timeless place, this is not the main message of the film. It is

all brilliant surface, very beautiful to look at and somehow as empty

as a music video.
That Misty might appeal to a more superficial generation is borne
out by a conversation with the feminist historian Hayakawa Noriyo.
She told me that while Kurosawa’s film might not have reflected the
views of all Japanese in 1951, since many people felt themselves to
be victims of the prewar government and somehow exonerated by
this fact, a film about a general sense of guilt would not even make
sense to the current youth of Japan—especially as a sort of postwar
sentiment. When she starts to give her lectures on Japan and the war,
Hayakawa notes, most of her university students think she is referring
to the Gulf War or the Vietnam War and are very confused by the idea
of Japan having a role in these events! Japanese school history books,
famously, are ambiguous about the Second World War. Misty is a
film aimed at a generation who feel no particular shame about their
lives and who, as a result of a long economic recession, are more into
escapist fantasy than ever. Old Japanese folktales are often mined for
such fantastic tales and Saegusa and Inoue may well have gone back
beyond the Akutagawa original stories to Heian (794–1185 CE) tales
about all the supernatural doings that went on by the Rashô gate.
What is interesting, in comparison to the original film, is that the
Saegusa version insists on presenting us with a final solution and if
anyone is guilty it is men who rape and kill as well as the men who
are too weak to protect their women, leaving honorable revenge in
the hands of women. Despite being into escapist fantasy that often
involves convoluted plot lines that can take years to work themselves
out (cf. Standish 1998), the current generation of Japan, it seems, are
just as uncomfortable with the idea of reality as subjective and truth
as unattainable, as are the supposedly more objective Westerners. In
short, no remake of Rashomon or version of “In a Grove” appears to
tackle head on the murkiness of the heart, which, as Kurosawa put it
“goes astray.” However, strangely enough, it is two comic permuta-
tions on the Rashomon theme that appear to achieve this best, as we
shall see in the next chapter.

5
The Battle of the Sexes: Or, the One Scenario
when Subjectivity is Acceptable
“What is truth?”
—Les Girls1
Introduction
The woman as the key to understanding the story is not something
Kurosawa offers as a solution. For him the problem was “the human
heart.” But it could be argued that it is the woman who translates—
after a manner—and transcends in many versions of Rashomon.
Perhaps this is a result of something that many societies still seem
to have in common, an inability to understand or accurately portray
women in works of art. This theme of women and their unknowable
motivations are at the core of the comic versions of the film. So it can
be argued that it is the two films considered in this chapter—Cukor’s
Les Girls (1957), and the Italian film, Quante volte . . . Quella Notte
(Bava 1972)—that seem truer to Kurosawa’s point about the human
heart than do the more faithful remakes, despite the fact that the plots
of both films only resemble the original in terms of some of their nar-
rative structure. This narrative resemblance is what I chose to call a
permutation: it contains changes that lead to great difference, but the
relationship with the original remains obvious.2
It is also worth noting again that among the first attempts to try
to make something like Rashomon occurred not only in the United
States, but also that this attempt was a musical comedy about the
relationship between men and women. That reality is subjective, then,

seemed an apt point to make in 1950s United States in terms not of

murder, but of romance, and how it can go wrong.
“Must Be a Shock, After These Years, for

a Chap to Learn the Truth about His Wife”3
The British Film Institute’s press release on a season of George Cukor’s
films noted:
If there is a particular theme running through Cukor’s work, it hinges

on illusion and reality, the theatrical and real life, with plots revolving
round doubles, deceptions, disguise or self-doubt, seized on by biog-
raphers as a metaphor for his own homosexuality. (www.bfi.org.uk/
news/realease/2004.2004-08-12-cukor.pdf)
All these themes appear in Cukor’s Les Girls, which is the story of
how an autobiography written by Lady Sibyl Wren (Fay Kendall)
causes a furor when her old friend Angèle de Croiz (Tania Elg) sues
her for libel, and the resulting trial offers us three versions of what
happened between the dancers of the troupe Les Girls and their
star, Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly). The three variations on love gone
wrong, based on the ambiguous nature of Barry (is he a playboy, a
serial seducer, or a man in love with only one woman?), never gel
into one coherent tale and thus appear to reflect well the point made
about the themes in George Cukor’s work in the quotation above.
Was Barry seduced by the playful French Angèle, who, although
engaged to be married, sees him as a challenging conquest? Did
Angèle attempt to commit suicide because Barry fired her for mak-
ing a mess of the act on the night that her fiancé Pierre (Jacques
Bergerac) and his family see her performing on stage, catching her
out in the lie that she is working as a nurse? This is Sibyl’s version
of events.
Angèle, on the other hand, argues that it was all different, that
Sibyl had a drinking problem and was about to be fired by Barry for
it, when it occurred to her to tell Barry that Sibyl drank because her
love for him was unrequited. On the strength of this deception, Barry
begins to be kinder to Sibyl, who, interestingly enough, stops drink-
ing. A sort of romance seems to take place, punctuated by a visit from
Sibyl’s old beau, Lord Wren (Leslie Phillips), which ends in a fight
between the two men and Sibyl’s realization that Barry does not love
her, but was only being kind to stop her drinking. Does she get drunk,

The Battle of the Sexes 67
get fired, and then attempt suicide as Angèle claims in her version of
the story?
Finally Barry tells his tale, one in which he is in love with the third,
American, girl in his troupe, Joy Hensen (Mitzi Gaynor). She seems
to have no time for him because he will not propose marriage. During
the time he is trying to woo Joy, Pierre and Lord Wren approach
Barry and ask him to help them win their suits, it is time the girls
gave up dancing and settled down they think. Barry comes up with
a plan that achieves that: he fakes a heart condition and lets slip that
he should quit dancing, but won’t because he doesn’t want the girls to
lose their jobs. Pitying him, all three girls quit and Joy even seems to
be falling for Barry. Both Sibyl and Angèle are accidentally poisoned
by a gas leak after a good-bye party and, taken separately to hospi-
tal, never compare stories until the book appears. Barry swears his
version is the truth, the marriages of Sibyl and Angèle, threatened by
the competing versions each has told about the other’s romance with
Barry, are saved and the case is dismissed.
However, when Barry meets his wife Joy in a taxi after the trial,
she berates him with “They couldn’t have invented those stories
completely; there must have been some truth . . .”
“Here we go again . . .” replies Barry, indicating that this is a long-
running argument between them and the film ends with a shot of a
sandwich board that asks, “What is Truth?”
Like Rashomon, Les Girls has one key scene that is repeated, with
variations, depending on the teller. This is the song and dance rou-
tine “Ladies in Waiting,” which, in one version has Angèle trying
to hide from her fiancé’s family who are in the audience; in another
has Sibyl drunk and falling over; and in the final has Joy weeping
because she knows of Barry’s bad heart. In contrast to the Japanese
film, however, the “mystery”—who committed suicide, was it really
both women?—is not really so important. More central to the film is
the mystery surrounding how men and women act when they are in
love. How can Angèle claim to love her fiancé, but still want to seduce
Barry for fun? Does she really fall for him? Why is Barry so easily
convinced that Sibyl is in love with him and why does she respond so
well to his kindness in light of this? Why does Barry tell a version in
which the only woman who attracts him is the one who rejects him
constantly? Is it really, as he claims “the truth”?
That we are never given answers, that there is not a final solution is
seen by some critics as a flaw in the narrative rather than true to the
spirit of the Japanese original. Who can understand male and female

attraction? Do men and women experience the same events in the

same way? Did the men in Rashomon see a seduction, did the bandit
sense that the woman gave into him, while Masago felt only violated?
In this comedy the issues are handled with less of a shock value—the
permutations of the romances in the story are fairly stock for the pre-
feminist era, but the point is the same: how can we ever arrive at the
truth when it comes to male/female relations?
That the concept of society depends on the idea that there is a
truth is well parodied in Les Girls by the idea of a trial to determine
whether libel occurred or not. Again, true to Kurosawa’s film, the
notion that courts somehow attempt to establish veracity in situations
where stories may well completely contradict each other is important
in this film. However, the sense of guilt surrounding a crime is not
key to Les Girls in the same way. In the end, it is guilt that they have
publicly maligned each other that causes Sibyl and Angèle to make
up their quarrel, whether or not they agree with Barry’s version. The
story he tells lets them all off the hook and satisfies their husbands,
both of whom are threatening divorce in light of the versions each has
told of the other. If there is added guilt here, some sexual guilt about
real affairs with Barry, it is buried as the new version of the past is
accepted by everyone but Joy.
While Kurosawa gives us a film about the chaos that ensues when
everyone tells their version of the truth, Cukor gives us a rather dif-
ferent film about how relationships are maintained by the lies we all
agree on. Marital discord occurs only when competing narratives
are examined and compared, something that happens especially, it is
implied in the final scene, when a woman wants to discuss a man’s
fidelity or lack of it. Moreover, anticipating Lerner’s and Lowe’s bit-
tersweet duet, I Remember It Well, from Gigi (Minnelli 1958), this
film makes a point about the different ways in which men and women
remember what is important. It reduces the complex issue of finding
the truth about a crime to a sexual comedy, and yet, perhaps because
of Cukor’s own concerns with social deceptions, it is a sex comedy
with a valid point to make. For the Hungarian based in Hollywood,
Cukor, the human condition was one in which it was necessary to lie
in order to survive in a world dominated by an accepted construc-
tion of “normal” gender relations; for Kurosawa it was one of guilt
redeemable only by accepting one’s responsibilities to other peo-
ple. No clearer example could be made of how culture, history, and
even sexuality can affect the way in which a narrative might be told,
reshaped and retold.

“Do You Believe It?”4

The Italian Rashomon is a European coproduction—largely West
German and Italian money in this case. The director, Mario Bava,
was both a painter and cinematographer, as well as film director who
had learned his craft through a long apprenticeship in the Italian
studio system. In many ways, Bava appears to resemble Kurosawa
and his expertise in special effects is one talent that he shares with
Kurosawa who, with his cinematographers, pioneered many ways of
filming the heretofore difficult to film (rain, spurting blood, shooting
into the sun). However, Bava made his mark with gothic horror films,
the occasional gladiator film, and Spaghetti Westerns. This film,
set at the end of the swinging sixties, is rather an unusual offering
from him. One thing that can be said about it is that the tongue-in-
cheek quality of the film extends to making fun of what had come
to be stock characters in more serious Italian cinema: the liberated
young woman, the anguished playboy, and the beautiful people of
la dolce vita. In this way, Bava seems to have understood something
of the original that subverted stereotypes and made a dark joke about
national innocence. However, the tragedy that is Rashomon becomes
a light comedy (or a heavy-handed attempt at light comedy) in its
Italian incarnation.
The plot is simple: a young male model, John Price (Brett Halsey,
an American actor) meets and chats up a beautiful young girl, Tina
(Daniela Giordano), in the park one day. The first point of view we
get is that of Tina, whose voiceover expresses her doubt at this young
man’s intentions. The English-dubbed version (like many Italian films
of this era, various dubbed versions were produced at the same time) is
done entirely in Southern U.S. accents, perhaps a jibe at The Outrage.
Later that day, John picks Tina up for a date, he takes her dancing
and then they head home early since she insists she promised not to be
late. Much later, Tina arrives home with her dress torn. This is where
the film enters Rashomon territory. Tina tells her mother a convoluted
story of stopping by John’s place, waiting for him in the garden out-
side his flat while he makes a call, but being frightened by the arrival
of two foreigners she goes into the flat. There John tries to seduce/
rape her; she escapes via some complicated tomfoolery with the two
doors of the bathroom and comes home more or less unscathed. She
refuses to let her mother call the police because, she says, they might
not believe her story since she went willingly into his apartment. An
insignificant detail becomes important in all the versions—the gate to

the garden that leads to John’s flat is difficult to open and the care-
taker does not answer the call button when they try to reach him.
John, with a huge scratch on his face, is pictured next, telling his
version to some male friends in a bar. In his story, Tina is a voracious
“nympho” who couldn’t leave him alone. They have sex and then, giv-
ing him some time to rest, she comes back for more only to find that
he is not ready yet. She keeps trying to interest him, knocking him
off a swing (in his flat!) at one point and scratching him. Finally, on
Tina’s third attempt to get him back into bed, the foreign neighbors
ring the doorbell and John invites them in, “If they hadn’t dropped
by, she’d have killed me.”
The third version is told to a milkman by the caretaker, who hap-
pily admits to his voyeurism. It is this man, played by Dick Randall,
who repeats the single line that refers to original “I tell you the times
are sick, the young people nowadays . . . won’t even fight for their coun-
try anymore.” The line also appears to be a weak attempt to address a
U.S. audience, hinting at the draft dodging of the 1960s.
The caretaker’s version is the most outrageous of the stories: it
involves not only his witnessing a homosexual orgy in the flat (with
the arrival of the neighbors), but includes also a flashback triggered
by a story the woman, Esmeralda (Calisto Calisti), tells Tina in an
effort to seduce her. The flashback, to an S&M club where the neigh-
bors both first met John, is a sequence that raises the film to cult
status for some viewers. After this flashback, Esmeralda spikes Tina’s
drink and, while the caretaker runs off to get some binoculars, Tina
loses her dress somehow. On his return Tina is naked and Esmeralda
is tickling her with a feather. When Esmeralda pounces, Tina fights
back, tries to get her dress, it tears, John comes out, Tina struggles
with him, scratching him and finally gets away.
The final version is the most curious since it is given to us by some-
one who is not part of the story at all, a psychiatrist who suddenly
appears to say: “Of course what you’ve seen is all false or all true—an
interpretation . . . Whose interpretation should we accept? The truth,
for some reason is always hidden from view. Would you like to see
how things really went?” He then proceeds to tell us the fourth ver-
sion. In this version, the couple meet, they spend a long day together
in the park, she wants it not to end, he suggests the evening out. They
go to the club but leave early. Tina wants to go home and he agrees
saying, “I’m not that type, but do you mind if we stop at my place for
a minute?” They go to his flat, have a drink, he kisses her once (with
the caretaker watching from the rooftop), and she promises “I will let

you do anything you want, but not yet.” He agrees to take her home,
but the gate out of the garden won’t unlock and the peeping caretaker
is still stuck on the roof when John rings for help. They try to get out
by climbing the gate, tearing her dress, scratching his face, and finally
give up, settling down to wait on a bench in the garden. The other
couple arrive, they have to ring for the doorman to open the gate and
John and Tina get to leave. The doctor asks us: “Do you believe it? Do
you really believe things happened that way?” End of film.
With its denouement that appears to offer us a real version and
then undermines it by the psychiatrist’s closing words, we are much
closer to Kurosawa territory than in The Outrage. Moreover, the var-
ious stories hold true to what Richie tells us about the confessions in
the original:
Each is proud of what he did because, as he might tell you: “It is just
the sort of thing that I would do.” Each thinks of his character as
being fully formed, of being a thing, like the rape or the dagger is a
thing, and of his therefore . . . being capable of only a certain number of
(consistent) reactions. They are in character because they have defined
their own character for themselves and will admit none of the surpris-
ing opportunities which must occur when one does not. They “had no
choice”; circumstances “forced” their various actions; what each did
“could not be helped.” It is no wonder that the reported actions refuse
to agree with each other. (italics in original, 1996:75–76)
The young girl is “a good girl” as her mother says, and so can only tell
a story that reaffirms this. The man is meant to be a handsome model,
irresistible to women, so how could he explain a scratch that might
have come from a woman fighting him off in such a way that does not
undermine his masculinity? It seems that even great lovers quail in
the face of a sexually voracious woman. The caretaker, a sleazy, sex-
obsessed and homophobic voyeur, can only tell a story about what he
wishes he had seen. The psychiatrist, trained not to believe the stories
any of us tell until they have been analyzed and reanalyzed, offers us
a rather anodyne version. It is rather chaste, full of promise perhaps,
but nothing like the interpretations that filled Freud’s work. This last
version presents us with a problem that is very like a Spanish riddle:
“If all men are great seducers, taking any woman they please; and if
all women are virtuous and would never allow themselves to seduced;
who is telling the truth?” Or, to put it another way, in the late 1960s/
early 1970s era of supposedly liberated swinging sex in Italy, what
was really going on?

Quante Volte . . . Quella Notte is more potentially interesting than

The Outrage since it attempts to comment on modern Italian mores.
However, by being so pinned to a particular moment in Italian sexual
history, the film now looks very dated. It does make some changes to
the original that are worth considering: for example, the judge and
the commoner roles have disappeared. We have no sense why we, the
audience, are being told these stories. Is it because this is not a tale
of crime, really, but the sort of story anyone of us might be involved
in? The priest has also disappeared, an interesting erasure in a film
made by an Italian; but the psychiatrist might well be meant to be
his replacement. Moreover, it could be asked, how is it that the psy-
chiatrist has had access to all these stories? Is the fact that his hand
reaches down into the film, like something out of Monty Python, and
picks up John’s car as he drives Tina home at the end of the last story,
an indication that this rather “mad” appearing doctor is something or
someone more than a mere psychiatrist? There is nothing in the film
to offer us answers and so we are left with an inferior, if fun, variation
on the original. That some see this film as a camp precursor to Austin
Powers (Jay Roach 1997) and, I would argue, Rocky Horror (Jim
Sharman 1975) is enough to ensure its cult status. Bava fans, on the
Internet, argue that he made other films that better dealt with the sub-
jective nature of reality: The Whip and the Body (1963), Operazione
Paura (1966), and Ecologia del Delitto (1971) (cf. Monell 2000).
In relation to how the remakes of Kurosawa’s film and In a Grove
seem unable to deal with subjectivity and not-knowing, it would
Figure 3 What is Truth? End Shot from Les Girls

Source: Cuckor 1957. MGM. Courtesy of Warner Brothers Classical Musicals Collection

seem that—as with Les Girls—it is all right to question the nature
of human subjectivity if done as a sex comedy. In such narratives
audiences appear to comfortably accept the idea that human society
is always made up of different versions of reality—stories that con-
tradict and maybe even cancel each other out. Moreover, who has
not argued with a partner about whether something really happened
that way or not? Our awareness that the truth is unknowable is eas-
ier to bear if we can laugh at that fact, the laughter itself signaling
our unease. As a guiding principle of how to understand a crime,
however, we do not find individual subjectivity and various versions
of reality quite so amusing, this certainly seems to be the message of
the remakes discussed in the last chapter. So it is no surprise that in
the permutations on the narrative style of Rashomon in crime films,
as we will see in the next chapter, audiences are given comfort in the
form of a final solution, a final version; in short: the truth.


6
Permutations on the Theme of Murder:
The Search for Solutions
“Just the facts”
—Ritt 19651
Introduction
What does an analysis of the films that appear to be closest in
narrative structure to Rashomon offer the media scholar? The issue
of translation, particularly in the case of The Outrage, seems to be
most at the forefront. It seems clear that the concerns of a particular
director at a particular historical moment do not translate straight-
forwardly across time and cultures. The amount of material written
on Rashomon makes the point that even the original creates problems
of interpretation that are related to the fact that it is a Japanese film.
By the time the story has been framed by a need-to-know discus-
sion of the original short stories it is based on, the legends surround-
ing Rashô gate, notions of guilt in Buddhism, the supposed culture
of Heian Japan, the postwar culture of Japan, and Kurosawa’s own
worldview, the film itself gets buried under a weight of scholarly
material. This, however, is not how film directors generally go about
creating a remake.
As we have seen with Les Girls, Quante Volte . . . Quella Notte,
The Outrage, Iron Maze, and Misty, each new version of the story
has focused on a different aspect of the original narrative. It is as if
Rashomon, as text, opens itself up for its viewers allowing an acces-
sibility that transcends the narrow confines of the moment of its

creation. For the Kanins as writers and Ritt as a filmmaker it was the
relationship of one particular couple that held the key to the story. For
Cukor and Bava it was the more general problem of sex and romance
as the subject of people’s own narratives that was at issue. In Yoshida’s
version we have the relationship between the United States and Japan
as the key metaphor for all that happens in the film. In Saegusa’s ver-
sion we have what, I would argue, is a failed attempt to change the
depiction of Masago—to make her less an object, the subject of men’s
fantasies, and more of an active agent. The seeds for all these versions
are there in the original, depending on which version of the story the
audience is most convinced by. Masago is either a victim of the vio-
lence that seems an integral part of the medieval construction of mas-
culinity and can do nothing but respond to this and feel guilty for the
consequences (the tack taken by The Outrage and to some extent Iron
Maze); or she is the guilty of being her husband’s murderess (Misty).
Or we can assume that no one’s version is entirely true (as does the
commoner) and it remains a mystery, as Cukor and Bava assume for
their versions, in which even the final narrative is presented as possi-
bly inaccurate.
However, as was argued in the introduction to chapter three, for
a film to be rashomon-like, it does not have to be about rape and
murder (or attempted rape). As Galbraith notes in his discussion of
the film, there have been any number of films that have since used
the techniques and ideas of Kurosawa, and, in his opinion, resulted
in better films. What does this mean? The concept of what consti-
tutes a better film is one that I won’t discuss, but certainly the idea
that there exists a genealogy of films spawned by Rashomon is worth
considering.
It seems that almost any film that consists of multiple points of view
presented to the audience through flashbacks and that tries to solve a
mystery is labeled as being like Rashomon. As was noted earlier, the
use of flashback was not introduced to the West by Kurosawa, nor
is the technique of many voices telling us parts of one story uniquely
Japanese. It could be argued that this polyphonic technique goes as
far back as Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus’ son is told about his
father’s various adventures by several people. Odysseus himself tells
the final, larger part of his adventures, inspiring James Joyce’s version
of the story.2
Citizen Kane (Welles 1941) is another film that not only tells a com-
plex story through more than one point of view, it is also a narrative
that contains a mystery at its heart: Why does Kane say “Rosebud”

Permutations on the Theme of Murder 77
as he dies? This film differs from Rashomon in that only the audience
is involved in solving this mystery—no one else has heard these dying
words. Generally, in the films that are seen to be rashomon-like, the
mystery exists for someone within the narrative itself who wants to
know the truth. This is not a hard and fast distinction: Bava’s version
has no such “investigator” (unless we count the psychiatrist), while
in Saegusa’s it is a troupe of travelers who seem to want to get at the
truth, but who are content to let someone else do the judging in the
city. In the main, however, the films seen to be like Rashomon present
us with a mystery that is also in some way a crime. In contrast, a film
like Velvet Goldmine (1998), which has an investigator who wants
to get at the truth of a man’s life and supposed death, is so clearly
modeled on Citizen Kane that it would make no sense to link it to
the Japanese film. A few films are labeled as being like Kurosawa’s
because the audience can never be sure of the truth of the stories
given, but this is not an essential reason for citing Rashomon. For
some, the reason to so label a film has to do with camera technique
as much as the use of flashback, various points of view, and an uncer-
tainty about “the truth.” If the film includes a woman whose motives
are unclear, this seems to be another reason for labeling the film as
being like Rashomon.
Summed up in this way, Rashomon appears to resemble a stan-
dard murder mystery or film noir. In contrast to the modern mystery
that aims to make order out of the chaos of people’s lies and arrive
at a final solution that is true (as in CSI), this is not the main aim of
Kurosawa’s film. However, it appears that late-twentieth/early-twenty-
first-century audiences, whether they are Western or Japanese, prefer
solutions—wanting answers, we could argue, is a feature of moder-
nity. That the solution to the problem might not be the right one or
that everyone is somehow responsible—that is the occasional plot line
of a cop drama, but, even so, justice must be seen to be done.
The sense that wrongdoers must be caught and, ultimately, pun-
ished is central to the murder mystery. In an increasingly secular
world, even the possibility of a justice that is meted out after death
by God, the possibility that Dostoevsky continually returned to, no
longer exists. The power to punish is now in the hands of state insti-
tutions and ordinary individuals who have chosen to become offi-
cers in the employ of the state. Moreover, members of society like to
be reassured that this system works, that there are solutions to the
problems caused by criminals. Since real life, clearly, does not offer
this reassurance, then the genre of the crime story seems to fill the

gap between expectations and reality. Allowing life to take its toll
seems to be less an option in these postmodern times, even in Japan,
which is enjoying a huge vogue for detective novels, than it was in the
past. Thus, the theme that most rashomon-like films have in common
is that while many—if not all—the story’s narrators are unreliable,
the truth is finally revealed. While this is not true to the original’s
intent, there is, however, one more way in which these films are like
Kurosawa’s, and that is to the extent to which they depend on the
audience’s dialogic imaginations.
To analyze each and every film that bears some resemble to
Kurosawa’s would take more than a chapter. What I propose to do
here is to try and piece out various films and look at how they may
have been inspired by Rashomon. The films I have chosen to consider
include: The Killing (1956), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Reversal
of Fortune (1990), Reservoir Dogs (1991), The Usual Suspects (1995),
Run, Lola, Run (1999), Courage under Fire (1996), Memento (2000),
Ghosts of Mars (2001), and the television series, Boomtown (2003).
My choices are neither ad hoc nor personal: if a reviewer or an audi-
ence member has labeled the film “like Rashomon,” I have chased
it down, sometimes to my disappointment. Narc (Carnahan 2002),
Hoodwinked! (Edwards 2005), Hero (Ying Xiong, Zhang 2002), or
Vantage Point (Travis 2008) might well inspire people to think of
Kurosawa, for example, but the first one falls out of the scope of my
analysis because I just don’t see the connection; the second through
fourth are excluded for reasons I will discuss later.
Inspirations
Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) is often cited as having been
influenced by Rashomon. Given its voiceover narrative, its coterie of
desperate men willing to take to crime for varied reasons, and its two
main female characters, it is hard to think of a film that resembles
Kurosawa’s film less. In short order the film introduces us to Mike
O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer) who has a chronically ill wife; George Peatty
(Elisha Cook) and his demanding wife Sherry (Marie Windsor);
Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), the “mastermind” who wants money
in order to make a new life after getting out of prison; Randy Kennan
(Ted deCorsia) who is tired of his job as a police officer; and Marvin
Unger (Jay C. Flippen) who, we learn indirectly, is involved in the
planned heist because he loves Johnny; as well as to Fay (Coleen Gray)
who is Johnny’s sweet, innocent, and supportive girlfriend. It is a large

cast of characters, yet Kubrick is able to tell the story from various
points of view and through a series of flashbacks within flashbacks,
laying out a timetable as tight as a train schedule. Is this enough to
merit its inclusion as a film that is influenced by Rashomon? Not if
we recall that other intricate flashback films such as Citizen Kane
and The Locket had pre-dated the Japanese film; and that the per-
fect crime gone wrong premise owes much to a French film, Du Rififi
chez les Hommes (1955), directed by a U.S. blacklisted Jules Dassin.
There are, however, two ways in which the film might be argued to
be part of the genealogy of Rashomon: Kubrick’s film is shot in black
and white, and his use of shadow and light owes much to Kurosawa.
There is also a moment in which Sherry Peatty manipulates her hus-
band, George, by telling him that Johnny “abused” her, setting the
scene for George’s violent explosion—a passionate incursion into
the minutely plotted heist, which instead of upsetting the division of
spoils actually coincides with and interrupts the robbery attempt by
Sherry’s boyfriend Val Cannon (Vince Edwards). Everyone, except
a late running Johnny Clay, ends up dead in a shoot out that clearly
inspired Quentin Tarantino. In true film noir style, a dying George
stumbles home to kill Sherry.
The lying female might well be another small reference to the
Japanese film. If so, it is a reference that does not understand the
ambiguity of the original. In The Killing, Kurosawa’s main theme of
a subjective reality is entirely undermined by the documentary-style
voiceover: this is what happened, this is how it happened, is the mes-
sage of the film. The factual voiceover narration is the opposite of
the unreliable narrator that all the characters in Rashomon, includ-
ing the director’s camera, definitely are. However, the film ends with
an invitation to the audience’s imagination that might well be pure
Kurosawa: an accident causes the suitcase full of money to open and,
with the cash blowing away in the wind, two police officers go after
Johnny Clay. As they draw their guns and he runs away, the film ends.
It is up to us to imagine what happens next. The decision is explicitly
ours as the audience, yet, as with the judging in Rashomon, how are
we to ever know what “really” happened?
Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad 1961),
written by the Frenchman Alain Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain
Resnais, is also cited as influenced by Rashomon. Again, as with the
Kubrick film, a quick look at the film would appear to make this a
rather tenuous connection. In contrast to most of the films discussed
here, this one is about the total subjectivity of experience and one in

which we doubt the reliability of the narrator: we have a man, the

narrator himself perhaps, who tries to convince a woman that they
met the year before. She denies knowing him and he repeatedly tells
her of what they did and what they had said the previous year. Slowly,
it would seem, she comes to admit knowing him. The construction of
the film is even more convoluted than that of The Killing, but with
no attempt at unfolding a chronology that makes any sense: scenes
could be in the present or in the past; they could be of real or imag-
ined events.
In short, as with Rashomon, Last Year at Marienbad appears to
reject any attempt to offer a single interpretation—it all depends on
whether the audience thinks the man is lying or if the woman is lying.
It could all be a dream. At the heart of the film, as with much of
Robbe-Grillet’s work, is a possible crime: was the woman shot by her
husband? Or does she imagine this possibility? Was it another woman
at another time? Did the man fall off the balcony? It seems to me that
there is a possibility that everyone is dead and in some sort of pur-
gatory, and the only escape possible is for the man to get the woman
to remember what led to their deaths: once she does this it is finally
possible for them to leave the hotel and its garden. But that is my
interpretation. Again, it is in this way that Marienbad most resembles
the Kurosawa film: the audience must exercise their dialogic imagi-
nations and make a choice about what they think has happened. Yet
since the French film creates its “ambiguity through contradictions
on many different levels: the spatial, the temporal, and the causal”
(Bordwell and Thompson 2003:392) the meaning each of us creates
may well be totally different from that of anyone else. Resnais and
Robbe-Grillet push the idea of subjectivity further than Kurosawa,
relying on the subjective interpretations of the audience as the only
possible response to the film. This begs the postmodernist or decon-
structionist question: can there any shared meaning at all?
“If You Tell Me the Truth, It Limits Me to

What You Say . . .”3
There may well be several films made between 1969 and 1990 that
deserve the description of being like Rashomon, but if so, they are
rarely mentioned in the material that discusses Kurosawa’s work—
this might be a very Anglo-centric view: perhaps Europe, Bollywood,
China, or Japan itself continued to mine this vein. On the other hand,

it might well be possible that nostalgia for a single shared reality dom-
inated the mass media in these two decades, which saw the start of
theorizing on the postmodern condition, and that the concept of a
subjective construction of reality was relegated to horror films. That
we might experience events in various ways, then, became a possi-
bility considered only in films that may well have been influenced by
Bava’s more gothic work—films such as The Abominable Dr Phibes
(Robert Fuest 1971) or Fright Night (Tom Holland 1985) (cf. Twitchell
1985). The problems created by not acceding to the dominant version
of reality were relegated to the terrain of dreams (Nightmare on Elm
Street, Wes Craven 1984), the possibly insane (Asylum, Roy Ward
Baker 1972; Fade to Black, Vernon Zimmerman 1980), the defiantly
criminal (Manhunter, Michael Mann 1986), or to those who dwelt
in other societies (The Gods Must be Crazy, Weyers, Prinsloo 1981).
The use of flashbacks to tell a story did not disappear as a filmic tech-
nique, but tended to be used more straightforwardly, as in any mystery
where witnesses each tell a version of the story but only one is lying
(think of any Agatha Christie film). What these 1970–1980s films
generally share is the certainty that subjectivity and reality somehow
are connected. That the weird people next door might well be vam-
pires; that the men caring for your wife might well be responsible for
her death; that dreams can kill; that small objects can set us off on
great quests; that a love of film and insanity are not so far apart and
that the actions taken as a result of any subjective interpretation of
the facts have real consequences in life. The insistence on a subjective
interpretation triggers the events of the film, thus these horror stories
different from Rashomon, which explores the subjective experience in
the aftermath of the event.
However, the theme of not being able to learn the truth because
we might be lied to or because everyone experiences events differently
was a theme that resurfaced in more mainstream films from 1990. It
is interesting to speculate on why this should be so. The first film in
this group I would like to consider, Reversal of Fortune, predates the
Gulf War—one possible source of Hollywood’s current disenchant-
ment with the idea of a shared reality (cf. Baudrillard 1995)—so it
cannot be simply a result of the U.S. public’s re-encounter with the
way a government can manipulate real events. Perhaps the end of the
decade of greed, the spread of a recession, and the realization that life
was not always “going to get better” for every U.S. citizen were all
trends that influenced the reappearance of this theme in filmmaking.
If so, no film could have been a more appropriate harbinger of the

future than Barbet Schroeder’s 1990 version of the book written by a

lawyer, Prof Alan Dershowitz (1986).
The story of the Claus von Bulow case is a story emblematic of
the 1980s when the upper caste of old New York was shaken by the
revelations about Sunny von Bulow’s marriage, life, and descent into
a diabetic coma. It is a true story that reveals, at its heart, the U.S.
distrust of the foreigner (a German played in the film by an English
actor of course); a delight in scandals about the rich and famous,
especially if about the class of the old New York elite that generally
did not get written about in newspapers; and it exposes the lengths
to which people will apparently go for money. But, and this is what
makes the story like Rashomon, even after two trials, no one has any
sense of what the truth of the matter is; and the woman at the root of
the mystery remains unknowable.
Schroeder’s film opens like this: a camera pans over the houses of
the rich on the East coast and eventually moves in, fades and opens
again in a hospital corridor. It moves down the corridor and into a
room where a woman lies in a bed on life-support. Then, a voiceover
begins; it is the voice of the woman herself. She refers to herself in the
past tense (since the woman in question is brain dead) and she takes
us back to 1979 when she was resuscitated from a previous coma. A
year later, she is found unconscious again: “I never woke from this
coma and I never will.” This introduction to the facts of the case is
as powerful as the woodcutter walking through the forest scene in
Rashomon. The camera work might not be as daring, but the camera
as an independently moving agent that allows us, the audience, access
to the “facts” is definitely analogous to Kurosawa’s work. The tactic
of being addressed by a “dead” woman is even more interesting. In
relation to the dead husband’s testimony in Rashomon, Richie and
others have asked if we can trust the dead when they speak of their
lives—despite the priest’s inability in Rashomon to believe that the
dead could lie—and we can certainly ask this of Sunny von Bulow
(Glenn Close) speaking from her long-term coma. As the film goes on
to reveal, in her own voice, this is a woman who abused prescription
drugs, drank, smoked, and was hypoglycemic—can we trust any-
thing she remembers in her coma-like state? So we have our first unre-
liable narrator who takes us into the story of how her second husband
tried to get his “guilty” conviction overturned in a case that had been
brought by her children against him for attempted murder.
The second unreliable narrator is Claus von Bulow (Jeremy Irons)
himself. He keeps insisting that he is innocent and that his version

of the story exonerates him, but his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz (Ron
Silver), an academic who generally takes on cases that constitute a real
fight for social justice, keeps asking him not to tell “the truth.” The
fact that it is not possible to be tried twice for the same crime in the
United States means that he can only try and get the first conviction
overturned on the basis of problems with the first trial and then to ask
for a retrial. Dershowitz wants to deal only with the original miscar-
riage of justice. In his own words, knowing the truth limits what he,
as a defense lawyer can do. This statement reflects something about
the way in which the U.S. justice system currently works and high-
lights the conviction, shared by many Americans, that the rich do not
have to go to jail for murder if their lawyers are good enough.4 It is
perhaps this reality that underpins the making of Reversal of Fortune.
So we cannot believe the story Claus von Bulow finally gets to tell. In
fact we only hear his version of events after he has said to his lawyer:
“Who do you want me to be?” and after we learn that von Bulow is a
British-trained lawyer who is well aware of the malleability of facts.
Thus, even if his version of his wife’s falling into a coma is true, we do
not trust this man at all. Nor are we able to trust, as it turns out, the
“evidence” collected by a private detective that led to the first guilty
conviction. We cannot, it appears, trust the testimony of Sunny’s loyal
maid, or that of any other witness. In the end, only the lawyer and
his team might be trustworthy, but in their crusade to ensure a fair
trial for von Bulow, are they not also capable of twisting facts? We are
left at the film’s conclusion with two more possible versions of what
happened given to us by the lawyer and his assistant—their attempt
to get to grips with the facts of the case. Dershowitz’s assistant, Sarah
(Annabella Sciorra), offers the story of a suicide attempt that coin-
cides with von Bulow’s own version; Dershowitz offers a tale in which
Claus “helped” Sunny’s suicide attempt along. We return to Sunny in
her hospital bed and she tells us: “He was retried, acquitted. That is
all there is. All you can know.”
As a film that examines what the court system does in the United
States—is there any justice being meted out, or has the legal system
become an elaborate game of chance?—Reversal of Fortune is an
example of the decades’ long U.S. fascination with its own institu-
tions. The work of Scott Turow certainly prefigures this film, but
Turow writes fiction, albeit in a roman à clef way, while the von
Bulow case is a true story. In contrast to works of fiction, either in
print, film, or television, this real case does not end in a neat solution,
a crime solved. It reveals the very thing that Kurosawa proposed in

Rashomon: that reality is messy, chaotic, and ultimately unknowable

despite all our attempts to make experience cohere, to make sense of
it all. Sometimes it is impossible to know what happened and, per-
haps, as Rashomon suggests, the main actors might well not be sure
themselves, convinced that their story tells what they experienced. In
contrast to the Japanese film, however, it is innocence that is at stake
here, not the problem of properly appropriating guilt. The U.S. credo
that everyone is innocent until proven guilty and that a person can
be found not guilty because of “reasonable doubt” runs deep. Yet the
fact that guilt might well be buried in the depths of the human heart,
the heart that Kurosawa said was unknowable, is possibly but not
necessarily provable.
Therefore, despite the many differences in the story itself, Reversal
of Fortune is close to Rashomon for the very reason that we will
never know the truth; being nonfiction we do not have the comfort of
a neat ending. It is a much darker film as well. If Kurosawa’s film pos-
its the existence of the compassionate judge who sees into the hearts
of people, Schroeder’s gives us a legal system that is labyrinth and
endlessly manipulated. Perhaps the lawyer Dershowitz and his team
represent the possibility of good, honest intentions, as does the priest,
and finally, the woodcutter, but in their very involvement with the
system they are suspect. As one of Dershowitz’s students protests:
“We become accessories in his crime!” In 1950 in Japan, Kurosawa
was implying that the audience might well be accessories in a crime;
in 1990 in the United States, it is the very system created for trying
criminals and its servants, lawyers, who are the accessories. In both
films, it is the chaotic world outside the events that is problematic: the
times are evil.
The World as Hell

Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs is a film some liken to Rashomon
because of its very complex narrative: the flashback technique that
tells of the perfect heist gone wrong. Unlike The Killing, which it
otherwise strongly resembles, we never learn the full details of the
heist itself. The audience is shown how the men—Mr. White (Harvey
Keitel), Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen),
Mr. Pink (Steven Buscemi), Mr. Blue (Eddie Bunker), and Mr. Brown
(Quentin Tarantino)—are recruited by Nice Guy Eddie Cabot (Chris
Penn) and Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney). We are also shown the
moments leading up to the shooting of Mr. Orange; the fact that there

must be a police informer in the group; and finally, the revelation of

the identity of the informer. There is nothing chronological about the
unraveling of the story—the flashbacks have to be organized in the
audience’s mind in order for the story to cohere and this is possible, in
contrast to Marienbad. It also resembles Schroeder’s film, which does
not give us a straightforward chronology either; but ultimately, unlike
Rashomon or Reversal of Fortune, the same core event is not retold.
There is some overlapping of points of view, but the dominant story is
the mystery: who is the police informer?
Is the claim that Reservoir Dogs is like Rashomon really merited?
Tarantino himself, always one to pay tribute to the films that influ-
enced him, talks of the aesthetics of violence in the DVD introduc-
tion to the film: “Violence is a purely aesthetic thing. It has nothing
political, there is no morality involved.” As we shall see in the discus-
sion of Seven Samurai, the issue of an aestheticized violence was one
that Kurosawa himself considered, especially as he is acknowledged
as having set the standards in this area of filmmaking. Yet, Kurosawa
never passed up an opportunity to impart a moral message through
his work. Famously, when he had to invent the technique for show-
ing blood spurting from a pierced heart in Sanjuro (Tsubaki Sanjûrô
1962), he did it to further the key theme of that film: that violent
action is not the solution to life’s problems. In Reservoir Dogs, the
“Bloody Orange” is the victim of a similar sort of horrific wound,
but we are in the realm of men who think that violent action is the
solution to all of life’s problems. If a burglar alarm is set off, shoot the
poor girl who pressed it. If you need a car, shoot the woman driving
the first available one; if you want information, torture your victim.
It is the amoral world moaned about at the start of Rashomon: what
does it mean that Tarantino presents it as the everyday reality of a
country not at war; not in the throes of famine; nor, really, in the grip
of plagues? Can we trust him as a director who claims that there is
no moral message to his depiction (actually, nondepiction; famously,
his camera often cuts away) of violence—that it is not political, there
is no morality involved? The world Tarantino depicts is masculine,
racist, and sexist to the extreme and yet it is compelling, at least to
men—the police informer, shown practicing a story he will tell the
other men in order to “validate” him as one of gang, suddenly finds
himself in the middle of his own story. The cutting of this sequence
is masterful, but the idea behind it is powerful as well: is it possible
to pretend to be a criminal and not be tainted by the association with
this world?

In a tangential way, the story is closer to Kurosawa’s Sanjuro. In this

Japanese film, the question of how better to solve one’s problems than
by drawing a sword is raised by a woman and by Sanjuro (Toshiro
Mifune) himself—because these two advocate thought before action,
a bad situation is not made worse. Tarantino, by depicting a world
where men’s first instinct is to kill, hit, or punish, shows us what the
world is like if that sword/gun is always drawn. He may deny a moral
to his story, but it can be found. This is only a Rashomon film in
terms of use of the flashback as a narrative technique and, in the fact
that like The Killing, the audience is left to imagine what happens at
the end when the police break in—the ending is ours to invent.5
The Usual Suspects (1995) is yet another “heist gone wrong” film.
The director, Bryan Singer, in the special features track of the special
edition DVD (Keyser Soze: Lie or Legend?), says that “It’s a bit like
Rashomon.” The film is, as one of the actors tells us in an interview,
“A maze . . . of lies, not clues” (Stephen Baldwin). This description is
close to how the woodcutter and priest describe the court testimo-
nies they have heard: lies, not clues. The story, however convoluted it
appears, is in the main a simple flashback told from the point of view
of the one criminal who survives the bloodbath at the start of the
film. Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) is forced to confess to Dave Kujan
(Chazz Palminteri), a detective who has been pursuing a former cor-
rupt cop, Keaton (Gabriel Byrne). It is the story of how the round up
of “the usual suspects” (as well as Verbal and Keaton these include
McManus [Stephen Baldwin], Hockney [Kevin Pollak], and Fenster
[Benicio del Toro]) leads to their coming together to pull off a robbery
that in turn leads them to another robbery and, finally, to the night
of the killing. Kujan forces this story, bit by bit, out of Verbal and his
telling of the tale is intercut with the FBI’s attempts to get a descrip-
tion of the shadowy crime lord Keyser Soze from a badly burnt sur-
vivor of the massacre. Kujan does not believe in Soze, he is sure that
Keaton is behind the whole event, but Verbal remains adamant: of the
larger crime, killing everyone on board the ship and then killing all
the usual suspects, it is Keyser Soze who is guilty.
The end of the film was the sort of surprise ending that the theatres
asked audiences not to give away, just as they were to do later for
The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan 1999). It is this moment when
all the details of Verbal’s story are revealed to be taken from odds
and ends in the police officer’s office—pinned up news items, pic-
tures of criminals, the brand name on a mug—that is the shock of the
film. As the screenwriter, Christopher McQuarrie notes in the DVD

interview: “It’s just a big, well-structured magic trick.” Of all the

unreliable narrators we have encountered thus far, Verbal Kint is the
most unreliable of all. Others may have lied to themselves about their
actions, and, in doing so, have misrepresented themselves but only in
terms of who they think they are; Verbal has just lied. As he leaves the
station, his crooked gait straightens, his weak arm stretches, and we
are suddenly in the presence of a man who is capable of not only lying,
but who might well be the master criminal Kujan is sure does not
exist. This revelation required many in the audience to see the film
again in order to determine how not only the narrative, but also the
camera, had lied to them— how every scene as described by Verbal
could be read in an entirely different way.
As Singer himself points out this is not the tack taken by Rashomon
where we see the same event four different times, in four different
ways—here, the audience sees everything only once. If they want a
reinterpretation of the events they have no other narrator than the
camera to turn to and in order to do that, they must see the film again.
Again, as Singer notes, not even the camera is truthful; it sometimes
focuses on objects that will trick the audience into believing Verbal’s
version the first time through. This is a visual step further than that
taken by Kurosawa and more on the lines of something Orson Welles
might pull—as he did in F for Fake (1976). Again, it would seem that
the Japanese film is being credited for something that any film stu-
dent could have learned from another source. Why this might be so is
something I will discuss later.
Rashomon at War
The American director Edward Zwick has long acknowledged his
admiration of Kurosawa; he has gone on to make The Last Samurai
(2003) and in interviews he has said that he always wanted to direct
a battle scene like that of Kurosawa. Courage under Fire (1996) has
been called “Rashomon goes to war,” indicating a first attempt at
emulating the Japanese director. In many ways the film is a carefully
structured homage to the Japanese version, yet it too cannot resist
offering a final, truth solution.
The film opens with news clips of the events leading up to the Gulf
War in 1990, including one reporter describing being in Baghdad as
like being in hell. The imagery supports this, all red lighting and oil
fires showing under the credits until we find ourselves observing a
group of soldiers about to go into action. They are led by Colonel

Nat Serling (Denzel Washington) who—after warning his men about

mistakes caused by sleep deprivation, saying a prayer and a gung-ho
“Let’s kill them all”—proceeds, through a complex series of events,
to kill his great friend Boylar in an incident of friendly fire. Serling
immediately assumes responsibility for the act, but the military hier-
archy appears bent on a cover up. The case is considered “closed” and
Serling is entrusted with the task of investigating the case for award-
ing the Congressional Medal of Honor to a helicopter pilot, Captain
Karen Waldren, the first woman proposed for the medal in combat. 6
The case for the woman’s heroism is not a straightforward one and
involves Serling in an investigation where we are presented with sev-
eral versions of the events.
The first version is that of the wounded men who were saved by
Waldren’s heroism—Lt Chelli (Ned Vaughn) tells the basic story: how
the medic team was unable to land to collect them because of enemy
fire and, after managing to destroy an Iraqi tank, was also shot down.
Stuck in a position between them and the Iraqis, the downed crew
protected the wounded men until help arrived the following day, and
they continued to fire an M-16 rifle even as they were rescued. The
men of this crew are certain that the dead captain of the medic chop-
per crew deserves the Medal of Honor. When Serling goes to interview
the surviving members of Waldren’s crew, he gets different versions.
Raden (Tim Guinee) adds to the original tale, explaining how they
used a spare fuel tank to destroy the Iraqi tank that was pinning in the
wounded U.S. soldiers and then, hit by a bullet in the lung, he remem-
bers nothing of the next three days. Waldren’s medical specialist and
friend, Ilario (Matt Damon), confirms the other men’s story of hero-
ism. In his tale, Waldren is calm, she shows no doubt, no fear, voices
no thought of surrender, and even after being shot by the enemy dur-
ing the night, remains in full command. Her main concern is to keep
safe the wounded officer, Raden. Ilario smokes nonstop as he tells the
tale and asks, when he finishes: “Is that it? Does she get the medal?
Because I don’t want to have to tell that story again.” Serling asks him
about the M-16 rifle that the other crew mentioned: did it run out
of ammunition? Ilario is flustered and cannot answer the question.
Serling, driven by his own demons (in the form of flashbacks and a
pursuing reporter who wants to interview him about the events in his
own case), wants to make the various versions of the story fit together
somehow. He tells Brigadier General Hersheberg (Michael Moriarty)
that the case is more complicated than it appears. The General refers
to the rashomon effect by telling him: “No two eyewitnesses agree on

every detail,” and threatens to have him discharged over his increas-
ingly heavy drinking, but Serling wants to find the truth and returns
to the investigation.
Sergeant Monfriez is the next interviewee, a regular soldier who
was sent with the rescue mission. He confirms Ilario’s story in such a
way that Serling becomes even more suspicious. Pressing him to “tell
the truth,” Serling gets a longer story from Monfriez who says that the
Captain was afraid, a coward and that all the heroic moments of the
day and night were his. In his version, Waldren wants to surrender;
she cries and distracts the men while the enemy creeps up on them in
the night, resulting in her being shot in the stomach. In the end, she
is too afraid to let him carry her to the rescue chopper and he has
to leave her, cowering in fear, behind. Monfriez claims that because
she was a woman and the White House is eager not only to award
a medal for heroism in this war, but also to give a woman the first
medal ever for combat, no one wanted to hear any other sort of story
than the original, false, story he told. Serling goes on to drink even
more heavily than before. He has several conversations with Gardner
(Scott Glenn), the Washington Post reporter who is pursuing him.
Serling tells him: “I just want to get something clear. Get something
right. Get somebody to be a hero.”
Things become complicated: Ilario goes missing, the fourth crew
member, Altameyer, has disappeared, and the General tells Serling to
finish the investigation. Everyone wants to give Waldren the medal.
Taken off the case, Serling goes back to Gardner. In return for his
help in finding Altameyer, he will give Gardner the tape of the night’s
events in his own case. Gardner does locate Altameyer who is dying
of stomach cancer and won’t tell Serling anything. A return visit to
Monfriez ends with the Sergeant killing himself and Serling is left
only with a clue Ilario has given him about liking to watch playing
children at his parents’ cabin by a lake. He finds the medic, who, it is
now revealed, is an addict and he gets the final version of the story. In
this version, Waldren is calm, she has no fear, and she saves them all
by covering their backs with the M-16 as they run for the rescue chop-
per. But during the night the men want to surrender and in arguing
with her, Monfriez accidentally shoots her in the stomach. Because
he fears court martial, Monfriez lies to the rescuing crew and says
that Waldren is dead when she is still alive and covering their retreat.
The napalm that the rescue crew sweeps the area with probably killed
her, making her a victim of “friendly fire” as in the case of Boylar.
Waldren gets her posthumous medal.

Serling gets to hear the tape recording of the night in which he

killed Boylar and finds that yes, Boylar’s tank confused them by firing
at them and that he, Serling, went on to save more men from friendly
fire by ordering all tanks to put on their lights (not shown in the
opening scenes). The reporter calls him a hero, but Serling argues to
Gardner that the public needs to know “The whole hard cold truth”
or Waldren and all the soldiers who have died are dishonored. The
film ends with a flashback: Serling, on the morning after his own
action, watches a medic chopper, piloted by Waldren, taking off.
Courage under Fire is a long and somewhat disjointed film. Serling
keeps finding bits of his conversation with Ilario on tape that we have
not heard; the events in his own case are hard to follow; and the
unhappy guilt he suffers from, through conversations with his wife, is
perhaps overemphasized. Nevertheless this is an interesting first Gulf
War film made by a director, Zwick, whose earlier film Glory (1989)
was about the black troops who fought in the American Civil War.
Clearly there is an agenda here besides that of updating Kurosawa’s
own film. The very fact of the Gulf War is part of the film’s main con-
cern. This is the war that was seen to be an entirely media-dominated
event, so much so that the French theorist Baudrillard (1995) claimed
it wasn’t a real war at all. The government’s motives for going to war
were considered to be suspect by many as well. Thus Zwick reveals
a concern with the lies that society and its institutions tell, just as
Kurosawa does. However, whereas the Japanese film inverts the story
so that the lies are a form of the truth, this U.S. film gives us lies that
are just that.
Moreover, the investigator who wants the truth is also, by his
own admission, guilty—as Kurosawa implies the viewing audience
is—but he is also ultimately a hero. This is Zwick’s concern in much
of his work, the way in which honorable men do their duty and accept
responsibility for their actions. The theme is, perhaps, meant to be
something Zwick has borrowed from Kurosawa, but it is somewhat
different from the message of Rashomon. Not the issue, Dostoevskian
as it has been argued, of responsibility, but the whole concept of
honor. It is the idea of “honor” that is used in The Outrage but is
not broached in the original Japanese film where Masago only once
mentions her “disgrace” and her husband (in the woodcutter’s ver-
sion) calls her a “shameless whore.” I am not saying that there is no
idea of honor in Japan—there are various terms used in relation to
the concept7—but that in Rashomon, as Richie notes, it is ego mani-
fested as pride and human responsibility, not honor that are at stake.

The problems of Rashomon are the problems of everyone; in Courage

under Fire the problems are those suffered by those who serve their
country as soldiers. Baudrillard may have argued that the war was not
real, but Zwick shows that real men suffered, fought, and died.
Not just men, but women. The Gulf War was the first war in which
women were sent into combat as opposed to serving on the margins.
This was, and remains, a problem for many: the idea that women,
the ones who are meant to be protected in times of war, are capable
of fighting like men. This has proved problematic even for feminists,
many of whom have argued that women are naturally more peaceful,
less violent than men. Zwick, just as he was keen to tackle the case
of forgotten African American soldiers and their heroism during the
American Civil War, confronts the issues head on. Karen Waldren is
not only brave, calm, and unafraid, she is a heroine who is undone
by her own men’s fears—fears that they express in terms of a sexist
distrust of her ability to command. Just as it could be argued that
Masago is a victim of men’s fantasies and expectations in Rashomon,
the same could be said of Waldren. In both cases these women are
destroyed by men’s reactions to them as women: the Japanese woman
raped because of a chance breeze and a bandit’s whim, then disowned
by the husband who could not protect her; the American woman is
also violated by being disobeyed and finally abandoned by her own
fearful men who then go on to lie in order to protect themselves.
More than Misty then, Courage under Fire is a feminist variation
of the Akutagawa story: the woman fights back. It is her undoing and
ends in her death. Hers is certainly not the heroic death one might
expect in battle, she had to fight not only the enemy, but her own
men who would not accept her as their superior. As a permutation, or
working out of the original story, this film is a “fighting document”
(cf. Brode 2000:9) about the respect that all soldiers, regardless of gen-
der, deserve. Liberal in its overall political view of the Gulf War and
in relation to the place of women in armed combat, it is nevertheless
conservative in its view of military honor and glory. This last makes
Courage under Fire a version of Rashomon that begins with the same
premise, the difficulty of getting to the truth, but ends very differently.
The audience does not have to exercise their imagination to decide
what is true or not: Serling does that for us, sometimes even imagining
events of which he has no knowledge, like Waldren singing to her men
and her daughter. As with The Outrage and Misty, the film is uncom-
fortable with not knowing, and it falls back on the device so common
in mysteries: the second but “true” telling of someone’s tale.

The Power of Love

The next film, Run, Lola, Run (Lola Rennt, Tykwer 1998) has no
reservations about leaving it to the audience’s dialogic imaginations.
If this is a Rashomon-like film, as has been suggested by Galbraith
among others, it is a version for the video game generation. This fast-
paced and sometimes exhilarating film’s premise is simple: Manni
(Moritz Bleitreu) is a small-time crook who manages to leave a bag
of cash on the underground train next to a homeless man (Joachim
Krol). He is certain that his boss will kill him unless, within twenty
minutes, he can deliver the 100,000 marks. He rings his lover, Lola
(Franka Potente), to tell her this and to berate her because she was
not there to give him a lift on her moped, forcing him to take the
train. She makes him promise not to do something stupid, like rob the
supermarket round the corner, while she tries to collect the money.
The rest of the film consists of three versions in which she attempts
to do this. In the first version she goes to her banker father (Herbert
Knaup), who, furious after a fight with his mistress, refuses to help
her. Lola meets up with Manni just as he heads toward the supermar-
ket to rob it and ends by helping him. They come out to find the police
in wait for them and Lola is shot. Dying, she remembers a conversa-
tion she has had about love with Manni and proceeds to “replay” the
last twenty minutes.
In the second telling, Lola hangs up the phone, runs out of the flat,
past her mother in the same way as in the first version, but she trips on
the stairs on her way. As a consequence, her encounters (literal run-
ins) with people on the way are not the same, the timing is somewhat
changed by the slightly different start. Her father also has a different
argument with his mistress and is much tougher on Lola as a result.
On her way out of the bank she takes the guard’s gun and returns to
hold her father captive. She forces him to hand over 100,000 marks
and runs with the bag of cash to meet Manni, catching him before he
enters the supermarket. An ambulance, which Lola has encountered
in both versions, hits Manni and as he lies dying he recalls the con-
versation with Lola (although somewhat differently) and proceeds to
“replay” the events again.
The third time Lola avoids crashing into a woman on the way
down the stairs, and also misses a run-in with a car driven by a friend
of her father’s. As a result, when she arrives at the bank, her father
has been collected by the friend and is not there. The two men go on
to become involved in a car crash that leaves the friend dead and the

father injured. In the meantime Manni sees the homeless man (who
has been in the previous versions but unspotted by him or Lola) and
gives chase. Lola sees a casino and argues her way in. She wins the
100,000 marks and hitches a lift in the ambulance, affording her a
touching moment with her injured father. Then Lola arrives just in
time to see Manni leaving the car of his boss—he has exchanged his
gun for the money with the homeless man. With an extra 100,000
marks in hand, the couple wander off into the distance.
The fast editing, occasional use of cartoon images, and mini-
vignettes where the future of minor characters is rapidly presented in
montage, make this film very like a music video. The three versions of
events, no one labeled as more true than the other, are perhaps the one
way in which it resembles Rashomon, but these versions are not sub-
jective readings of the same event, rather they are alternative construc-
tions of what might happen. In the notes for the DVD Tykwer says:
The sequences with Lola and Manni are shot on 35mm. The others,
where Lola and Manni are not involved, were shot on video—in a kind
of synthetic, artificial world. That places Lola and Manni at the centre
of their world, in which miracles can happen just like in the movies.
The film image is true, and the others are untrue, as it were.
Perhaps the director is correct to argue that something about his pro-
cess is a first—the idea that the contrast between 35mm film and
video is equivalent to the difference between reality and artificiality
is an interesting one. Why should the use of older film techniques
be “more true”? In fact, for Tykwer it is important that 35mm film
makes the characters seem more real and powerful enough to change
their reality. But they can only do this “like in the movies”—we cer-
tainly cannot do this in real life. The key to this, according to the
director, is the power of Lola’s love: “It is this woman’s passion alone
that brings down the rigid rules and regulations of the world sur-
rounding her.”
In short, Lola is a far more active agent than Masago could ever
be in Rashomon; she is powerful enough to change reality, making
her perhaps somewhat akin to the version of Masago given to us in
Misty. The German film, however, is a more satisfying portrait of the
woman as a sort of powerful deity—we know that she does every-
thing she does out of love, her actions make sense within this context.
In Misty, we know that Masago is avenging her mother, but remain
confused as to why she does things in the way she does. However,

despite its German setting, this is definitely not a film about guilt
(Manni, Lola’s great love, is a crook) nor about morality. No one
comes out very well: from Lola’s gossipy, disinterested mother (Nina
Petri) to her philandering father. Even the people Lola bumps into
are revealed to be thieves, drug addicts, religious fanatics, or sex-
ual perverts. The message might well be that in the corrupt world of
the late twentieth century, only love has a sort of redeeming power.
This is possibly an apt message in post-reunification Germany, but
it is not Kurosawa’s point: for him it was the taking of responsibility
that mattered. Even so, we never learn if there is one “real” account
of the events in Run, Lola, Run. Yet it is worth noting that of all the
films we have looked at thus far, it has been only the European films
(Quanta Volte . . . Quella Notte, Last Year in Marienbad and given
their foreign-born directors, Les Girls and Reversal of Fortune) that
leave the “truth” up to the audience to determine.
In this vein, the film Memento by the British director Christopher
Nolan (2000) is a film that some people have, in conversation, men-
tioned as being like Rashomon. This is a more difficult one to tackle,
since the English director, speaking in an interview on the DVD spe-
cial features, acknowledges a heavy debt to film noir and the film
Double Indemnity (Wilder 1944) in particular. Pushed to name an
admired director, Nolan says Orson Welles. In many ways, the film
stands as a reminder of how thin the line is between the filmic permu-
tations on Rashomon and film noir as a genre.
Memento is a story about one man’s subjective construction of the
world, a man who has chosen one way in which to interpret the world
and to present himself. This character, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce),
is, to reiterate Richie’s point about the characters in Rashomon, not
able to become anything other than what he is. Leonard, like the char-
acters in the Japanese film, is proud of himself and of how he copes
with the disability of not being able to remember anything in the pre-
sent for longer than ten minutes. There is a hint, in his obsession with
the story of another man with his condition, that the state he exists in
is psychological and not physical—that it is a self-induced state that
serves to conceal his own guilty actions from himself. In this way, it
could be said, Leonard as a character seems to be an extreme example
of the sort of subjectivity in which the characters in Rashomon exist.
Unlike them, however, his amnesia-like condition prevents him from
ever having to assume responsibility for his actions: he forgets them
almost as soon as he completes them. His system for remembering—
notes, photographs, and tattoos on his body—becomes labyrinth,

subject to his constant reinterpretation and his construction, and, as

the character Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) suggests, is only the truth as
Leonard wants it to be. Despite his insistence on the “facts,” his abil-
ity to forget the why of a fact, its reason for being significant, renders
his world meaningful only on his own terms.
As the director suggests, Leonard is thus everyman—reliant on
his notes, diary, or mnemonic habits in order to “remember” and
be able to construct a narrative that makes sense of his world. The
story, told linearly but backward and in short segments that are inter-
cut with Leonard telling a long story on the phone (this is filmed
in black and white as opposed to the color of the rest of the film),
resembles Marienbad in intent, if not in complexity of structure.
We, the audience, learn some truths through the flashbacks as they
are juxtaposed with the story being told on the phone, but we never
learn the solid truths about Leonard: did he accidentally kill his wife?
Has he already found his wife’s attacker? Is Teddy a friend, a police
officer, a snitch? How many men has Leonard murdered during his
investigation? How long has it been since his condition set in? These
are details left to us to imagine. Like the narrator in Marienbad, the
world seems to be Leonard’s own and no one else’s—how can we ever
understand what is true and what is not? Despite Nolan’s assertion of
a rather thin genealogy for his filmic inspirations—he also cites Angel
Heart (Parker 1987) and The Sixth Sense—it would appear that he
has fallen back on the use of “tropes” we might well associate with
Kurosawa.
Cop in Rashomon-land
John Carpenter’s Ghost of Mars (2001) is a film whose worth is hotly
contested by many arguing their case on the Internet. Is it a truly
awful film? Or is it tongue-in-cheek and far better than generally
appreciated? Whatever side the opponents are on, they all seem to
agree that it is Rashomon-like in structure.
The story is told by a police officer, Melanie Ballard (Natasha
Hensbridge), to an inquisitor (Rosemary Forysth) and told in flash-
back. Ballard is trying to account for the fact that all her fellow officers
have died and their prisoner has escaped. Within her own story, she
tells stories that other people have narrated to her and they appear in
flashback as well. These flashbacks tell a tale of the awakened ghosts
of Mars, who possess the new human colonizers of the planet. So far,
rather intriguing it could be said. The heroine is also flawed, her story

rendered somewhat unreliable by her admitted use of drugs. Add an

ending in which we see the film’s two main characters—Ballard and
James “Desolation” Williams (Ice Cube)—heading out to face the
ghosts, but that leaves us knowing nothing of their fate and we might
say that John Carpenter, whose 1982 remake of The Thing (Nyby
1951) was generally considered to be better than the original, is on
form. The sepia tones of the film, his attempt to make Mars look dif-
ferent from Earth, are all successful.
The film does fall down in its depiction of the possessed humans:
the ghosts seem to turn them into poor, even racist, caricatures of
aboriginals; and whenever he has any doubts about plot structure,
Carpenter puts in a fight scene. The heroine is tough and in the
mould of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) from Alien (Scott 1979) to the
point of (comically?) being taken over by a ghost only to have her
drug-permeated body reject the possession. But as a film inspired by
Rashomon there is little to merit the assertion other than the flash-
back structure and the unreliability of Ballard as a narrator. Yet, just
as some have mentioned in passing that Memento is like Rashomon,
so too is this a firmly held idea about Carpenter’s film. The next chap-
ter considers the reasons for this before looking at the very last of the
Rashomon permutations, the television series Boomtown.

7
And on Television . . .
“Where to Sherlock?”
—Nolan 20001
Introduction
If the remakes of Rashomon all took the rape as part of their central
premise, the permutations on the film have tackled all sorts of other
aspects: murder; memory; the world as hell; subjective understandings
of the world; the position of women in society; the (in)ability to accept
responsibility; questions of truth, of innocence and guilt. No single
film is about all these things, although each film could be said to
share the assumption that social reality consists of the stories people
tell about themselves: how they choose to remember and explain their
actions. Whether this is the same as hard, objective, even Platonic,
facts is another question altogether.
The films tend to present a contrast between the certainty that
facts, in and of themselves can reveal the truth, and the assumption
that simple facts can only point to or signify what are more com-
plex events. What is left out of the first assumption, as Teddy tries
vainly to explain to Leonard Shelby, is that humans interpret facts.
The great flaw in Leonard’s construction of his world is that his lapses
of memory make it impossible for him to construct a consistent ver-
sion from his facts; he is not like the narrator in Marienbad who, if
he is lying is doing so consistently, persistently, and thus manages to
convince the woman of his version of events. He effectively constructs
a new version of reality. Nor is he like Monfriez in Courage under

Fire who, once his version is challenged, chooses not to live with the
consequences.
Thus, save for—ironically enough—Reversal of Fortune, most
permutations invert the central premise of Rashomon; that is, they
assume that subjective points of view all cohere into one grand narra-
tive. There can be one correct interpretation of the facts, one that we
all can agree on. This may well be based on a reading of the Japanese
film that assumes that the woodcutter’s tale is the true version, that
there has been a crime and a solution. However as mentioned in the
last chapter, there appear to exist various tropes, repeated themes
or techniques, associated with Kurosawa’s work. The use of multi-
ple flashbacks has become such a trope, especially in the genre of
police procedurals. This trope has acquired the label “the rashomon
technique.” I first heard this term in a long promotional ad for Sky’s
showing of, ironically enough, CSI. The actor Paul Guilfoyle (Capt
Jim Brass) noted that the program is groundbreaking because it uses
this technique: different points of views and flashbacks tell the story
in such a way as to lead the audience through to the final solution. In
fact, episode twenty-one of CSI’s season six was entitled Rashomama
to make the link between the technique and the film clear, although
as a reference to the main female character as being “difficult,” the
title was also a pun: Demon Mama.
This is not what Kurosawa, basing this part of his film firmly on
the original story by Akutagawa, posits: he gives us a film in which
we never know the truth. Schroeder’s film, telling us a story based on
“real life,” reflects this accurately. The other films discussed engage
the audience’s dialogic imagination in an entirely different way. Like
the novels that Bakhtin was analyzing, they offer endings that could
not be called happy—being somewhat true to the idea that we can
never predict all of life’s events—they are partial endings. It is up to
the audience to decide what happens next. In fact it is not just a ques-
tion of whether the characters live happily ever after and what that
might constitute, but whether the characters even get to live that is
often the puzzle we are left with (The Killing, Reservoir Dogs, Run,
Lola, Run, Memento, Ghosts of Mars).
Mysteries, traditionally, offer us tidy solutions: the criminal is
caught, presumably brought to justice (sometimes even within the
story itself) and the survivors go on. In contrast, these films appear in
part to reflect life as it is experienced: generally we manage to agree
on a version of past events, but do not always know what is next; do
not always get the complete truth; or we might assume that it will be

And on Television . . . 99
years before the events work themselves to a conclusion. These films

are “slices” of life we might say, and, as stories, inconclusive slices that
beg for something more to be known or decided. Yet, interestingly,
precisely because they reflect the chaos that is real life, they are not
films open to sequels—do we really want a definite answer on whether
anyone survives the slaughter at the end of Reservoir Dogs or if poor
Johnny Clay ends up in prison again in The Killing? Do we want
to know if there are really ghosts on Mars, rather than it all being
Ballard’s drug-induced imagination? The film ends with her heading
out to face the ghosts, but she has taken another dose of her drug of
choice just before this: is she hallucinating it all? Does the audience
want to know or would they rather imagine their own version? The
directors of these films seem confident that we would rather imagine
the “what next” ourselves. This is a distinct contrast to what hap-
pens in the series Boomtown, which, because of the constraints of the
medium, television, takes a somewhat different tack.
Boomtown, hailed by the critics as groundbreaking (again), appeared
to have taken seriously the concept of “the rashomon technique” and
applied it assiduously through its first season eighteen-episode story
arch that left some threads dangling at the end, as it were, but that
also provided “closure” for some of its main characters. Yet, each epi-
sode is the complete telling of one series of events, with introduction,
middle, and clear end.
With eighteen episodes, it would take too long to unravel all the
aspects of Boomtown that might be of interest; it should be enough,
however, to outline the premise of the series and to focus on the
episode that most resembles Rashomon. The series is another crime
show, a variety of programming that appears currently to saturate
U.S. television. There have been many variations of the theme in
recent years: Homicide, Life on the Street; Law and Order (with
spin-offs); The Shield; the already mentioned CSI and its spin-offs;
The Third Watch, Brooklyn South, The Sopranos, and Oz to name
just a few. If we think of most of these programs as involving the
solving of a mystery as well as delving, over the many weeks, into
the personal lives of the crime fighters, lawyers, or criminals, we
could add others that use this formula: X Files, The Practice, or The
Agency (an attempt to reassure U.S. citizens that the CIA knows
what it is doing). Add to it light comedy mysteries such as Diagnosis
Murder, and reruns of old series like Perry Mason, Cagney and
Lacey, Murder, She Wrote, or Columbo (to name just a few) and
we might imagine that American viewers watch nothing but crime

programs. 2 What we can say is that the crime series remains a dom-
inant formula and that Boomtown tried to do something innova-
tive with the basic premise: crime is committed, criminals have to be
caught by increasingly human and unhappy officials; then, in some
variations on this, they have to be tried by a justice system that is
overworked and on the verge of collapse.
What did Yost, the series producer, do? He gave the audience the
now rather common large cast of main characters—seven in this
case—and presented almost every episode from all seven points of
view, in, often overlapping, flashbacks. Events from the point of view
of other characters—the criminal, a victim—are also included and, in
the first two episodes, even dead characters were allowed their flash-
back version of events. The technique is certainly polyphonic. Some
sequences run backward to the moment of the crime, reminiscent of
Memento. The main cast of seven are not all police officers; there are
four of these: two detectives, Joel Stevens (Donnie Wahlberg) and
his partner Bobby “Fearless” Smith (Mykelti Williamson); and two
uniformed officers, Ray Hechler (Gary Basaraba) and Tom Turcotte
(Jason Gedrick). We also have the deputy district attorney, David
McNorris (Neal McDonough); an ambulance paramedic, Teresa
Ortiz (Lana Parrilla); and a reporter, Andrea Little (Nina Garbiras).
The last character is, in some ways, the most important. For a large
part of the series, it is possible to trace all the narratives back to events
Andrea has either witnessed or might have been told, afterward, by
the other characters. One way or another, she has access to almost
everyone in the series (save for the dead!). The series opening credits
would appear to offer us a clue as to her centrality as possible pur-
veyor of all the narratives: she appears lying down, dozing—possibly
dreaming—and turns in a restless way, the camera pans past her to
focus on a framed print of the founder fathers of Los Angeles offering
an apple to a “native” girl.
Andrea is the granddaughter of the Little who sold all the orange
groves of the county to developers in order to make his fortune (an
allusion, perhaps, to Polansky’s Chinatown, 1974). In her eagerness
to prove herself as something more than a spoiled rich girl, she seems
to be always on call, always ready to investigate a story, follow an
injustice and get involved. In fact, at the start of the series, Andrea is
having an affair with David McNorris, affording her yet more access
to all sides of the stories. Although she ends the affair by the fifth
episode, Andrea remains close to McNorris, who is still in love with
her. She continues to feel guilty about being the other woman; and is

concerned about his drinking, which reminds her of her own relation-
ship with her alcoholic father.
Andrea’s guilt is shared, in different ways, by all the series’ char-
acters. This is an interesting development of Kurosawa’s characters
who all feel responsible for the murder. In Boomtown, McNorris feels
guilty about cheating on his wife, and about his increasing resem-
blance to his own father, a corrupt Mr. Fix-it for politicians on the
East Coast. Tom Turcotte carries a burden of guilt over his father’s
career as well: Paul Turcotte, was a police officer long investigated for
corruption and forced to retire before being prosecuted by Internal
Affairs. Tom’s partner, Ray Hechler, is still under suspicion for cor-
ruption. Ray’s former partner has disappeared with money that
some wonder— especially Andrea as a reporter—if he also doesn’t
have access to. This cloud of suspicion means that his fellow officers
do not trust him and Ray’s relationship with the detectives, Stevens
and Fearless, is especially fraught. While Tom’s relationship with his
father is occasionally touched on, especially in episodes four (Reelin’
in the Years) and eighteen (Lost Child); Ray’s anger at the others’ sus-
picion of him is mentioned in almost every episode. We never learn
whether he is guilty or not, but his desire to prove himself a good
cop drives Ray to acts of bravery, compassion, and sometimes fool-
ishness (e.g., episodes three, The Squeeze; seven, Insured by Smith
and Wesson; twelve, Sinaloa Cowboys; fifteen, Storm Watch; and
sixteen, Fearless).
Fearless Smith, we learn as the series evolves, feels guilt both over
the death of his friend Freaktown (Miguel A. Munez, Jr.) in the Gulf
War and over his own sexual abuse as a child (episodes six, The
Freak; and sixteen, Fearless). Fearless is as interesting a character as
Andrea; he has a story for everything it seems, and sometimes he tells
the same story with a different ending, depending on what the situa-
tion requires. He is both an unreliable narrator in this sense, but also
the most reckless and inspired of the police officers (episodes six,
The Freak, and eight, Crash). Fearless is also a sympathetic partner
to Stevens who is struggling with a depressed wife and with trying to
maintain the lie that she was injured in an accident, rather than in a
suicide attempt. Stevens, we learn by the end of the series, is also car-
rying a burden of guilt—not just his increasing attraction to Teresa,
the paramedic (e.g., episodes five, All Hallow’s Eve; and thirteen,
Home Invasion), but also due to the fact that he feels responsible
for the death of his second child, the death being the very reason for
his wife’s depression since she feels guilty about what appears to be

a case of SIDS. Teresa, the paramedic, reveals in episode thirteen

that she does all that she does—not just her medical work, but hos-
pice work—because she promised her mother, whom she “helped”
to die when the pain from her cancer grew too great, to always help
others.
The themes of guilt and responsibility are the most dominant in the
series and the two emotions are the engines that appear to drive each
and every one of the main characters. In this we have a clear devel-
opment of Kurosawa’s Dostoevsky-inspired ideas: it is not the wrong
that we have done that matters as much as what we chose to do in
the light of our “sins.” While the bandit boasts, the woman weeps
and the dead man bewails his place in hell, it is the woodcutter who
acts—he takes on the responsibility of the child. This does not make
him less guilty, but it does work toward mitigating his guilt. He is, in
a Buddhist sense, making merit. So too, albeit it in Christian terms,
are all of the characters in Boomtown—only McNorris, struggling
with a drinking problem, ever seems in danger of being paralyzed by
his guilt, he is the character most at risk, struggling at every turn to
try and do the right thing. Ultimately—as Fearless says in the very
first episode, “I don’t have a prayer, but I do have a story”—none of
the characters remains as they are, the series is about their stories and,
as a result, the changes they undergo: becoming closer as friends and
colleagues; struggling to do the “right thing”; to correct old wrongs;
and, in almost every episode, to bring the consciousless bad guys to
justice. The contrast between the very human good guys and the bad
is most clearly made by looking at the episode that deals most directly
with issues taken from Rashomon: Home Invasion.
This episode, the thirteenth of the series, is about a gang of crimi-
nals who find their way into people’s houses, hiding and waiting until
the night, when they come out to kill everyone, first raping the wife
while the husband watches. The police see a link between two fami-
lies murdered in this way—they have used the same car parking ser-
vice when going out to eat in the evening—and try to track down the
next possible victims. The case is one that upsets everyone, and in an
echo of the opening dialogue in Rashomon, Stevens says: “This is why
cops talk to other cops. My wife wouldn’t understand this.” Fearless
tells him: “It’s not understandable.” Whatever these men feel guilty
about, they have not yet crossed the line that makes the logic of these
criminals accessible to them; they don’t understand why criminals do
what they do, although they can assess the facts to work out what has
happened, in what order, and when it might happen again.

Andrea has also worked out the valet parking link and insists on
being part of the investigation. The first suspect they trace, however,
dies before he can be questioned and, working on the clues provided
by his belongings, the police set up a stake-out in the house of the
family, the Steins, they think has been targeted as next. Joel Stevens
is in the house, Ray Heckler outside (Ray cynically implies that Joel
has asked for him as back up because he does not trust Fearless not
to kill the criminals). Also inside is Teresa Ortiz, who as a volunteer
hospice worker, takes the place of the night nurse that the husband,
played by Joe Spano, 3 of the household needs as he is in the last stages
of cancer.
The night is made more complicated, or perhaps more interesting,
by Mr. Stein’s refusal to leave his house: since he is dying anyway, why
should he flee before the would-be murderers? His wife, then, also
refuses to leave. During the night, Teresa confesses to Mr. Stein that
she helped her mother kill herself and, admits to Joel that she is inter-
ested in him. By daybreak, nothing has happened and the police leave,
wondering if they have not made a mistake, and the couple’s daugh-
ters return home. A flashback reveals that the murderers are waiting
up in the attic, aware of the police’s presence and glorying in the idea
that by doing their “work” after they leave, they will have outwitted
the cops. Joel, however, sees a meter reader making his rounds and
remembers, also in flashback, a report about a meter reader doing
the rounds the previous day. He and Ray go back into the house and
Joel takes Mr. Stein’s place in bed. When the criminals enter the room
and threaten him with a gun, Joel sits up and shoots; then, chasing
the other man through the house, he and Ray hear a shot. They find
that Mr. Stein has shot the man with a rifle and is preparing to shoot
again. Joel tries to stop him: “It’s murder.” Ray uses reverse psychol-
ogy: “Go ahead,” he says and somehow, this calms Mr. Stein down.
They lead him out of the house without his firing again.
This episode clearly calls on many of the events of Rashomon: the
criminal’s gaze that has the power to turn innocent passers-by (in a car
rather than on a horse) into victims. The desire that expresses itself as
the impulse to cause others pain: that is the children are killed and wife
raped while the husband, bound and gagged, is forced to watch. The
rage that the husband feels (interestingly, save for Mrs. Stein’s refusal
to leave her husband’s side, we know nothing of what she thinks or
feels) at the very thought that this is the criminals’ plan is, in this
story, not turned inward nor focused on the woman, but directed at
the rapists themselves. However, the idea that shooting in self-defense

is justified—a man should defend himself and his family—but also

that killing someone in cold blood is murder, are additional themes
that draw attention to the thin line between what is right or wrong.
Bound up in all this are other ideas about what is allowable: helping
a pain-wrecked, cancer-ridden mother to take enough painkillers to
die could be wrong, it seems, perhaps even a crime under the law,
but in terms of Teresa’s responsibility to her mother, it was the right
thing to do.
As with all the episodes in the series, Home Invasion considers
the rights and wrongs of responsible action and draws a line between
what is murder and what is justifiable. More to the point, it makes
clear how the characters in the series deal with moral dilemmas not
just in their jobs, but also in everyday life—as we all do. Teresa’s
dying mother, Joel’s depressed wife and his growing affection for
another woman, are not situations unique to them. Nor is Andrea’s
guilt over her affair with McNorris; his sense of remorse that allows
her to manipulate him; Fearless’ sometimes dangerous subjectivity;
or Ray’s tactic of advising others to do their worst—they are all pos-
sibilities that any member of the audience might encounter. Even the
obvious post-September 11 nightmare of the very prospect of a home
invasion (with all its meanings, I would argue, fully intended)—all of
this is meant to speak to the audience. In Bakhtin’s terms, the series is
densely polyphonic, heteroglossic, and certainly calls on the dialogic
imagination. But, this episode aside, is all of this enough to justify the
label of being like Rashomon for the series as a whole?
The answer to this is only if we are willing to accept the concept
of “the rashomon technique”—a concept that appears to have entered
the vocabulary of people who work in the mass media of film and
television. I have outlined what this technique seems to include more
than once and I have also noted that there is nothing particularly
“Kurosawa” about aspects of this technique: telling a story from more
than one point of view, and through flashbacks was not something he
invented. The shock of Rashomon, to repeat, was in its assertion that
social reality was constructed through our subjective experiences and
that these experiences might not coalesce into a “rational” narrative
despite the human desire for cogent stories. It allowed for a sense of
responsibility, a sense of guilt, to be shared amongst various people
who might well be sure that they are each responsible for the same
person’s death. It examined the sin of pride (rather than celebrating it,
as the producer and writer of Misty claim to do, cf. Yamaguchi 1997)
and the hell that is created by people’s inability or refusal to change.

Interestingly, many of the films I have discussed consider this last

issue—The Killers, Reversal of Fortune, Reservoir Dogs, Memento,
and perhaps, if its moral is about the changing role of women in
the military, Courage under Fire. But it is only the more drawn out
medium of the television series, almost eighteen hours worth of view-
ing, which explores the possibilities to their fullest extent.
However, Boomtown is firmly American in its tenor as well as in
its use of dominant tropes: it is a cop show par excellence and many
of its themes are not new to the genre. In contrast to a postwar Japan
or Europe where history was remade by fascist ideology and then
recreated again by a victorious occupying Army, neither Boomtown
nor most of the films discussed question the dominant construction
of reality. They do not ask “can there be a single truth,” but assert
“there is a single truth.” They always offer us a final version, a coher-
ent version in which all the pieces come together and one reality is
proposed. Only Marienbad, Run, Lola, Run and because of Ballard’s
drug usage, Ghosts of Mars, suggest something other: that reality
is what we make of it—Memento also does this but blames it on
a disability. Reversal of Fortune does not offer a final truth, but it
does offer a caveat about the importance of a justice system that tries
to make the right decisions, while The Usual Suspects asks us to be
impressed by the most unreliable of unreliable narrators: the cam-
era. In Rashomon the camera may be unreliable but does not lie nor,
really, do the humans. It is our subjective interpretation of the facts
that is at stake.
In this sense, the idea of a rashomon technique misses the point of
the original that could be read as a commentary on the human need to
use narratives as a way of creating and protecting a distinctive sense
of self. That this need contradicts dominant rationalist discourses
about an objective reality is not only the point of Rashomon, but also
a “fact” of life.4 Novels and films, then, often explore how subjectiv-
ity coheres into the consensus we call social reality. Yet, as I argued in
chapter one, inherent within the genres themselves is the implicit abil-
ity to question dominant constructions of reality. Occasionally these
forms of fiction bravely, explicitly, challenge this cozy construction of
the world. The explicit challenge, however is not one with which audi-
ences are entirely comfortable—hence the permutations that shift the
dialogic question from “what really happened” to “what happened
next”? That there is difference between what directors think U.S. and
European audiences will accept is a point that needs to be reiterated
in relation to the films reviewed here. The question is whether this

is due to the fact that U.S. society is suffused with Judeo-Christian

values in a way that European societies—with a longer history of
anti- clericalism and growing agnosticism, as well as a greater experi-
ence of the failure of political ideologies—no longer are, or if it is an
example of how local cinemas create themselves as different in light of
the hegemony of the Hollywood film. The answer is probably that it
is a little bit of both. Moreover, uncomfortable as some of these films
might make audiences, the films considered here have achieved near-
global critical and economic success.
But why insist on the existence of the rashomon technique? There
is much to be said about the modern generation of filmmakers and
their desire to establish themselves in the light of an appropriate
filmic genealogy. I will elaborate on this in the upcoming “interval”
and return to the question in the conclusion, but, before doing so,
want to consider other remakes of Kurosawa films: the films spawned
or inspired by Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Hidden Fortress each of
which presents us with different facets of what happens when narra-
tives are translated across cultures.

A Short Interval: Rashomon and
the Desire Lines of the Imagination
Marge: “You liked Rashomon!”

Homer: “That’s not how I remember it.”
—The Simpsons, “Thirty Minutes over Tokyo,” May 16, 1999
I have examined Rashomon and its remakes/permutations in some

detail and the films merited this close examination for a variety of
reasons. The first is that given the “shock” of the film’s initial recep-
tion—that something so interesting could come from Japan, that such
an unusual story with no clear ending could be so compelling—it is
significant that an attempt to remake the film followed within the
decade. That is, despite an apparent disjuncture between cultures, as
well as a Western postwar sense that Japan was beyond understand-
ing, leading to a “romantic” interaction with this exotic Other that
always assumes difference, the story, its narrative strategies and con-
cepts were quickly incorporated into the Western canon. In English,
the term rashomon effect is a well-known sociological description of
the subjectivity of witnesses’ testimony and, in the media world, the
rashomon technique describes a particular narrative strategy.
Second, the use of the multiple flashback and several characters’
point of view as narrative strategies in a film such as, for exam-
ple, Hero, Hoodwinked! or Vantage Point, immediately sets some
segments of the audience to discussing the assumed relationship to
Rashomon (see the IMDB discussion board for films Rashomon is
referenced in). This relationship can often seem tangential. In Hero,
the allusion is less to Rashomon than to Kurosawa’s battle scenes in

general; and the flashbacks are interesting only in relation to how

the emperor sees through a series of fictive narratives and manages
to construct a single true version rather than to the subjectivity of
the each story. It is tempting to analyze the film in terms of a par-
ticular modern Chinese sensibility about authority and the need for
strong if tough leaders. Yet the sense that Kurosawa’s film is some-
how the inspiration remains. In Hoodwinked! and Vantage Point the
rashomon technique is used to solve a mystery. In the former it is part
of a strategy to make the film interesting for adults as well as children.
In the latter film, the bringing together of the different points of view
reveals the identity of the terrorist at the heart of the plot, speaking
clearly to an American post-9/11 sense of fear, but not to Kurosawa’s
original intent. Vantage Point, in contrast to the original film, seems
intent on portraying hard and fast truths. Film critics in the United
Kingdom, for example, were quick to dismiss the rashomon reference
and yet as a technique several of the actors refer to it in the DVD
interviews. Thus the comparison to Rashomon is an intertextual ref-
erence that is made about any number of films. In short, we cannot
ignore the propensity to make connections between films.
This leads to my third point: referring back, either as filmmaker
or a as member of a film audience, to the work of a great director
is part of our modern knowledge capital. I use this term as a corol-
lary to Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of cultural capital. I have already
discussed how, in a business sense, knowledge capital refers to way
in which knowledge can be used as capital in profitable ways by film-
makers. In a more quotidian manner, when discussing audiences, I
am referring here to knowledge used as capital in order to assume
superiority over others who may, in general, possess more cultural
capital. For someone to argue that something about the film Hero
is like Rashomon is a strategy used to display a wide knowledge of
films in general and foreign films in particular. In this sense it is not
so much about how we are formed by our access to cultural capital,
but how we use knowledge as cultural capital to make ourselves in
ways that are not part of a dominant ideology. To be better edu-
cated may no longer be simply enough in the daily human interac-
tions that often seem to resemble primate chest thumping. Being well
educated and knowing about art, music, and foreign films is part of
the status-making process within the capitalist class system. To be
well educated, know about the classical arts, and to be able to say
something about popular culture, as well as to see the relationship
between the two, is a description of a different sort of status, one that

A Short Interval 109
may have little value in the wider world of class hierarchies, but that
relates to subcultures and their formation. Such uses of knowledge
capital signify a certain lifestyle in the Weberian sense and appear to
be fundamental to our understanding of how commodities work in
postmodernity.
Knowledge capital can also be subversive, undermining cultural
capital. Internet discussions of films often come down to this sort of
arguing, question asking (“Does anybody know . . .?” someone will
begin), disputes over interpretations offered and all to what end we
might ask?. What does it matter if “anonymous of Toledo” is sure
they have understood the film, can explain it, and are able to sup-
port their reading by making film connections? In modern Western
societies where to be able to critique is almost as important an ability
as to create, there seems to be a great deal of significance attached
to this sort of knowledge capital. As Logan has argued in relation
to the Internet: “We’re all critics now” (1999). In its more positive
light, such an ability to critique, to display our knowledge capital
is as much part of an impulse to create connections between people
who share the same interests/obsessions as we do, as it is an attempt
to assert dominance. Displaying this capital is both a way of knowing
and being in the world, evidence of the desire lines that makes pop-
ular culture matter no matter what the theorists say about its being
only the opiate of the masses (cf. Adorno 1991).
For the film directors I have discussed thus far, knowledge capital
relates to a further issue: the establishing of one’s filmic genealogy.
As Kurosawa noted, a wannabe great film director watches the great
films of the world. For the independent filmmakers I have thus far
discussed (and most have been independent of the Hollywood system,
although they may have come to be incorporated into it), knowing
one’s films and film history is important. In an odd battle between
those who studied at film school and those who just studied the films
(Quentin Tarantino being a vociferous advocate of the latter), knowing
one’s foreign films matters to both sides. To remake a great but other-
wise unknown foreign film might well be the province of the studio or
producer who just wants to make money, but to play on and play out
the intertextal relationships between one’s film and a great film is the
mark of the would-be auteur. The desire line here is the line that links
knowledge, creativity, and recognition in the broader world. When it
comes to a film like Rashomon, which subverts a dominant Western
philosophical understanding about “the truth” and reality, the fact
that the narrative needs reworking in order to sit comfortably with

both filmmakers and audiences matters less than the initial impulse,
which acknowledged the possibility of the story—or some aspects of
the story—translating.
The variations in the basic story, the visual techniques and nar-
rative strategies that we get in the permutations of Rashomon do
appear to give us a divide within Western understandings of the film.
European directors (Cukor, Resnais, Bava, Schroeder, Tykwer, Nolan)
seem content with the idea that narratives are inherently subjective,
while U.S. and modern Japanese filmmakers want to offer us a “true”
solution. Yet even this generalization is too neat: Kubrick, Tarantino,
Carpenter, and even Singer, in so far as their films are like Rashomon,
seem to offer us endings that resolve nothing in substitution for the
subjectivity that makes all the stories in the Japanese film true. For
them “not knowing” what happens next appears to be analogous to
Rashomon’s radical critiquing of the construction of social reality.
The Japanese film’s question, how can society function when every-
one seems to live so within their own versions of the truth, becomes a
query about how we never know what might be just around the cor-
ner, an uncertainly about life. In their dialogic relationship with the
audience, both formulas allow viewers to make a decision of sorts,
either to decide who did it or what might happen next.
However, for all the filmmakers, save for The Usual Suspects or
the series Boomtown perhaps, the female appears as a problem and
the circumstances of that problem vary between societies and eras. Is
she telling the truth, manipulating us, too earthy for her husband, a
murderess, a heroine, too lost in her own construction of self to be
honest—all these are not only questions we can ask of Masago, but
can also be applied to the women who appear, as central or minor
characters, in each of the remakes or permutations. In short, as I have
argued elsewhere (Martinez 2007:34), woman “as a sign remains
unreadable and unknowable, the illusion that structures our social
reality” because we can read anything we would like into this sign.
Perhaps of all the films that I have discussed, Les Girls, Reversal of
Fortune, Run, Lola, Run, and to some extent, Courage under Fire,
best illustrate this. Thus, as I have already noted, Rashomon as a nar-
rative is opened out, allowing filmmakers and audiences to invest the
story with a myriad of meanings and interpretations.
The next three films that will be discussed differ from Rashomon
in that the stories have often been appropriated with less variation
because their meanings appeared to be, I will argue, more immediately
accessible to audiences. As we shall see, in contrast to Rashomon, the

A Short Interval 111
remakes and permutations of the Seven Samurai build on already exist-

ing Western constructions of the heroic group. Yojimbo’s relationship
to U.S. detective fiction with its antihero, whose morals are somewhat
questionable, presents us with a different problem: how to limit an
analysis of all the intertextual relationships that are possible because
tales about the lone hero appear everywhere (cf. Campbell 1949) in
some incarnation or another? The universality of the heroic quest, the
need for a wise mentor, the treasure to be retrieved, the romance of
the adventure, and the role played by the “ordinary” side-kicks, all of
which can be found in folktales everywhere will be discussed in rela-
tion to the final film I want to consider: The Hidden Fortress. With
themes as near universal as those of The Hidden Fortress, we appear
to enter the domain of fairy tale or fantasy, realms where the ability
to tell a new story or an old story in a new way will lead me back to a
discussion of the human imagination and creativity.

Figure 4 No Welcome in the Village, Seven Samurai
Source: Kurosawa 1954. Toho Co., Ltd. Courtesy of The Criterion Collection
Figure 5 No Welcome in the Village, The Magnificent Seven

Source: Sturges 1960. MGM. Courtesy of MGM Home Entertainment

8
The Group Western
“Well, I guess we’re really seven now”
—Heihachi in Seven Samurai
Introduction
If Rashomon is remembered for its narrative techniques as well as
for its astonishing cinematography, Seven Samurai (Shichinin no
Samurai, 1954) might be considered more important in terms of its
plot and some of the visual techniques that have inspired directors
from the 1960s onward. Prince (2000) has written an essay outlining
Kurosawa’s influence on Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah, especially,
so I will do little more than refer here to this at the chapter’s end—my
focus will remain firmly on the remakes and the permutations that
this acknowledged masterpiece of Japanese cinema inspired outside
Japan. It is worth noting, however, that since the story and the plot-
ted development of its elements have “translated” relatively easily
across space and time, this chapter will consider the reasons for this
ease of translation.1
At the time of its making, as Richie (1996) and Galbraith (2002)
note, Seven Samurai was the most expensive Japanese film ever
produced—although the expense did not extend to the use of color
film stock. The film took over a year to make, was filmed mostly
on location, and presented the director with endless problems: not
enough horses, constant rain, and an increasingly worried pro-
duction company (Toho Studios). It was part of Kurosawa’s effort
to make a historically accurate jidai-geki (historical drama). As

Richie notes:
. . . fully half of all Japanese films made were jidai-geki, the “real” ones
were very rare. Most of them were . . . chambara, simple sword-fight
films . . .
Kurosawa, then, wanted to present the past as meaningful, but do
it within a framework of the jidai-geki . . . at the same time, he says,
he wanted to make a picture that was also completely entertaining.
(1996:97)
In wanting to make a realistic film, Kurosawa referred to the realism

he admired in Mizoguchi’s historical films (Richie 1996). Coming
after his brilliant story of a dying man, Ikiru (To Live, 1951) and a
failed version of Dosteovsky’s The Idiot (Hakuchi, 1952), Kurosawa’s
motives appear to remain the same: the Seven Samurai is not only an
attempt at realism, but is also another social critique of modern Japan
with a debt to Russian film epics. It also shares with Rashomon the
theme of guilt, although this is a subplot not generally understood by
Western audiences who saw a shortened version of the film shown
from 1955 onward. It is only with the restored three-plus-hour ver-
sion and the newly translated version issued on DVD by Criterion that
the true nature of the story is revealed (cf. Martinez 2008).
The story and its plot can be summed up quite simply: the inhabit-
ants of a village that is periodically raided by bandits decide to hire
professional warriors to protect them. With nothing more to offer
other than room and board, they manage to “hire” seven men who
teach the villagers how to fight the bandits. In a series of skirmishes
and, eventually, in one large battle, the forty bandits are defeated
and the three samurai who survive leave the liberated village. In
the main, the screenplay, as written by Hashimoto Shinobu, Oguni
Hideo, and Akira Kurosawa, is about peasants’ experience of oppres-
sion by roaming bandits during the Civil Wars of sixteenth-century
Japan. The story is clearly set after 1542 (when muskets were acciden-
tally introduced into Japan by shipwrecked Portuguese sailors) and
before unification of Japan under Tokugawa Hidetoshi—an impor-
tant point, as we shall see.
The farmers in the story suffer not only because of the bandits who
raid their village regularly, but also because of the taxes that their
lord exacts in order to fund warfare. They are clearly a downtrod-
den lot, beaten into submission by the near constant wars, the bandit
raids, the difficulties of farming, and the disinterest of their lord who
cares only about what can be squeezed out of them. It would not be

The Group Western 115
farfetched to see an analogy between the situation of the farmers and

the plight of most Japanese before the Second World War. This depic-
tion of how tough life was before 1950 was at odds with most jidai-
geki—which, even today, show rather contented farmers whose lives
are only periodically beset by problems. For example, the country
doctor Saga published his collected interviews with elderly Japanese
in order to document how Japan “had, until only recently, a very dif-
ferent type of society” (1987:19) and it is noticeable how many of his
interviewees referred to television samurai dramas only to debunk
their romantic portrayal of the past. “It’s absolute nonsense” says one
elderly woman (Saga 1987:116). U.S. documentaries made after the
war, during the Occupation, also attest to the poverty of rural life:
they detail the illnesses of the farmers, tapeworms, ringworm, rickets,
and malnutrition of all sorts as well as an average life span of forty-
seven years for woman, forty-five for men. It is this “quality” of life
that Kurosawa wanted to depict in his film.
However, the film has another level to it. There is a story within a
story that was, to Western audiences, lost for almost forty years. That
is that the Seven Samurai is no simplistic apologia for “oppressed”
Japanese. At the heart of the film is the story of the villager Rikichi’s
(Tsuchiya Yoshio) missing wife (Shimazaki Yokiko). From the opening
of the film it is clear to careful observers that something is “wrong”
in the young farmer Rikichi’s relationship with the others. 2 When
he speaks for action at the very start of the film, urging his fellow
farmers to do something about the bandits, to arm themselves and
kill them, there is something shamefaced in the way they avoid his
gaze and eventually give in to his demands. Then, in town to recruit
samurai, there comes a point when the other farmers want to give up,
but Rikichi stops the incipient mutiny by taunting Manzo (Fujiwara
Kamatari) with the idea of appeasing the bandits by giving them
his daughter, Shino (Tsushima Keiko). That the women in the vil-
lage themselves are concerned is also clear: it is a woman crying and
screaming who brings all the villagers together, at the film’s start,
to discuss what they might do about the next bandits’ raid. If we
add the historical knowledge that pre-Tokugawa farmers could not
only arm themselves, but also frequently did (cf. Hane 1982), rising
in rebellion against their feudal lords, it becomes even more apparent
that there is something wrong with this village, which is not resisting
the bandits and where the women feel that “There are no gods here
any more . . .” (Richie 1970:70). Kurosawa hints at this when Rikichi
says to Manzo, right at the start of the story: “You manage to kill all

the samurai you catch, all right, but you can’t kill bandits” (Richie
1970:71). Why aren’t the villagers fighting against the bandits?
The answer comes in bits and pieces through the story strand that
concerns Rikichi’s missing and very beautiful wife. In a single sen-
tence (in a scene initially cut out of the Western version and then
mistranslated in the BFI version), it becomes clear near the end of
the film why the farmers have not been resisting the bandits. When
Manzo’s daughter Shino is caught making love to the young samurai,
Katsushiro (Kimura Isao), Rikichi tells the furious father: “At least it
was something between two people who like each other. She wasn’t
given to bandits.” Rather than fight against the bandits, the villag-
ers initially tried to buy them off, giving them their most beautiful
woman in the hope that they would go away. Not only has this not
worked—the film opens with the bandits planning to return after
the barley harvest—it has somehow emasculated the farmers—all the
fight, the viciousness that they can bring to resisting roaming unem-
ployed samurai (ronin), has gone out of them.
In its commentary on modern Japan, the film is not only a harsh
look at how elites can oppress peasants, a continuation of Kurosawa’s
concern with class (Prince 1991), but also at how victims can be
complicit in their own oppression. If the film is a comment on 1950s
Japan, it is one that does not excuse their participation in the war. As
with Rashomon, the 1950s Japanese audience, to the extent to which
it identified with the farmers, had to identify with a people who are
responsible for the situation in which they find themselves. The seven
men who come to the village then, are not just professionals come to
teach the peasants how to defend their own home, they are somehow
healers, come to restore the village to its former self.
It is tempting in this light to see, as some have, the samurai in the
film not only as representatives of the best values of Japaneseness, but
somehow also like the Occupation Forces. The message at the film’s
end—that the warriors cannot stay in the village—is double-edged
and, as Yoshimoto (2000) notes, one that Kurosawa knew was his-
torically inaccurate. During this era Kambei (Shimura Takashi), the
samurai leader, would have thought nothing of settling in the village,
taking it over and, making it the basis of an attempt to build up a feu-
dal domain of his own. Katsushiro, the young apprentice, would have
stayed as well, taking Shino as a concubine. But, in this story, when
the job is over, the samurai leave a village that is free from oppression
and its own sense of guilt. Two years after the end of the Occupation
this might not have had the emotional force it may have had when

the screenplay was being written. If this is one possible reading of

the film, it is the reading that has “translated” most readily in the
film’s remakes. Not just the notion of a group of professionals who
do not fit into normal society, but as Carroll (1998) notes about some
Westerns in the United States, foreign professionals who come to the
aid of a people with whom they seem to have nothing in common.
While Carroll speculates as to whether these 1960s sorts of Westerns
attempt to ideologically justify U.S. military involvement abroad, I
find the concept of the roving professional killer also intriguing.
Seen in this way, Seven Samurai shares with some U.S. Westerns
and later detective/police films what was to become an important
theme post-Vietnam: what do we do with ordinary men trained to
kill once we no longer need them to be soldiers? The various remakes
of the Japanese film has the men dying and/or leaving the village,
while the theme, as it developed in other sorts of Hollywood films,
pits the good ex-soldier, now become a detective or police officer,
against the bad one, now become a mercenary or master criminal. In
these films the good and bad protagonists are often old friends, com-
rades in arms who have taken different paths postwar, and who—in
their violent temperaments, inability to have normal relationships and
loneliness—are more alike than not. This theme of the state trained
killer’s alienation from “normal” society is not a theme Kurosawa
introduced to Hollywood—we might trace this storyline back to the
first postwar films from 1918 onward3 —but it is one shared by his
film and others. Where do the bandits come from if not from the
ranks of farmers, foot soldiers, and unemployed samurai? The post-
war concern with how to incorporate the nonprofessional soldier,
who is nevertheless trained in combat, back into ordinary life, is com-
mon to both Japanese and Western societies and might well account
for how comprehensible this film is seen to be by foreign audiences.4
“Nowadays Men are Cheaper than Guns”5

The first remake of the Seven Samurai—The Magnificent Seven
(1960)—is probably also the best known. The story of how the remake
of the Japanese film came about exists in two versions, as the special
features documentary on the DVD notes (Heaton 2000). The actor
Yul Brunner claimed that he immediately realized the potential of
a remake when he saw the Kurosawa original, and got his lawyer in
Japan to buy the rights. Lou Morheim, the associate producer, claims
that he had the idea that the Japanese film would make a classic

American Western and that he got the rights to remake the story from
Toho.
Initially the new screenplay was closer to Kurosawa’s with the
story set just after the American Civil War—Martin Ritt, who went
on to make The Outrage, was first brought in as the director and the
blacklisted Walter Bernstein produced the first draft of the screen-
play. The script was rewritten by Walter Newman and John Struges
finally directed the film. Walter Mirisch, the producer, claims that the
film was set in Mexico because by filming there they could escape an
actors’ strike. This seems too simple an explanation: given its team of
young, mostly unknown stars—including a German, Horst Buchholz,
as Chico and a well-known Mexican actress, Rosenda Monteros, as
Petra—and its location, it would seem that the studio was trying to
keep costs down while making a film that would do well in Latin
America as well as Europe. To understand why MGM took this strat-
egy, it is important to remember that The Magnificent Seven was
made at the very end of the “golden era” of Hollywood Westerns,
in an era when television was saturated with weekly series set in the
West6 and film versions of the genre had decreased in popularity. The
narration in the documentary Guns for Hire (2000) calls the film
the “pivotal movie” made between the Western’s golden era and its
death by television. However Westerns were still doing well outside
the United States and it seems likely that this was uppermost in the
studio’s mind when casting The Magnificent Seven.
The decision to set the story south of the border can also be as an
extension of the reasons I gave in chapter four for setting the new ver-
sion of Rashomon in a similar location. Not only is the potential of
such mythic events occurring somehow more possible in this “exotic”
location, but also the very undemocratic premise of the story makes
“more sense.” Although Westerns were often about farmers getting
into range wars with cattlemen, or cattlemen with evil scheming rail-
road barons, and the lone gunman who arrives on the scene is cru-
cial in getting rid of the villain; the idea of peasants—as opposed to
independent hardworking citizen farmers—oppressed by the social
system just did not sit well with the U.S. version of its own history
as the country where the downtrodden of other societies came to be
free. Mexico, on the other hand, still had peasants who were even
called that, peons. The only problem was that the Mexican govern-
ment was sensitive about how Hollywood represented its past and
gave permission for the company to film only if the script was vetted
by their censors and if changes were made whenever they encountered

an inappropriate representation of Mexicans. On the more ludicrous

side this included not showing the peasants as dirty or sweaty, but on
the more serious side there was raised an objection that echoes the
central problem of the original story. Why would Mexican peasants
hire professionals to defend them against bandits when the country’s
history was full of examples of rebellious peasants more than capable
of defending themselves?7
With the edited version of the Seven Samurai being the one
Hollywood writers were working from, the subplot of Rikichi’s wife
was not available: there was only her brief appearance as a kidnapped
wife who kills herself rather than return safely home. So the theme of
communal complicity and guilt was not apparent and if it had been,
it is possible that the Mexicans would not have accepted it, since this
too might have seemed to besmirch Mexican honor—what sort of
man would give his wife away? It would seem that a kidnapped wife
was also problematic, for this version of Rikichi’s story is not incorpo-
rated into the U.S. film, although there is a reference to how the ban-
dits “take our women.” Hilario (Jorge Martinez de Hoyos, another
well-known Mexican actor), Rikichi’s Mexican counterpart, seems
entirely free of family ties. The new writer, brought in to cope with all
the requested script changes, William Roberts, added the story twist
that the peasants go north to buy guns, but since men are cheaper
than guns, they end up with seven professionals instead.
That the original film was appreciated in terms of Orientalist ste-
reotypes, as Yoshimoto (2000) argues, seems true. For the actors,
especially James Coburn, the samurai represent ideal men who strive
for perfection. He says, in the documentary, that his character—
Britt—was based on the character Kyuzo (Miyaguchi Seiji): “. . . the
greatest swordsman in Japan.” Seven Samurai never makes this claim
for Kyuzo, describing him only as “a fine swordsman” who is “not
interested in killing, only in perfecting his skill” (Richie 1970:101).
So too does the title of the remake miss the point of the original: the
samurai in Kurosawa’s film might appear magnificent by the time
they have finished and four of them have died, but they are not repre-
sented as extraordinary warriors.8 The leader Kambei is down on his
luck, old and having made and lost his fortune; his sidekick and old
friend Shichiroji (Katô Daisuke) admits to having survived a battle by
hiding; while Heihachi (Chiaki Minoru) frankly admits to running
away if his enemies are too many; and Kyuzo is not interested in kill-
ing even if it is his profession. The young apprentice Katsushiro is not
trained as a warrior, and the wannabe samurai Kikuchiyo (Mifune

Toshiro) is just a farmer who has probably served as a foot soldier.

Only Gorobei (Inaba Yoshio) appears to be acting out of altruistic
intentions, but even he tells Kambei “I know what the farmers have to
put up with, but it’s not because of them that I accept. It’s because of
you” (Richie 1970:95).
The U.S. version has equally flawed characters, perhaps, but
there is no question about their abilities, even the now-frightened
and somewhat shaky Lee (Robert Vaughn) is represented as a skilled
gunfighter. The American gunfighters are not warriors out of a job
because a war has ended, they are the men who have done their job,
taming the West, far too well and so have maneuvered themselves out
of a livelihood. When Chris (Yul Brunner) asks about the refusal to
bury a Native American in the local cemetery—“How long’s this been
going on?”—the local undertaker sums up the era succinctly: “Since
the town’s got civilized.” It becomes clear that the West is no longer
wild, it no longer needs men like Chris and Vin (Steve McQueen)—
but Mexico, it seems, remains “uncivilized.”
That there is a tension between this Hollywood stereotype and
what the Mexican censor thought permissible is clear in the elabo-
rated role of the bandit chief, Calvera (Eli Wallach). In contrast to the
Japanese bandit chief, not only does the Mexican have a name, but
he is loquacious and somewhat urbane. He explains in great detail,
much as does the bandit in The Outrage, that he is only a man with
responsibilities to his men. A man who has to feed his charges—and
how else is he to do this if not by preying on the sheep-like farmers?
To justify his position as villain he constantly tells the seven hired
men that he and they are alike: that men like them live and die by the
gun—they do not belong in villages and towns. This is a theme only
implied in the original film where only Kambei’s final speech “We’ve
lost again” gives a hint of all the regrets a professional warrior might
have. In the U.S. film, often wordy where the Japanese is not, this is
summed up in a rather pithy speech given by several of the men in
response to Chico’s query: “How can you talk like this? The gun has
got you everything you have.”
Vin: Home: none; wife: none; kids: none. Prospects: zero.

Chris: Places you’re tied down to: none. People with a hold on you:
none. Men you step aside for: none.
Lee: Insults swallowed: none. Enemies: none.
Chris: No enemies?
Lee: Alive.

This, in conjunction with O’Reilly’s (Charles Bronson) speech to the

children of the village of what courage really is, to carry the weight of
responsibility to others, makes it clear that the gunfighters’ inability
to live with others is as much a flaw as it is somehow magnificent.
In the Japanese film there is no question of the men staying on,
although their time spent in the village somehow humanizes them—in
the U.S. version the offer is made and only Chico, in love with Petra
and a Mexican himself, takes up the offer. That the men have achieved
some sort of redemption through their involvement with the villagers
is made clear during Harry Luck’s (Brad Dexter) death scene. He dies
saying “I’ll be damned” to which Chris responds: “Maybe you won’t
be.” Lee, who has been too frightened and shaky to take part in the
fighting, also dies in a blaze of glory, redeeming his past coward-
ice. The various sequels to the film, Return of the Magnificent Seven
(Kennedy 1967), Guns of the Magnificent Seven (Wendkos 1969),
and The Magnificent Seven Ride! (McCowan 1972),9 indicate not
only the desire to cash in on the success of the original film, but also
pick up the possibility hinted at by the end of the film: Chris and
Vin, so purposeless at the start, have now found a new direction in
life—an altruism that leads them to protect others. This is certainly
the tack taken by a later version of the film that I will discuss below.
There is one further, fundamental way, in which the Japanese and
U.S. remake differ and that is to do with the issue of class. While inter-
estingly the idea of a class difference was introduced in The Outrage
where it was not a major theme in the original, The Magnificent
Seven does away with what Prince sees as the major concern in the
Kurosawa film; that is, that the farmers are the subjects in a feudal
system, and the samurai are a part of the class that oppresses them.10
This point is made repeatedly throughout the film with references to
the villagers’ hatred of samurai, to the way in which samurai have
been attacked and murdered by villagers and, finally, in an impas-
sioned speech by Kikuchiyo:
Well, what do you think farmers are? Saints? They are the most cun-
ning and untrustworthy animals on earth. If you ask them for rice,
they’ll say they have none. But they have. They have everything. Look
in the rafters, dig in the ground. You’ll find it. Rice in jars. Salt. Beans.
Saké. Look in the mountains, hidden farms everywhere. And yet they
pretend to be oppressed. They are full of lies.
When they smell a battle they make themselves bamboo spears. And
then they hunt. But they hunt the wounded and the defeated. Farmers
are miserly, craven, mean, stupid, murderous!

You make me laugh so hard I’m crying.

But then, who made animals out of them? You! You did—you samurai!
All of you damned samurai!
And each time you fight you burn villages, you destroy the fields, you
take away the food, you rape the women and enslave the men. And
you kill them when they resist. You hear me—you damned samurai!
(Richie 128–129)
Chico’s analogous speech in the U.S. film does not quite have this
power: the gunslinger is generally represented as working alone, his
capacity for causing the sort of devastation Kikuchiyo ascribes to
the professional soldier was somewhat more limited and has been
largely depicted as town-centered violence. In many ways, the gun-
fighter was part of the changing Western landscape—he existed not
in the isolated ranches or farms, but in the growing towns before
they “got civilized.” He was also symbolic of a proud U.S. form of
individualism—and so the gunfighter as part of a class of oppres-
sors, as with the undemocratic existence of peasants, just does not
fit into the dominant ideology of the 1960s. Thus, in the context of
this film, it just does not work. If it had been a speech about the U.S.
oppression of Mexico, then perhaps it might have carried a similar
political force. While ethnic identity is a problem raised in this film—
the Native American refused burial because he is not white; Calvera
saying that his punishment for crimes committed in Texas would be
greater than it would be for Chris—it is not explored. In 1960 such
issues had yet come to carry much weight in U.S. society. However, by
the time The Magnificent Seven was rewritten as a television series in
1998, the issue of ethnic identity and race could not be avoided.
“Life’s Tough and Then You Die”11

I suggested above that Prince (1991) is incorrect to argue that Rikichi
is framed in his scenes so as to “reinscribe” him within the group. Yet,
it cannot be denied that the group as a functioning unit is an impor-
tant theme in Seven Samurai. The Japanese attitude toward groups,
however, must be more clearly understood. As Gill (1998) points out
in an article about children’s superheroes, the group in Japan is seen
to be made up of different types of individuals: the leader, the brainy
one, the great fighter, the girl (in these politically correct days), and
the passionate, somewhat dangerous one. What makes one person
the leader is their ability to use everyone’s skills to solve a particular

problem in the best possible way. The group is not a bunch of mind-
less drones, all alike. One of the differences between the samurai and
the villagers, then, is that the seven who come to the village rather
quickly, perhaps as part of their professionalism, form a coherent
group that can work together. The villagers, as shown in the second
scene of the film, are divided, they cannot decide what to do: the
women rail and weep, saying that they might as well be dead; the men
sit with heads hung and only one young man, Rikichi, has a plan of
action. That the village elder (Kodo Kokuten)—a man way beyond
the age to be village leader, although old enough to be considered
wise—agrees with Rikichi is a surprise to the others.
In the Japanese film, then, we do not know who or where the vil-
lage leader is. The Magnificent Seven picks up this point by having the
old Mexican man (Vladimir Sokoloff) saying that he is not interested
in life any more, the people in the village bore him—he lives outside
the village and is not really part of it. That Hilario might become the
leader is the way the film ends, as does the Japanese version: Rikichi
beating the drum for the women to plant rice is playing an impor-
tant ritual role that indicates his rise in village politics—he has now
become the village head. But if we want to see this as an inscription
into the group, it would be somewhat inaccurate—he now heads the
group and can change its character, as he has already done through
his insistence that they resist the bandits. He is somewhat young for
the role: Manzo, the anxious father, is of the generation that gener-
ally provides leaders. If the village is of the sort that is always led by
the eldest son of the richest family, then this would have to be the
son of the old man—who seems to be missing, perhaps killed by the
bandits?12 If there is a postwar, post-Occupation message here it is
that the youth of Japan must be allowed to show the way.
I raise the issue of the group because it is a point about the Japanese
film that would appear to make it antithetical to the U.S. Western as a
genre. In the main, in Westerns, the bad guys always come in groups
while the good guy is generally a lone hero. Sometimes there is the
good group, the farmers or townspeople who do not know how to do
deal with the gang of bad men, but they need the single hero to help
them. Much of the thrill of the Western is often to be found in the way
a single man can face down the many. From time-to-time, the hero
is allowed one or two buddies or sidekicks.13 The group of helpers
might occasionally include a young untrained fighter and an unhappy
drunk or a courageous female (interesting as alternative options) as
in High Noon (Zimmerman 1952), Rio Bravo (Hawks 1959) and its

remake, Rio Lobo (Hawks 1970), as well as Unforgiven (Eastwood

1992) where, of course, we have the black sidekick.
The “lone crusader” is a huge theme in U.S. fiction that can be
found in comic books, Westerns, and detective fiction. The recent
Troy (Petersen 2004) pushes the history of this sort of hero all the way
back to Achilles in the fourth century B.C.E. while ignoring the point
of what has long been the dominant representation of the independent
hero in much of Western literature: he might be strong and able to face
the many, but this ability to act without the group also bears a price.
As with Achilles, such heroes often die in the service of the greater
good (think also of Roland and El Cid). This theme remains strong
in Japanese fiction (Standish 2000) where lone heroes often die. In
Hollywood films, the lone hero generally lives to fight another day.
Yet there is a model that makes the narrative plausibility of the heroic
group translatable from Japan to the United States. If we take Robin
Hood as another stereotypic hero who appears in many forms, it is
the man who knows how to be part of the group, even in Western fic-
tion, who most often survives. The Western as genre often subverted
this English theme in praise of the rugged individualism that “won
the West”; a sort of homage to the sometimes almost insane pioneer
spirit that transformed a “wild” landscape, albeit by wrestling it from
the natives and killing off the buffalo. Given the existence of Robin
Hood type heroes as well, The Magnificent Seven is not groundbreak-
ing with its representation of the group who acts heroically; yet, that
such individualists might not find working together easy is one of the
elaborated themes of the U.S. film.
In the Japanese film, it is only Kikuchiyo, the fake samurai, who is
problematic, the cog that exists to remind the others of how they are
responsible for the situation of the farmers. The central problem, we
might say, in turning this into a Western was how to get a group of
actors with their diverse talents to work collectively. It is interesting
that this is also a theme of the documentary about making the film:
how the director had to get the young stars with their massive egos
to work together. McQueen tried to upstage Brunner, all the men
started to add to their portrayals in order to draw notice to them-
selves, and the director was seen to be favoring Buchholz. Film edit-
ing might well take care of the problem of individualistic actors, but
it took some reworking of the plot to get this theme to work for the
Magnificent Seven.
For example, Chris and Vin, unlike Kambei and Shichiroji, don’t
know each other. They agree to help bury the dead Native American

and find that they work well together. Yet, once this job is done, they
go their separate ways. It is only the plea by the farmers that brings
them back together. Kambei and Shichiroji, on the other hand, are
old friends who are overjoyed to find each other still alive, their rela-
tionship as leader and sidekick is never problematic. The same cannot
be said of Harry Luck, whom Chris does know of old and only trusts
as far as he can keep the man interested in the mythical treasure he
is sure the village is guarding. So too with Lee, of whom Chris has
heard, both he and Vin wonder if they can rely on this southerner
who appears to have lost his courage and Britt remains very much
his own man, while O’Reilly seems to form a stronger bond with the
children of the village than with his fellow fighters. Chico, in both
the role of young accolade and native informant (bringing together
the roles of Katsushiro and Kikuchiyo), is shown to be constantly
tempted by the young Mexican girl whom, if he had stayed at home,
he might have already married. We have a group of seven who work
well together and will even fight for each other, but unlike Seven
Samurai, the group they form always seems in danger of splitting up.
In fact it is interesting that at the end there remain only two—Chris
and Vin, leader and sidekick it might be said, the unit most often
found in the Western.
This is the problem also encountered by and resolved in the televi-
sion series The Magnificent Seven (Beers et al. 1998–2000), although
it could be argued that there are very good functionalist reasons
for the way in which they solve the problem of making the group
work within the context of the Western as genre. The program was
an MGM production, sharing an executive producer with the film—
Walter Mirisch—and used Bernstein’s score from the original as well.
Elements of the film script written by William Roberts were used, as
well as the original storyline mentioned by Mirisch in the documen-
tary Guns for Hire. Moreover, the television series seems very much
a post-first Gulf War narrative, a new attempt to understand the pro-
fessional fighter who “helps” the foreign other.
This version is set just after the American Civil War, giving us the
theme of soldiers and men of violence set free upon the landscape, and
brings together seven men who find themselves defending a Seminole
reservation against a crazed confederate colonel who is convinced the
villagers are concealing gold treasure. The problem of how to find
an underclass in the U.S. Western is resolved, in the 1990s, by the
recasting of the plight of Native Americans: they are no longer sav-
ages who have to be subdued, but people who have been wronged.

Like the Mexican peasants of the original, these natives know how
to fight, but do not know how to defend themselves against the can-
non that Colonel Anderson’s troop uses on them. Moreover, they are
portrayed as a tolerant people, having taken in escaped slaves—the
other underclass in revisionist Westerns—and intermarried with
them. This allows for one of the seven to be black as well: a young
man, Nathan (Rick Worthy), who has medical skills, joins the seven
precisely because he knows that the Seminole have given refuge to
others of his race.
Chris (Michael Biehn), now surnamed Larabee rather than
Adams, meets up with Vin (Eric Close)—who is now allowed a last
name, Tanner—when they decide to save Nathan Jackson from a
lynching. Vin is working as a grocery clerk (something Vin threat-
ens to do in the film), but puts down his broom and quits the job
in order to save Nathan. The two men are spurred to action by
Mary Travis (Laurie Holden), the town’s widowed newspaper edi-
tor who tries and fails to defend Nathan in the first place. Once
the men take on the job of defending the Seminole, Vin suggests a
friend of his, Buck Wilmington (Dale Midkiff) who is a ladies’ man.
Nathan suggests Josiah Sanchez (Ron Perlman) who is a preacher
with a violent past. They are followed in all of this by the Kid,
John “J.D.” Dunne (Andrew Kavovit), a dude just come from the
East. Quite by accident they encounter a southern gambler, Ezra
Standish (Anthony Starke), a man who is better at talking himself
out of situations than at shooting his way free. As a group they
have, as would the Japanese, their individual personalities. The cast
list not only gives the characters’ names but their attributes: Chris
is “The Leader,” Vin “The Sharpshooter,” J.D., “The Kid,” Buck
“The Lover,” Nathan “The Healer,” Josiah “The Preacher,” and
Ezra “The Gambler.” Moreover, the characters have deeper back
biographies than in the film—given that the series had a two season
run, this would be seen to be necessary. Chris, we learn in the first
episode, has lost his wife and children: “Burned half the soul out of
the man.” Nathan turns out to be a former slave and falls in love
with one of the Seminole/black women (Dana Barron), but leaves
her behind in order to doctor to the wounded men at the end of the
film. “Go ahead,” she tells him. “They need you. I’ll wait.” The
preacher regrets his life of violence but cannot resist fighting and
drinking. Buck always has angry husbands after him and “The Kid”
turns out to be the illegitimate son of a chambermaid, not the rich
dude that the others have assumed him to be. As the series unfolds

more of the men’s personalities are revealed. These men become a

sort of substitute family for the bereaved Chris.
But the problem of the group is not just resolved by Chris’ fatherly
attitude as much as it is by the way in which the men form friend-
ships within the group: Chris and Vin are a pair, as are Buck and J.D.
The Preacher appears to confide first in The Gambler, but the south-
erner appears to be the real loner of the seven, more at home doing
card tricks for the children and running off to search for gold just as
Colonel Anderson’s troop returns to attack. Nathan, as the healer of
the group, also appears to be an odd man out in the first episode, but
forms his bound with the woman. His role becomes essential to the
continuation of the group, without him they literally would not live
to fight another day. Thus the group’s existence is always seen to be in
peril, through the work they take on and the very men’s personalities.
If we compare this to the Japanese concept of the group, it is some-
one’s ability to work with the group that might be in question, but not
the idea that the group continues to exist. We might say that there is
a key difference in this basic assumption about groups. Yet, in Japan,
groups grow and break up, factions are an interesting feature of
Japanese society, so it is not necessarily a large difference. Moreover,
the success of a television series depends on the continuing and grow-
ing bonds between the members of the group—in this case Boomtown
might be seen to be both an example of this sort of storyline, thus a
possible heir to the Seven Samurai as well as Rashomon.
That the idea of sequels was not part of Kurosawa’s vision is made
clear by all the deaths in the film. Yet there exist many television sam-
urai dramas with a group who, from year to year, right the wrongs
of society. There also exist series about the lone samurai hero—it
would be unfair to say that one type of storyline is Japanese and the
other is American. Slotting The Magnificent Seven into the category
of a continuing group—out to “tame the West”—does, however,
ignore one key part of the first two films: the men in the village who
learn how better to defend themselves, men who are remasculinized,
it might be said, through their taking action. The television series
chooses not to portray the Native Americans in this way, introducing
the storyline of the cannon as the superior weapon that renders them
helpless in the face of men they could otherwise easily fight, following
the film to a point. But in the film, the subplot of O’Reilly’s friend-
ship with the children who must be convinced of the moral worth of
their fathers retains something of the original story where the villag-
ers need to recapture a sense of pride in themselves. This theme of

fearful men taught to have pride in their fighting ability is the one
most frequently focused on by the various permutations of the sto-
ryline, which often also appear to pick up on the comic subtheme
of the original— although to understand the transition from drama
to comedy that the storyline has undergone in films such as A Bug’s
Life (Lasseter 1996) and Galaxy Quest (Parisot 1999), we need first
to consider the 1980 remake of the Seven Samurai, Roger Corman’s
production entitled Battle beyond the Stars (1980).
“Right Now Your Offer Seems Very

Attractive to Me”14
According to Galbraith (2002:519–520), Corman had long been a
Kurosawa fan, and if not for him, Dersu Uzala, Kurosawa’s first
independent production, would have never made it beyond the cult
festival circuit in the USA.15 Battle beyond the Stars, directed by
Jimmy T. Murakami and written by John Sayles, is not just a remake
of Seven Samurai, but calls also on the special effects and some of the
storyline of Star Wars, Lucas’ permutation on Kurosawa’s Hidden
Fortress to be discussed later. The film, definitely a “B,” if not a “C,”
film is worth considering for the changes it made to the basic plot of
the original film, changes that seem to have had enough currency
to continue to reappear as important themes in the permutations of
the film. The most significant change was to the idea of the seven
group members. In this science fiction film, the seventh member of
the team is the lone “villager” Shad (Richard Thomas), who sets out
to recruit the fighters needed to defend their besieged planet. This
is an interesting elision of the idea that the villagers must learn how
to fight and that, as a result of their contact with the warriors, one
villager appears to rise to obvious prominence. In the Japanese film
it is Rikichi, in the 1960s film it is Hilario. In the Corman version
made twenty years later, Shad is part of the gentle community of the
planet Akir, whose religious tenets, the Varda, forbid fighting. The
plot thus incorporates the issue of pacificism and refers to the peace
movements that had attempted to challenge U.S. politics from the
mid-1960s to 1975. However, like Luke Skywalker, despite his pacif-
icist upbringing, Shad has learned to be a crack spaceship pilot, tak-
ing instruction from the old warrior Zed (Jeff Corey) who has settled
amongst them. When the planet is threatened by the evil Sador (John
Saxon with black pigmentation over one eye and a body that needs

constant transplants), it is Shad who agrees to go out and find seven

warriors to defend the planet.
His first attempt to recruit an old friend of Zed, Dr Hephaestus
(Sam Jaffe), fails, but his daughter, Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel)—in
a role reprising that of the scientist’s daughter in the remake of
Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a science fiction film, Forbidden
Planet (Wilcox 1956)—decides to aid Shad in his quest. Together they
recruit different members: Nanelia encounters the reptile-like Cayman
(Morgan Woodward) and his two sidekicks, the Kelvin. Shad brings
in The Cowboy (George Peppard), The Nestor (from society of tele-
pathic clones, five of whom have gone out in search of adventure),
and Gelt (Robert Vaughn, who basically re-creates his role as Lee in
the Magnificent Seven). The Valkyrie Saint-Exmin (Sybil Danning)
fills the Kikuchiyo/Chico role of the annoying outsider who insists on
joining the fight. Nanelia, with whom Shad falls in love, is quickly rel-
egated to the role of technician and it is Shad who is the seventh war-
rior, battling Sador with the help of Zed’s talking space ship, Nell. In
contrast to the original film, none of the six warrior recruits survives
the fight—each and everyone giving up their lives for the Akirans,
leaving Shad with Nanelia to finally destroy, a la Star Wars, Sador’s
battleship with its deadly weapon the Solar Converter.
It is clear that the film refers to and inadvertently parodies any
number of films, not just Seven Samurai. As such it stands as an exam-
ple of knowledge capital in which the director, producer, and writer
of a B film work hard to remind a subculture—an audience of science
fiction fans in general and Star Wars fans in particular—how well
versed they are in filmic history, while attempting to produce some-
thing new. Battle beyond the Stars is not meant to be a comedy, but
given its hero, played by a television star famous for having been the
good but poor boy on the television series The Waltons (1972–1981);
its reliance on science fiction clichés—reptile-like aliens, telepaths, a
sleazy bar, a very sexy and barely dressed female warrior; a reference
to all the Star Trek episodes where a peaceful people with a bizarre
religion/moral code need help; and its cheap version of Lucas’ spe-
cial effects, it has the effect of parody. Gelt’s reprise of Lee’s alien-
ation certainly seems very tongue-in-cheek and the whole idea of
noble heroes, honorable men come to do a job out of some sort of
altruism, is undercut by the fact that script allows no time for the
main characters to interact. In fact all these films narrow the time gap
between their recruitment and most of the warriors’ deaths in a final
battle. The long weeks spent fortifying the village in Kurosawa’s film

becomes a few weeks, then days. Thus the heroes are very underde-
veloped characters. It seems that as audiences become more familiar
with the story, the men can be sketched out as mere stereotypes. In
Corman’s film, the heroes seem to have come along for the thrill or
revenge, while the main emphasis is on the growing love between
Shad and Nanelia: the ending implies their incorporation into the
peaceful life of Akir and married domesticity.
There is, of course, something of the original in this. While James
Coburn might well have been entranced by what he saw as his char-
acter’s ideal representation of the code of the bushidô (literary “the
way of the warrior”), Kurosawa had actually set his story in the era
before the codifying of the “way of the warrior.” That is, it was dur-
ing the peaceful years of the Tokugawa era, when the samurai were
often the bureaucrats of the military regime, that they found the time
to think of and write books about honor, reifying martial arts and
practicing Zen. Before this time, as Kurosawa liked to note, the war-
rior was just one step up from the peasants. His seven are not meant
to be especially honorable, they are, as Gelt says to Shad “. . . strictly
business.” That they need to eat is reason enough for them to take on
the job. The samurai who refuse even the offer of food and lodging
are depicted as too arrogant to have anything to do with peasants.
Their job is to fight for a warlord, not to look after “little people” and
this is the precisely where Kurosawa’s seven become heroic: they are
ignoring their warrior ethic to take on the job. They are acting “out
of character” (as do the characters in Rashomon) and it is this idea,
as well as the film’s comic interludes, that help form the premise for
the comic versions of the Seven Samurai.
More important than some medieval code of honor remains
Kurosawa’s concern with responsibility and people’s ability/inability
to accept their duty to others. This is what the samurai learn: that
their “job” as soldiers has repercussions and it is interesting that the
youngest of the group, who also appears to be the most pampered,
perhaps an aristocrat, has the most to learn here. Still, at the film’s
end he hangs his head like a child when confronted by the woman he
has seduced/been seduced by and so it is obvious that he needs to fol-
low Kambei and Shichiroji—Katsushiro is still an immature novice.
The farmers learn that sometimes it is better to fight than to try and
comply—that they need to be responsible for their land, women, and
children and not to look to others for protection.
The themes of the group assuming responsibility and the place of
professionals in times of peace combine in such a way that it is difficult

to argue for Seven Samurai as being as dialogic in nature as is the

more intellectually ambitious Rashomon. The latter film questions
the nature of reality, while the former explores how one group of peo-
ple can be entirely ignorant of how others live. If the samurai’s reality
is subjective, it is framed by the larger social system that sees the sep-
arateness of these groups as essential to the way society works. There
is little ambiguity in the film and the central mystery of the story;
Rikichi’s missing wife was a lost subplot for foreign audiences. It is
no surprise then that the permutations on the film are not as varied
as in the case of Rashomon. Once you establish the existence of three
groups of people—bandits, peasants, and warriors—who are interde-
pendent, but have nothing in common and you bring them together in
a situation of conflict, there seems to be only a limited way of going
about the storytelling. In the main, the remakes focus on the sadness
of these brief relationships; the nobility of the warriors who leave or
die; the bandits who are destroyed; or the villagers who, in an insular
sort of way, return to their lives—yet everyone learns something from
the encounter. These films are, more or less, tragedies. Yet, Kurosawa
used humor as the cement that helped seal friendships amongst the
samurai and between the villagers and samurai. Sturges’s film is also
full of humor, sharp one-liners that cover any feelings the gunslingers
might have. The television show developed the comedy by introducing
women, children, parents, and situations that balanced the violence
of the weekly gun fighting. Battle beyond the Stars is inadvertently
funny. All of this appears to lead to the development of the story as
comedy—it seems it was the only new direction left to explore. Yet,
as with Rashomon, it is the comic versions of the story that lay bare
the mythic core of the original story.
“It’s You Who Need Us”16

The sleeve notes for the Magnificent Seven DVD cites another film
permutation of the films, ¡Three Amigos! (Landis 1986), which is the
story of three silent film actors who play heroes and who are mistak-
enly hired as the real thing by some Mexican villagers.17 While ele-
ments of this film are important to the next two films I will analyze,
I will not discuss it in any detail because the dynamics of a group
of three are not the same as that of a group of seven. Moreover, the
theme of mistaken identity might well be said to be prefigured by
Kurosawa’s point that the samurai are acting out of character, while
the issue raised by mistaking actors for the real thing, the confusion

between myth and reality, is the central point of the original only
in relation to audiences’ expectations. Kurosawa wanted to make a
film about real samurai, not the fictional representations of samurai
as filtered through the ideals of the bushidô, a code, as noted, cre-
ated in times of peace. This too is meant to be a key feature of the
Magnificent Seven—the morality of being a gunfighter, generally
represented as being romantic and heroic, is questioned. Poking fun
at the myth is a topic taken up more clearly by the television version
of the film where Buck tells The Kid: “It’s not like the dime store
novels.” As Knight and McNight (2002) note, the Western is “the
most mythologically driven of American film genres,” and the link
between Westerns and science fiction films becomes important in this
context as we shall see.
As I noted in the Introduction, myth has its ideological elements
as well. Rashomon’s contestation of the construction of reality has
led to an inversion in which the rashomon technique reaffirms the
coherent construction of “the truth,” but it has not resulted in the
creation of a mythic narrative. There are no great heroes in this story,
everyone is potentially the villain. Seven Samurai, on the other hand,
simpler in its construction, aiming to be an “entertaining” film, easily
crosses the line between simple narrative and myth. Kurosawa’s story
about ordinary men regaining their dignity, warriors confronting
their morality and mortality, and everyone cooperating to defeat the
enemy—while aiming for historical accuracy—is the stuff of legends.
The serious versions of the storyline try to undermine the ideology
of pure, honorable heroes, but the flawed human versions they offer
instead appear to appeal to audiences as well—they are easier, per-
haps, to identify with than a hero who is the son of a god (Achilles,
Hercules), especially chosen by God, or a superman imported from
another planet. There is then something very twentieth century about
the idea that any one of us might be heroic if need be: everyman—
and, since the 1980s, some women as well—could be superman.18 Or
as that great icon of the American Western, John Wayne, said in the
film that made him a star (Stagecoach, Ford 1939): “A man’s gotta do
what a man’s gotta do.”
A Bug’s Life (1998) takes the audience firmly into the terrain of
myth rather than questioning it and yet manages to retain the theme
of social critique. A large part of this may well have to do with its tar-
get audience—children—and its chosen mode of representation: pixar
animation.19 The story also owes a debt to an old folktale, Aesop’s
The Ant and the Grasshopper, as much as it does to Seven Samurai.

Its starting point, that the bandits are lazy grasshoppers who every
year take their winter food from the hardworking ants is also prefig-
ured by a monologue in The Magnificent Seven. At the film’s end the
old man tells the remaining gunfighters:
You could stay . . . Only the farmers have won. They remain forever.
They are like the land itself . . . You helped them get rid of Calvera. The
way a strong wind helps rid them of locusts. You are like the wind
blowing over the land and passing on.
In A Bug’s Life there are no locusts, but grasshoppers seem close

enough. That they are meant to be the bandits of the original is made
clear by the way the leader, Hopper (Kevin Spacey), calls out “Let’s
ride!” when it is time to leave. They also spend the summer partying
in Mexico.
The working out of the plot as part of an old folktale not only
makes the film more palatable for children, but it solves the problem
of class—ever a sticking point even in 1990s America. Ants are the
group insect par excellence, all working, mindlessly it is assumed, for
the good of the colony. In the film, the colony is ruled by a Queen
(Phyllis Diller) who is training her daughter, Princess Atta (Julia
Louis-Dreyfuss), to take over. The unquestioning, hardworking atti-
tude of the ants is undermined by a single worker, Flik (Dave Foley),
who is always full of ideas that will make work easier. When one of
his inventions destroys the offering to Hopper’s gang of grasshoppers,
the “royals” of the colony decide to get rid of Flik, while they work
to store up food again, by sending him to recruit some fighter bugs to
protect them from the grasshoppers. They do not expect him to suc-
ceed; it is solely a plan to get him safely out of the way.
In the “big city” (a dump outside a single trailer), Flik manages to
hire some professionals. Only in this case it is a group of inept circus
performers who have just all been fired by their boss P.T. Flea (John
Ratzengerger). In terms of numbers, they come to more than seven
professionals—as was the case in Battle beyond the Stars, in which
the number of space ships came to seven, while the fighters numbered
a few more. In this film we have a stick insect, Slim (David Hyde
Pierce) who works with a ladybug, Francis (Dennis Leary); a black
widow spider, Rosie (Bonnie Hunt) who works with a dung beetle,
Dim (Brad Garrett); a moth, Gypsy (Madeline Kahn) who works with
her praying mantis husband, Manny (Jonathan Harris); two pillbox
acrobats with no English who work together, Tuck and Roll (Michael

McShane); and a caterpillar, Heimlich (Joe Ranft) who appears to

have no partner. There is no way to make the group add up to seven.
The film plot uses an interesting device that allows the mistake to
occur: Flik heads for a bar to find fighters and in the bar are the per-
formers, depressed over losing their job. When two flies pick a fight
with them, Francis tells the others: “To do the Robin Hood” act. The
link between the Japanese group and a Western tradition of the heroic
group is thus made explicit for the children in the audience (and per-
haps a few adults too!). At the end of the fight, that other mythic
band of Western heroes is referred to when Francis brandishes Slim
like a sword, a single light focused on the stick insect—King Arthur,
Excalibur, and the Knights of the Round Table are given to us in that
single shot. Seeing the act, Flik is convinced that he has found a gang
of very tough bugs indeed.
When they arrive on Ant Island the circus troupe come to realize
that they have not been hired by talent scout, but have been mis-
taken for warriors; they tell Flik the truth, and it is the ant, after
urging them to stay, who comes up with an idea of how they can
fight the grasshoppers. Hopper, his brother Molt (Richard Kind) has
revealed, is afraid of birds. Flik decides that they will use a fake bird
to scare the grasshoppers away. The performers present the idea as
their own to Princess Atta who then gets the whole colony to help,
telling them: “I know it’s not our tradition to do things differently.”
Together, the performers and the ants work hard to make a bird—the
period of work being one that brings them together, creating a warm
Figure 6 The Finale to the Robin Hood Act, Referencing King Arthur, A Bug’s Life
Source: Lasseter 1998. Pixar Animation Studios. Courtesy of Disney Collector’s Edition

relationship between the two groups. In the meantime, Molt tries

to convince Hopper that they have enough food and do not need to
return to the colony, they can stay in Mexico. Hopper then explains
to his “dumb” brother: “You let one ant stand up to us, they all might
stand up to us. These ants outnumber us a hundred to one. If they
figure that out, it’s the end of us.”
Spelt out in this children’s film, then, is the central paradox found
in the original as well as in many heroic tales: why should the many
fear the few? That the good might outnumber those who are bad or
evil seems to be a truth, and yet, entire societies can be held in check
by the few, the elite, the criminal. Kurosawa compounded the prob-
lem by having the farmers do something wrong in their fear—giving
a woman away—but also, more sympathetically, presented the situ-
ation as a historical dilemma depicting the tyranny of the elite. Why
should such elites have this power? Access to weapons and advanced
technology were the answers offered by previous versions of the story,
yet the peasants, it is revealed, have weapons stolen from samurai so
the question is not answered in the Japanese film, although the repre-
sentation of the villagers at the end hints at peasants who might have
learned to act and think for themselves. The need for a professional
class who know how to handle weapons and who can fight for the
“weak” is the solution we seem to get in Westerns.
The children’s film is much more proactive. When the plan with
the bird goes wrong and Hopper seems in danger of having won,
Flik finally stands up to him. Hopper says: “Ideas are very danger-
ous things . . . You were put on this earth to serve us.” Flik challenges
him: “It’s you who need us. We’re a lot stronger than you say we are.
And you know it, don’t you?” The message seems almost Marxist,
although the inclusion of “ideas” and the portrayal of Flik as a crea-
tive thinker puts this revolution firmly in the terrain of the American
tradition of quirky individualism. The colony had no need of profes-
sionals, it just needed to be open to the voices of its own members. It
had to be able to follow a different sort of leader (and the masculine
challenge to the female leadership of a mindless colony is worth a
feminist rant all of its own), in order to be free.
Galaxy Quest (Parisot 1999) takes a similar tack: the Thermians,
sweet, naive if somewhat repulsive octopi-like aliens (when their
appearance generators are turned off), need to learn the difference
between history and drama, the truth and lies, and, ultimately, what it
is to joke. Once they have begun to master these dichotomies, they are
able to find their own heroic leaders and are able to defend themselves.

This notion that an ability to tell lies underpins what it means to

be civilized or advanced is one that I have already noted is impor-
tant. Knowing how to tell stories is how reality is constituted, but
knowing that different types of narratives are evaluated differently is
also important. When the humans who encounter the aliens find out
that they think that all television series, including Galaxy Quest, are
historical documents, one of them, Gwen (Sigourney Weaver), asks:
“Surely you don’t think Gilligan’s Island is real?” The Thermians
hang their heads and one of them says: “Those poor people . . .” The
joke is that such an unrealistic and rather silly television program
could be taken seriously.
It might also be said that the joke is on the humans as well, for
through their cynicism about what constitutes “good” versus “poor”
drama they have lost all sense of respect for themselves as actors and
for their profession. They are perfectly aware that as regulars on a
science fiction series they play caricatures of the heroic types found
in other sorts of narrative tales. In fact, since the 1990s it could be
said that the science fiction genre has taken over from the Western
as one of the dominant genres found on U.S. television, competing
with detective series. In the late 1960s the groundbreaking program
parodied so effectively in Galaxy Quest, Star Trek (Roddenberry
1966–1969), was populated by actors who had all done some work
in Westerns. William Shatner was the preacher in the Outrage, and
De Forrest Kelly had guested on various Westerns as had many of the
guest performers who appeared each week.
Galaxy Quest unlike Star Trek is a postmodern tale. Just what
does that mean? Not only does Galaxy Quest refer to and parody a
large number of modern icons (the serious British actor, the sexy yet
powerful woman, the token black, the “guy who gets killed in scene
two”); it refers to numerous films (any number of science fiction films
including the Alien series, Kurosawa, television programs), and life-
styles (the science fiction convention phenomenon, people who role
play, teenagers who are obsessed with making the fictional real), while
regarding them all with a certain amount of nostalgic affection. The
film fulfils many of Harvey’s (1990) criteria for a postmodern film.
But unlike Blade Runner (Scott 1982), the subject of Harvey’s well-
known essay, Galaxy Quest’s nostalgia is not for the bleak, postwar
1950s film noir, but for the more optimistic late 1960s working out of
Kennedy’s20 vision for the future of the United States: democratic, car-
ing, and noninterfering action in “Space, the final frontier.” That this
vision ignored cold war politics and a divided modernity is pointed

out in one of the later Star Trek films, The Undiscovered Country
(Meyer 1991), by a Klingon leader who toasts the current peace with
the Federation with the words: “To the end of history.” References to
Fukuyama (1992) aside, the key theme of all the Star Trek series, even
in its more politically complex Deep Space Nine (1993–1999), has
been how the decent values of middle-American will always win out.
Carroll’s theory about the group of foreign professionals in Westerns
who aid helpless others as representing an U.S. ideal about its role in
global politics would seem to be supported by the continued use of
this trope. Thus, by the time we reach Galaxy Quest, the basic plot
has been thoroughly imbued with American symbolism, ideals, and
concerns.
In this sense, then, the actors of the now-cancelled television series
Galaxy Quest represent a generation of Americans who are no longer
are optimistic about their values, and have lost faith in that better
future that, in its mythic way, Star Trek portrayed. They are depicted
at the beginning as rather sorry figures, depending on appearances
at science fiction conventions to keep them going. At the film’s
start, the Brit, Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman), who plays the alien
Dr Lazarus bemoans his—and their collective—fate: typecast forever
as a crewmember of the NSEA Protector. “To think I once played
Hamlet,” he cries at the sight of himself fully made up in the mirror.21
Gwen DeMarco, who plays Lt. Tawny Madison, has no sympathy
for Dane—he at least, she tells him, was not just on the program for
the sake of his breasts! Others from the program vary in their cyni-
cism: Fred Kwan who plays Tech. Sgt. Chen (Tony Shalhoub) appears
to be the only one of them who is content, but he is portrayed as
blissfully, perfectly, almost transcendently stupid (or, as some IMDB
comments would have it, stoned). While Tommy Webber, Lt. Laredo
(Daryl Mitchell), is an adult child actor who has nothing else in his
life; and Guy Fleegman (Sam Rockwell) has made a career out of
once having been on the show and dying: “To show that the situation
really was dangerous.” Jason Nesbith, the actor who played Captain
Peter Quincy Taggart (Tim Allen), appears to balance an affection
for his fans with a disdain for his mediocre acting career. The tension
between his love of the role and the disregard in which the “seri-
ous” world holds such examples of popular culture seems to fuel his
drinking.
It is these six who will go to the aid of the Thermians in their fight
against the evil General Sarris (Robin Sachs, another English actor
who seems to specialize in playing villains), the leader of an insect-like

race of aliens who have been systematically destroying them for gen-
erations. Led by Commander Mathesar (Enrico Colantoni), the last
remaining Thermians beg for the aid of the heroic crew of the NSEA
Protector. Initially thinking it is a part in a private role-playing gig,
Jason Nesbith goes along only to discover that the Thermians are not
only real aliens, but that they have based their entire technology and
culture on the “historical documents” of the Galaxy Quest. By the
film’s end not only could we count a tortured and masculinized—that
is, he learns to act violently—Mathesar as the seventh of the warriors,
but we get a neat inversion of the original: in love with the Thermian
Laliari (Missi Pyle), tentacles and all, Fred Kwan brings her back to
Earth with him. The new version of Galaxy Quest, now back on air,
includes her, a real alien, as one of the actors.
This film shares not only its basic plot with Seven Samurai, but in
some part also with Preston Struges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941). This
depression era film tells the story of a successful director of comedies,
played by Joel McCrea, who wants to make a serious film and goes
off to research the life of hobos on the road. During his misadventures
he learns an important lesson: audiences depend on his comic films
to make life bearable. The point is taken further in Galaxy Quest:
for the Thermians life itself is made possible, their extermination as a
race is avoided because of the values they learn from a fictional tele-
vision program. A similar point is made about the future of Earth.
While the actors take their plot lines and made-up technology for
granted, part of an entire generation of obsessive teenagers study the
technology with great seriousness: it is they who will make the future
(cf. Penley 1997). When Jason Nesbith needs to know how the ship
the Thermians have constructed actually works, he has to “call” these
kids, led by Brandon (Justin Long), who have the blueprints on com-
puter and who have also solved the “problem” of what the Omega 13
drive actually does. While this is a funny sideswipe at a subculture,
it also is an example of knowledge capital; that is, it postulates a use
for the kids’ obsessive knowledge accumulation that is beyond that of
status making.
By giving the “helpless” Thermians the possibly superior technol-
ogy, the film also comes to the heart of Kurosawa’s original: the farm-
ers need to change the way they think about the world in order to
succeed. In contrast to Rashomon, where, as Richie noted, the main
actors cannot change, they are who they are, the farmers in Seven
Samurai learn to change as do the Thermians. Advanced technology
does not matter; it is humanity that will win out.

Figure 7 The Not So Magnificent Seven, Galaxy Quest
Source: Parisot 2000. Dreamworks SKG. Courtesy of Dreamworks Home Entertainment
This cheerful optimism about technology is a contrast to 1980s films

such as The Terminator (Cameron 1984)22 as well as Blade Runner
and, it might be said, sadly marks it as pre-dating September 11.
However Galaxy Quest does share with these two films a question
about what constitutes humanity. The evil General Sarris may look
like a bug but walks upright, knows what a joke is, and understands
the difference between history and fiction. Yet, it is the much more
alien Thermians who are the more likable. Their very desire to be
like humans (for which read, Americans) is enough to make them
worthy of help; by the film’s end their future looks bright. Such a
rosy outlook is not part of any historicized viewing of the origi-
nal—the Tokugawa era brought peace to Japan, but it also, by the
end of its 250 years, managed to squeeze many of the farmers even
more tightly through taxes than in previous eras. The ending of the
Kurosawa film, with the samurai leaving the village and their dead
behind, reflects an ambiguity about the years of peace that were
to come.
The idea that there is a large gap between myths and reality is miss-
ing from the comic versions of Seven Samurai, instead we are given
the idea that life is better when we try to live life as mythic heroes.
That even this version of the heroic is problematic was best explored
by Sergio Leone in his remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, to be discussed
in the next chapter. These comic versions of the film also sidestep the
issue of violence—one by being animation and the other by enacted
violence on insect-like aliens. They are thus not part of the wider
influence Seven Samurai has had terms of narrative techniques.

As Prince (2000a) argues, Kurosawa’s use of multiple cameras, 23

slow motion montages, and longer takes influenced both Arthur Penn
and Sam Peckinpah. More to the point, along with “disjunctively
angular cutting, and reliance on telephoto lenses” Peckinpah found
in Kurosawa’s work the “exploration of slow motion within scenes
of violent death” (2000a:180). Both Penn and Peckinpah pushed the
boundaries of this stylized approach to filmic violence in their respec-
tive films Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969),
adding squibs that exploded fake blood and made the scenes “more
realistic.” Through the work of these two Hollywood directors, we
could trace any number of modern films that use these techniques
back to Kurosawa: from Matrix Revolutions (Wachowski 2003) with
its final fight in the rain (another Kurosawa technique that many have
tried to emulate) to Lord of the Rings (Jackson 2001–2003). While
the idea that slow motion one-on-one fighting comes from martial
arts films inspires Tarantino, it could also be argued that Hong Kong/
China got it from Kurosawa and Japan as well (Yau Shuk Ting 2005,
2006). There is, then, the entire issue of the aesthetics of violence that
must be addressed and no films are better suited to use in this discus-
sion than Yojimbo and its Italian remake A Fistful of Dollars.

9
The Lone Hero
“Is this a play you wrote?”
—Gonji asks Sanjuro in Yojimbo
Introduction
Yojimbo (Yôjinbo, The Bodyguard, 1961) raises different issues
related to translation than the previous films: Rashomon’s screen-
play was based on two Japanese stories and Kurosawa cowrote Seven
Samurai as an original screenplay. In short, it could be argued that the
stories are firmly Japanese. Yojimbo however has its roots in Dashiell
Hammet’s novel, Red Harvest (1992),1 and, perhaps also—as Leone
argued during the copyright battle over A Fistful of Dollars—
Goldoni’s eighteenth-century play A Servant to Two Masters (1753).
It is clearly structured as a Western; that is, as Kurosawa would say,
it uses the visual grammar of the Western and certainly recalls High
Noon as well as Shane (1953). Its morally ambiguous hero, the body-
guard (Toshiro Mifune), seems to refer more to the world weary,
aging Ringo (Gregory Peck) in The Gunfighter (1950) than to the
boyish, clean cut Alan Ladd in Shane.
As a Japanese jidai-geki, Yojimbo, with its dark humor and
tough hero, revitalized a moribund industry—just as the Western in
Hollywood had lost its box office appeal because of television, so
had the samurai drama in Japan. Moreover, as Yoshimoto (2000)
and others argue, Yojimbo is an attempt to overturn the rather stale
kabuki-based conventions of most samurai drama, although they are
not just subverted in this film, but—as we shall see—also used in a
very interesting way. What might seem notable in this film is its use of

a Western style lone hero in a society that prizes the group. There are
two points to make about this. As I argued in the previous chapter,
just as groups of heroes had long existed in the Western imagination,
allowing for the story of the Seven Samurai to translate, so too was
there a history of the lone hero in Japan (Dore 1965, Ikegami 1997,
Ohnuki-Tierney 2002) that allowed for the Western tale to be used by
Kurosawa to revitalize the Japanese samurai genre. Most familiar to
non-Japanese would be the historical character Miyamoto Musashi
(c.1584–1645), author of The Book of Five Rings (Go Rin No Sho),
about whom several films have been made, including one in 1954
starring Toshiro Mifune. 2 Moreover, the figure of the loner who has
made fighting his profession (warrior, police officer, assassin, etc.) is
one that appears not just in the United States but across societies.
What could be said to be different from modern Western depic-
tions of the lone hero is that the Japanese version is invariably tragic,
even when in a comic tale. That is, the sorts of arguments made in
the film The Magnificent Seven pointing to the loneliness of the gun-
slinger are also taken as common features of the lone hero in Japan:
no family, no permanent lovers, no friends, and no enemies—alive.
While any society might see this as a high price to pay for hero-hood,
in Japan (and other East Asian societies), there is a further cost: no
family means no one to pray for the dead hero’s soul to make sure he
makes it to Nirvana. In short, lone heroes, unless they change their
ways, are doomed to continue to wander after death as hungry ghosts.
Thus the individualistic hero in traditional Japan is not a problem if
he acts for the well-being of the social whole, but he might be a prob-
lem if not cared for after dying. The fact that the villagers in Seven
Samurai have buried the dead samurai and will probably care for
them in death is a significant point often missed out by the Western
viewers of the film. Even the dead will benefit more from having pro-
tected the village than the living samurai who leave it. In contrast,
many, although not all, lone heroes in the U.S. tradition finally get the
girl, signifying, perhaps, an end to their loneliness and their readmit-
tance to “normal” society. Even when this does not happen, the fact
that the hero is remembered as a sort of savior within the community
they have helped ensures them some sort of salvation as Vin murmurs
about a dying Harry.3 What can be seen as common to the depiction
of heroes across societies is that they are, on the whole, difficult to
deal with: haunted by the past, moody, tortured, lacking social skills,
more skilled at the arts of death than at making small talk.

The Lone Hero 143
But there are some interesting twists to this very “ordinary” lone
hero that Kurosawa adapted from the above sources. First of all, this
hero has no name—he makes one up on the spot, Sanjuro Kawabaki
(Sanjûrô—thirty-year-old, kawabaki—mulberry field), but we never
learn a single thing about him as a person. In many ways this is a
clear reference to the continental operative of the Hammett novel who
narrates the story and, in a tour de force of stylistic writing, is never
referred to by name. While Frayling (2000) uses Orwell’s great essay
on the English murder (1995) to argue that Hammett’s heroes (along
with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe) were the tough, morally
ambiguous detectives that distinguished the traditional British crime
mystery from the American detective novel, the continental op in Red
Harvest actually turns out to be extremely loyal and morally virtu-
ous, bringing down both the gangsters and the corrupt union boss in
order to avenge the death of the man who hired him in the first place.
The continental op is, in Chandler’s words, a modern knight errant
who owes his loyalty to either his master or a cause and will battle all
in order to see justice done (1944). The link then between the samurai
as a type of Japanese knight and a Western type of heroic charac-
ter is very clear. There is another aspect to the film, however, which
Galbraith (2002) notes as “folkloric elements,” that makes the story
in some ways very Japanese.
First of all there are the references to Kabuki theatre in Yojimbo:
the town constable/timekeeper Hanasuke (Sawamura Ikio) calls out
the time, using the sort of clappers found in Kabuki. At two points
in the film actors are framed in shots to look as if in Kabuki make
up—Mifune beaten and battered looks like one of the more demonic
characters in his graveyard scene, while Unosuke (Nakadai Tatsuya),
the beautiful but psychotic villain, stands laughing against a blazing
brewery at one point, his face painted by shadows as if he were also
a Kabuki character. Yet by being filmed on an outdoors set instead
of the stagy indoors sets so often used by jidai geki, the rigidity of
Kabuki as a genre is undermined. Moreover, unlike the traditional
Kabuki tale, which are either historical dramas or love stories, this
is not a tale of a hero or love triumphing, but another sort of story
altogether.
The key lies in Japanese folklore. Sanjuro, blown into town on a
seeming whim (he tosses a stick to decide which direction to take
at the start of the film); is clearly a wandering stranger, a master-
less samurai (ronin), but he could also be a marebito, a wander-
ing Shinto deity (kami) or possibly a bodhisattva in the Buddhist

tradition. This is certainly not the way the film is generally ana-
lyzed—save by Richie who likens him to a Greek deus ex machina
(1996:149–150)—but any understanding of this Japanese folk belief
gives us startling similarities. Marebito are mysterious strangers
who appear in a town or village and who must be treated care-
fully, they bring blessings if they are treated well—giving them food
and drink in the main—but can destroy a person or place if treated
badly (Yoshida 1981). They are trickster deities, hard to pin down,
playing jokes, unreliable.
The film is framed as if it is this sort of folk tale: at the very start
Sanjuro watches a young farmer fight with his father because he wants
to leave home in order to be a gambler in town. The son departs and
Sanjuro asks for water to drink, which the old man gives him. As
Sanjuro takes water from the well, he eavesdrops on the old man and
his wife who are clearly aggrieved over the situation in the town as
well as by the loss of their son. The wife says something important at
this point, at least if you are a Shinto deity: “At this rate there will be
no silk festival in town this year.” Such village festivals also involved
religious observances; not to hold them would be to invite disaster for
a village or town—if the deities are not worshipped and allowed to
bless the area, much chaos will result.
At the film’s end when all the criminals are being slaughtered by
the seemingly superheroic Sanjuro, he spares one quivering young
man and tells him to return home to his farm: he is the old couple’s
runaway son. In terms of Japanese folklore, the marebito has repaid
the favor done him by the parents of the boy. Similar is Sanjuro’s
relationship with Gonji (Tono Eijîro), the town’s barkeeper. The old
man feeds the stranger for free and then begs him to go on his way,
explaining the mess the town is in and how it came to be, but Sanjuro
insists on staying: “I like it here, I’ll stay.” When Gonji pleads a little
more, Sanjuro replies: “I understand. I get paid for killing. It would be
nice if all these men were dead. Think about it.” At the end he saves
the life of the old man and tells him: “Now this town will be quiet.”
He has granted Gonji’s wish for there to be no more killing in the
town by killing every one of the gamblers.
Sanjuro also saves another family, an interesting subplot in light
of the story of Rikichi’s wife in Seven Samurai. Tokuemon (Shimura
Takeshi), the town’s sake brewer, has taken as a hostage/mistress Nui
(Tsukasa Yôko), the wife of Kohei (Tsuchiya Yoshio) a farmer who
has gambled everything away. As with Rikichi’s wife she is very beau-
tiful, but unlike the woman in the previous film, she has a son and it

The Lone Hero 145
is this child whom Gonji pities. While Sanjuro claims to despise this
young man who has lost everything and now lives next to his wife,
suffering daily beatings whenever he tries to see her, he eventually
rescues the woman and reunites her with her husband. It seems fair to
assume that this is another wish granted to Gonji who seems to care
for the young couple. In contrast to the shamed wife of Rikichi, how-
ever, Nui seems not to have any problem with returning to her family:
her love for her son is so strong that at one point when she is bound
up, she manages to drag her captor behind her as she tries to get to her
child. In short, Nui represents the highest virtues of Japanese moth-
erhood: suffering in silence, strong when she needs to be, and totally
devoted to her son.
We get to see a different sort of mother altogether in Orin (Yamada
Isuzu) the wife of Seibei (Kawazu Seizaburo), a brothel keeper and
henchman for Tazaemon (Fujiwara Kamatari) the silk merchant.
It is Seibei, in wanting to give all his territory to his son, who has
started the feud in the town. His right-hand man, Ushi-tora (Sazanka
Kyu), has objected to this and broken with Seibei. With the support
of Tokuemon, the sake merchant, Ushi-tora hopes to take over the
town. In the meantime Tazaemon, the silk merchant refuses to help
“his” henchman and so Tokuemon hopes to be able to defeat Seibei
and eventually take over from Tazaemon as headman of the town.
Spurring on Seibei in his plans to fight back is the very tough Orin,
who, when she hears that her husband has hired Sanjuro at a very
expensive price (50 ryô), argues that they should kill him and take the
money back. When Orin’s son is kidnapped and finally exchanged for
Nui (who has also been kidnapped from Tokuemon), she rewards her
son’s cry of “Mother” with an annoyed slap.
Orin’s hospitality to Sanjuro is always suspect and perfunctory—
she is the sort of person whom a marebito rewards with disaster.
Moreover, the division of the town into two reflects an aspect of tra-
ditional Japanese villages (Matsunaga 1998). These village sections
are often used to organize civic events, but are also important during
religious festivals when the men (usually) of the town might engage
in a tug of war or sumo bout: these sorts of “battles” are meant to
represent the cosmic battles of the gods (cf. Yamaguchi 1998). So it
would seem that the two halves of this fictive town are engaged in a
real battle and that the fray has been joined by an actual deity.
In fact we could say that it is joined by two deities. For when
Unosuke, Ushi-Tora’s younger brother, finally appears in town, it is in
a gust of wind so strong that Hansuke says to him: “Even the winds

welcome you.” Like his two brothers his name indicates the year of
his birth—Rabbit—but, as Gonji says of the three “he’s the bad one.”
Worse than bad he seems mad and takes great pride in carrying a
pistol,4 which he uses to kill men without warning. Handsome as he
is, there is nothing noble or honest about Unosuke. As he lies dying,
he begs Sanjuro to give him his gun to hold and promises that he can-
not shoot; he has used all his bullets. Once the gun is in his hands,
however, he tries to raise himself and fire.
As a character Unosuke is a Kurosawa critique of the rising cult of
the yakuza in film and television. The mass media’s and the yakuza’s
own attempt to link themselves to samurai values is certainly mocked
by the portrayal of all the gangsters in the film, but Unosuke espe-
cially is antithetical to the growing media representation in the late
1950s of gangsters as basically decent people who just operated on
the wrong side of the street. That he might be something more, as
might be Sanjuro, is hinted at by a question Gonji asks the latter man:
“Why did you come? Is this a play you wrote?” Sanjuro replies: “Half
of it. Unosuke’s changed the second half.” That both men have the
power to shape events is interesting as is the final thing Unosuke says
to Sanjuro: “I’ll wait for you at the entrance to hell.” Not in hell,
but outside, as if he has the power to choose where he will spend his
afterlife.
There are two final clues that would appear to make clear Sanjuro’s
possible supernatural origins: when beaten near to death he chooses
to hide in the town cemetery, an area no ordinary human would dare
Figure 8 Yojimbo Requests Two Coffins, Yojimbo

Source: Kurosawa 1961. Toho Co. Courtesy of The Criterion Collection

The Lone Hero 147
stay in beyond the time required to do the necessary rites for the dead;
and he accepts a dead man’s sword to fight with—something that
no samurai would ever comfortably do.5 Kurosawa himself admitted
that Sanjuro is meant to be a sort of superhuman character, but most
analyses of the film note his similarity to a film director, using the “Is
this a play you wrote” line combined with the fact that we see every-
thing from Sanjuro’s point of view to prove the point. Yet the very
thing we might assume could never translate, the possible religious
underpinning to the story, is precisely the aspect of the film that seems
to have transcended in the two remakes.
Figure 9 No Name Requests Two Coffins, A Fistful of Dollars

Source: Leone 1964. Unidis s.a.r.l. Courtesy of MGM Home Entertainment
Figure 10 John Smith Looks into the Funeral Parlor, Last Man Standing
Source: Hill 1996. Lone Wolf. Courtesy of New Line Cinema

“Strange How You Always Manage to

Be In the Right Place at the Right Time”6
In his book on Leone’s life, Frayling (2000) argues that all the reli-
gious elements we see in the Italian version of Kurosawa’s film are
truly original additions to the Japanese story. Given how few writers
seem to have understood the possible religious elements of the orig-
inal, this might well be true. Yet Richie’s point about Sanjuro being
like a Greek god is useful here: if nothing else, classical Western lit-
erature does provide us with a model of characters like the Japanese
hero. We might not know what a marebito is, but certainly can recog-
nize a man who seems more than human. In whatever way it was that
Leone came up with the idea of making these changes to the story for
his film A Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari 1964), it is an
interesting coincidence that these “changes” reverberate well with the
themes of Yojimbo.
The changes to the narrative are easily summed up by describing
Eastwood’s character, Man with No Name, as Christ-like. He arrives
in the town of San Miguel on a mule and is greeted by Juan de Dios
(John of God) the town’s bell-ringer. Like Sanjuro he is beaten near
to death and appears to rise again in order to fight the town’s villain.
Frayling (1998) jokes that rather than being a version of Yojimbo,
A Fistful of Dollars is a version of Christ Stopped at Eboli (Rosi
1979). This is reinforced by No Name’s championing of the kid-
napped woman, Marisol (Marianne Koch), whose name is a variation
on Mary and whose son is called Jesus. What Leone has done then
is to pare down the original—the story of the farmer’s son who runs
away does not happen at all—to the story of the kidnapped wife. It is
her son whom No Name first spots, as he stops to drink from a well
outside town, trying to sneak into the house where his mother is held
captive. He sees the husband, Julio (Daniel Martín) beaten when he
tries to retrieve the child and then glimpses Marisol looking out the
window. Their eyes meet and we are to assume that he is captivated
by her beauty.
In Last Man Standing (1996), Walter Hill goes a step further. The
film opens with a first-person voice-over narrative that firmly links it
to Hammett’s detective fiction, while the camera settles on a destroyed
church in which a woman, Felina (Karina Lombard), is desperately
praying. As she says her prayers, the wind blows and, coming up the
road is our drunken, on-the-run hero played by Bruce Willis. Unlike
the Leone version, he might not be a Christ-figure, but he certainly

The Lone Hero 149
seems to be a sort of avenging angel—impossible to kill even when it

is his ordinary gun pitted against the villain’s machine gun.
Both Leone’s and Hill’s films take place in that liminal area
already discussed: around the borderlands between the United States
and Mexico. In both films the border occupies an important place:
it is the permeable membrane through which not only the characters
travel, but which makes it possible to commit crimes. In the spaghetti
Western, exchanging guns for gold and then taking both from the
Mexican army is the crime committed by the devious Ramon Rojos
(Gian Maria Volonté), while in Hill’s film, there is a similar dirty
double-cross involving corrupt Mexican authorities. But whereas in
the later film the border is also an excuse that makes it possible to
bring Chicago gangsters to the town of Jericho (making this version
closer to the Hammett original novelette) so that they can run guns
and alcohol during Prohibition, in the Italian film the Mexican bor-
der allows Leone to puncture the myth of the ultimately altruistic
professionals in U.S. Westerns.
Leone (Frayling 2000) often commented on how his image of
the heroic, selfless American—fostered by his film viewing—was
destroyed for him in postwar Italy by his experience of the real thing.
The wonderful soldiers who had come to liberate the country were,
in his memory, as human and corrupt as anyone. The good guy in a
white hat of the U.S. Western, then, became an image that he longed
to dethrone. Leone became a rather good, if amateur, historian of
the U.S. Civil War and the years after as well, and it is this era that
is the subject of his best-known films including For a Few Dollars
More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), and Once
Upon a Time in the West (1968). While he was clearly influenced by
Yojimbo—no matter how much he tried to protest about this when
Toho sued him for copyright infringement—and its portrayal of a
hero who is somehow almost as bad as the villains, Leone’s desire
to make his own version of the story grew out of his own life’s expe-
rience. His is a European comment on an American myth: that the
West was won by basically decent people. Just as Kurosawa portrayed
the gangsters as grotesques straight out of Dickens (Frayling 2000), so
did Leone portray all his “heroes” as morally corrupt—even the hand-
some Eastwood is not to be trusted. Leone’s debunking of the myth,
like Kurosawa’s, was based on a fairly strong knowledge of the genre
and the visual grammar of the U.S. Western.
The surprise success of the Leone film speared on the nascent
industry of spaghetti Westerns in Europe, often Italian-German

productions made in Spain (Frayling 1998). It was also the film that
brought Eastwood to fame as well as setting his persona for much
of the work he was to do in the following decades. Whether as No
Name, Harry Callahan, or Josie Wales, the characters Eastwood has
portrayed over the years are morally suspect. They seem to be fighting
for the side of good, but like the original continental op upon whom
Sanjuro was based, seem not to mind the means that they use to
achieve their ends. Because of the court case over copyright, A Fistful
of Dollars was released in the United States late in the 1960s, gaining
an audience who seemed to understand the story as a sort of critique
of the Vietnam War. Not only does the good guy seem to be somewhat
like the bad guys, but also he is willing to do anything, it appears, for
money. Over time, this sort of crazy antihero has changed in the pop-
ular imagination; think of his incarnations in Mad Max (Miller 1979,
1981, 1985), Escape from New York (Carpenter 1981), or Desperado
(Rodriguez 1995) where the protagonist may have a personal moti-
vation for what he does—the death of his family, or bargaining for
his freedom—but, then again, may not, as in Vin Diesel’s films. The
moral problem presented by men, whatever their intentions, who use
violence in order to solve problems is central to all these films. Is the
dead but quiet town really worth it? In Last Man Standing this is a
point made very graphically by Sheriff Galt (Bruce Dern) declaring
the whole town dead. Unlike the first two versions of the film no one
can live there any more.
This evolution of the theme is certainly a Judeo-Christian twist
on the marebito theme of the original—that the town in Hill’s film
is called Jericho is a clear pointer to the Old Testament Jehovah who
was willing to destroy entire towns. Willis’ John Smith is much closer
to portraying “the wrath of god” than he is to the earlier incarnations
of his characters. Destructive as Mifune and Eastwood were in the
earlier films, they do not depopulate the entire town. Yet, of the three
characters, his motives appear to be the most human. Richie notes of
Sanjuro that “his human generosity is a weakness” as part of the way
of arguing for how the character only resembles a Greek god figure;
in contrast, the voice-over narration and other characters’ comments
make it clear that human generosity is both the weakness and the
virtue of John Smith in Last Man Standing. A key change to the nar-
rative, the addition of a prostitute, Lucy (Alexandra Powers), reveals
Smith’s weakness. Smith decides that everyone would be better off
dead after the drunken Italian gangster Strozzi cuts off Lucy’s ear for
“having a big mouth.” The Sheriff says to him at this point: “I think

The Lone Hero 151
I’ve just spotted the chink in your armor. When you go down, it will
be over a skirt.”
The useful reference to being like a knight aside, Leone’s and Hill’s
films share the notion that it is men’s relationships with women that
constitute the “problem” that set events in motion. This, I would
argue, is not a theme in Yojimbo, although it is in Seven Samurai.
If the idea of Sanjuro being a marebito is to hold water, then it is
the old couple at the start of the film who set events in motion. It is
the destruction of the family unit by the modern greed for money—
Kurosawa’s stated aim in making the film—that is central to the plot.
It is the same greed that drives Kohei to gamble his house and his
wife away. If Sanjuro is a wrathful deity, he is one who stands against
modernity and all its evils. He is not tempted by the woman—any
woman it would be appear—nor does he seem to pity her. While his
duel with Unosuke may have homoerotic elements, these are minor
in comparison to the central role such themes play in A Fistful of
Dollars and in Last Man Standing. As Richie notes, Mifune’s charac-
ter seem to be totally objective, only caring whether events are omo-
shiroi (interesting, amusing) or not. This is Kurosawa’s concern as
well: this rather bloody film in which we see arms cut off and blood
spurting for the first time in a jidai geki, a genre that had been, like
most Westerns, bloodless, is also omoshiroi. That is, there is a lot of
intended humor in the film; Leone picks up the humor of the Japanese
film and translates it neatly into an idiom capable of amusing both
European and U.S. audiences—although Eastwood claimed credit for
thinking up some of the pithier lines.
The humor of the Japanese film is black, and not necessarily
understood by all viewers. In comparing the structure of A Fistful of
Dollars to Yojimbo, Frayling (1998) points out the sardonic jokes that
Leone added to the story. What Leone seems to have understood, but
Frayling does not get, is that Kurosawa’s film was full of such jokes
as well. For example, Frayling uses the family consultation scenes to
make a point about the difference in acting styles between Japan and
Italy—the latter being more melodramatic. What he appears to miss
is the joke of a Japanese family consultation in which a father says
to his son “Remember you can’t get ahead in this world unless folks
think you’re both a cheat and a killer.” Then: “Your mother is right.
After all, you have to kill a few men or folks won’t respect you.” In
the more serious Hill film, this conversation becomes one of Mafioso
honor and there is no humor intended in the contention that a man
gains honor by killing other men.

The biggest “joke” of all is in the way Mifune portrays Yojimbo. As

a young actor he could, if need be, appear handsome if not downright
beautiful, but by his forties, Mifune was just as happy to play dirty,
scruffy, and possibly louse ridden. The samurai of Seven Samurai
might not have been magnificent and Mifune’s character in that film
is a bit of a drunken fool, but none of them appear as down and out
as does Sanjuro. This is not just an inversion of Kabuki conventions,
but also of those of the Western. As Mitchell (1996) notes, the cam-
era’s fascination with the male body, as well as with the strong and
handsome male face, is one of the most striking themes of the U.S.
genre. The camera lingered on the body, on the face and jaw; it gen-
erally did not start by showing us the hero’s dirty feet. Kurosawa’s
camera lingers on Sanjuro the most when he is thinking, face screwed
up, chewing on a straw, or being beaten to a pulp and he is not “easy
to look at.”
This visual joke does not translate into Leone’s film where Eastwood
is only marginally scruffy7 and Volonté, the actor who plays Ramon
Rojos, is one of those men who can appear both ugly and handsome
depending on the shot. So too are the minor characters in Leone’s film
peppered with virile-looking handsome men—Mr. Baxter (Wolfgang
Lukschy), his son Antonio (Bruno Carotenuto), Ramon’s brother
Esteban (Seighardt Rupp), and Marisol’s husband—to an extent that
the Japanese film is not. Leone might have been cynical about the
altruism of the U.S. hero, but he still loved the look of the Western.
The tension between what he wanted to portray and the way in which
he films it is such that all those close-ups of eyes, feet, and twitch-
ing fingers with dirty nails—the close ups even tighter than in the
Hollywood films—have become a visual signature all of their own.8
There is a sort of beauty in these duels to the death, something like
a bullfight we might say. In contrast, Kurosawa frames his shots in
what one Japanese reviewer termed “artistic simplicity” but seems
less in love with the looks of his actors. It is this aspect of the original
that Hill tried to recapture in Last Man Standing.
Mi miedo es mi maldición (My Fear is My Curse) 9

Mentioned above was the fact that one major change in the remakes is
the role the kidnapped woman plays. She is central to the plots of the
remakes from the beginning of the film in a way that Nui is not. That
is not to say that Nui is not also important: her rescue by Sanjuro
sets the final actions of the film into motion. But she is not the start

The Lone Hero 153
of the story as are Marisol or Felina in the remakes. The film is not
just about Nui and her family, but also about the farmer’s, Seibei’s,
and Ushi-Tora’s families as well. Leone picks this theme up to some
extent by having two families involved in the feuding: the Baxters and
the Rojos. Just as in Kurosawa’s film, he makes the first a family that
includes a tough woman, Conseulo Baxter (Margarita Lozano), and
the second a rather pathetic male-only family. Unlike the Japanese
film where it is the boss who wants Nui, the Rojos are weakened by
Ramon’s obsession with Marisol. There is a terrible irony in Ramon’s
taunting of Sheriff Baxter when he tries to surrender: “Have you
asked your wife?” the implication being that Baxter is less of a man
for being married to a rich, strong woman. But Ramon will also be
undone by his love for a strong woman, although she is poor.10 In
Last Man Standing, as already noted, it is women that are seen to be
the weakness in John Smith’s character. Every woman who appeals
to him for help (or even if they do not) is rescued by Smith: Wanda
(Leslie Mann) the overtalkative hooker; Lucy with her missing ear
and, last but never least, Felina the woman who prays.
Willis, it could be argued, was chosen to play the Sanjuro char-
acter precisely because he was more like Mifune than Eastwood—
not necessarily handsome and much more likely to appear morally
ambivalent. Hill’s camera is never quite as in love with him as Leone’s
was with Eastwood (although we do see him prone and naked in
the bath—a stock scene, as Mitchell argues, in the genre’s love affair
with the male body) and that has much to do with the nature of the
postmodern revisionist Western. Yet Last Man Standing as our third
version of Red Harvest is also more faithful to the original novel.
What could be more indicative of this than by casting the actor who
became famous for playing a comic version of the tough detective in
Moonlighting (Caron 1985–1989)? Willis’ strength in his first incar-
nation as the would-be heir to Hammett’s and Chandler’s detectives
was his ability to be funny. Hill however takes much of the humor out
of the Kurosawa original, leaving us with a rather dour, ultimately
moralistic version of the tale. Just to make the point clear the film
begins with “Funny thing, no matter how low you sink there’s still a
right and wrong and you always end up choosing.”
Men’s vulnerability to women, which in Leone’s version only leads
to trouble—hence Eastwood does not even kiss a woman in the film—
becomes the moral salvation of Smith who says “I was born without a
conscience.” Moreover, in contrast to both the Mifune and Eastwood
characters, Willis has two “affairs” while in town—although his first

time, with Wanda, ends by his having to jump off her body, naked, to
kill his would-be attackers. It is in his interaction with these women
when they are in trouble that we see a pattern in his life: he cannot
resist helping women and that is why, we might assume, that he has
no money, no job, and is always on the run. It is the supposedly tough
females, the ones who end up wounded in the world of violent men,
who seem to appeal to him most. “I always liked sinners better than
saints” he says as he watches Felina leave. Leone has been accused
of being a misogynist for his portrayal of women as either saints or
sinners, but Hill gives us only wounded women in his film. Orin and
Mrs. Baxter might well end up dead in the first two movies, the usual
fate for the strong female in the Western, but at least they are not
victims in every aspect of their lives. Last Man Standing gives us not
a single woman who is strong and, noticeably, there are no families
portrayed either: the closest we get is the character Giorgio Carmonte
(Michael Imperioli) who is Strozzi’s (Neil Eisenberg) cousin. We only
see a picture of Felina’s child (a girl) because the husband and child
are somewhere in Mexico. Outside of that, Jericho seems to be a town
populated entirely by men and a few prostitutes—if the whole town is
finally destroyed what should it matter?
This last is an interesting playing out of the Western myth. The
story of the revisionist Western is often largely a tale of how the gun-
fighter’s way of life cannot continue to exist in a time of change, of
becoming civilized, in an era when women come to town and men
have families. Or, as Leone put it, “When men lost their balls.”11 In
Hill’s film, Smith leaves town sure that something will always turn
up, that there will always be work for a killer like him to do. By trans-
posing the story to the era of the Prohibition, the times of gangsters,
and combining the genre of the Western with that of the mobster, Hill
appears to be making a statement about modernity just as Kurosawa
was. Corrupt men, law keepers, and towns exist at all times and in all
places. In contrast to Mifune who appears to stand against this simple
fact, fighting against the corruption of modernity, Willis’ character
is a product of this sort of society. He might not belong to a gang,
but he is a criminal just like the men in Strozzi’s and Doyle’s (David
Patrick Kelly) gangs. Eastwood, in contrast, is on the run, but we
do not know why. He clearly is not part of the sort of family busi-
ness that the Rojos and Baxters represent—by being free of family
ties, it would appear that he is able to do good. That he is outside of
everything is made apparent by the final joke of A Fistful of Dollars.
Noting that the Mexican army and the U.S. army are both about to

The Lone Hero 155
descend on the town of San Miguel, Eastwood chuckles at the idea of

his being in the middle. Having just destroyed two opposing forces in
San Miguel, what might he not be capable of doing with two armies?
While Leone’s message may well have been political—the United
States and Mexico as opposed rather than the former as the savior
of the latter—this does not take away from the fact that No Name
appears to consider the possibilities. Would it be a good thing if he
ended that conflict? He never says, it is left to us to wonder.
Hill, on the other hand, gives us utter destruction; all the women
gone; Smith wounded and yet driving off into the sunset; and a town
where all the remaining male inhabitants are planning to leave. If it is
not the apocalypse then it is something close to it—it is about the ste-
rility that leads to the end of a male-centered society. It could well be
that Hill is underlining the essential dead end nature of the Western as
a genre—once you kill all the bad guys and the women run off in fear,
what is left? The answer might well be: only a story that seems to end-
less repeat itself in countless variations. Kurosawa revived the story
with the humor of Yojimbo; Leone revitalized it with historical details
and a new style. Hill, a long veteran of the genre, seems to mourn
its falling into endless special effects. His attempt to give us some-
thing new with a voice-over narrative and a human yet powerful hero
fails as well. He would have been better served by Willis in his Fifth
Element (Besson 1997) incarnation as a hero nagged by his mother,
rescued by the goddess who is the Fifth Element, and hounded by the
authorities for his traffic violations. Or Willis as the family man in
the Die Hard (McTiernan 1988, 1995; Harlin 1990; Wiseman 2007)
series. The lone hero, in the Hollywood film, is no longer allowed to
be so solitary and women are no longer so easily deposed of12 —it is
the logical outcome of the civilizing West: he has been domesticated.
As discussed in the previous chapter, this is the solution explored by
the television remake of The Magnificent Seven, yet it is rare for the
Western as film to explore these issues: in Unforgiven, for example,
the events of the film mark the end of Eastwood’s attempts to be
a family man. Thus critics have continued to lament the end of the
Western, saying it is no longer a viable, exciting genre, often seeing
films such as Last Man Standing as rather ponderous self-referential
pastiches. Even on television the genre exists best as a self-contained
miniseries rather than an open-ended drama, although Deadwood
(Milch 2004–2006) could be the exception that proves the rule.
Something similar has been happening with samurai drama
(Karatsu 2007): viewing figures for television audiences are down

and the occasional film seems to have lost appeal as well. Karatsu
attributes this to audiences wanting more than fake stage settings and
cites the recent successes of Last Samurai and Zatôichi as indicative
of what audiences prefer: attention to historical detail, better use of
special effects, and something original added to oft-repeated story
lines. No film would appear to fit the bill better than Takeshi Kitano’s
prize-winning Zatôichi (2003), a film for which he was happy to dis-
cuss his influence by Kurosawa.13
“Even With My Eyes Wide Open,

I Can’t See a Thing”14
The story of the wandering blind masseur who is also a great swords-
man has had a long play on Japanese television (1974, 1976, 1978–
1979) and has been made into at least twenty-six films. Its basic
structure incorporated several elements found in Yojimbo: weekly a
person or family found themselves prey to some problem that could
only be solved by swift swordplay and the justice meted out by a wan-
dering professional. This wanderer should not stay in town however.
The blind swordsman, a master of his art, reliant on his hearing in
order to fight as if he were sighted, is perhaps one of the more original
incarnations of this variation of the marebito, and, we might argue,
the masseur does need some god-like skills in order to perform as
brilliantly as he does.
Kitano, directing and starring in the latest film version of Zatôichi,
takes this basic story and combines it with a few other stock plots
from the jidai geki genre: the gangsters who overstep their bounds;
two young adults seeking revenge for the slaughter of their family
by a gang; the ronin who is looking for work; the reckless nephew
who is wasting his time gambling; the kind widow who is happy to
take in a stranger; and the fatherly, gentle barkeep who is the center
of village life. Kitano, however, gives each of these subplots a new
twist: the gangsters never see the face of their boss. The children seek-
ing revenge, Okino (Daike Yûko) and her transvestite brother Osei
(Tachibana Daigorô), have become murderous geisha. The ronin,
Gennosuke Hattori (Asano Tadanobu), is a former bureaucrat whose
loving wife, Oshino (Natsukawa Yui), hates his bloody bodyguard jobs
but, ironically, she is slowly dying of tuberculosis, which forces him to
continue to seek employment in order to pay for her medication. The
nephew, Shinkichi (Taka Gadarukanaru), is almost too interested in

The Lone Hero 157
the transvestite geisha; and his widowed aunt, Ôme (Ôkusu Michiko),
is not a bent old crone, but a rather attractive woman who says “no”
to any romantic ideas the blind masseur might have. The bar keeper
(Emoto Akira), too, is more than he seems. Add to this a “mad”
neighbor’s son who spends his days running about as if leaping into
battle, dressed as a foot soldier because “he wants to be a samurai”;
peasants who tap dance in the mud a la Monty Python; a hero with
bleached blond hair; and a final scene that reminded many viewers of
Busby Berkeley musicals—but that has a touch of Kurosawa, refer-
ring to the fire festival sequence in Hidden Fortress—and we have an
energetic, vibrant film. As Karatsu (2007) notes, Zatôichi balances
life and death through humor, a technique she thinks comes straight
from Kurosawa.
There are other, clear visual references to Kurosawa as well: the out-
door settings, the attention to period detail, the care with which most
of the characters are accurately costumed for the era, and, finally, the
violent fighting that has realistic consequences. Being filmed in color,
it is a more stylized mise-en-scène than that of Kurosawa, owing
something, it could be said, to Tarantino and modern special effects
departments. The blood glistens as it flies, spurts, or drips from
wounds—in a suicide scene it stains the floor as elegantly as anything
Mizuguchi might have devised. But like Yojimbo it is a film not above
poking fun at its relatives within the jidai geki genre: the nephew tries
to teach some young boys how to fight in a traditional seeming scene,
but ends up teaching them moves that finish with all three hitting him
on the head. The widow tells the masseur not to get any ideas, and
the next scene cuts to him asking her if it is “Hard enough?” He is, of
course, giving her a massage. Moreover, it has a rather complex struc-
ture of flashback sequences that occasionally can lose the viewer. But
it has a very basic Yojimbo-like plot: there are two gangs in town
vying for power and the authorities seem to do nothing; it is the end
of the Tokugawa era when the samurai who had become bureaucrats
were forced out of jobs and, perhaps, some were forced to be warriors
again. It also has a Kurosawa-like message: despite all the bad things
that happen in the film, most ordinary people are basically good: the
gambling nephew, the murderous geisha, the cowering townspeople,
and, interestingly but sadly, the very skilled ronin who ends up work-
ing for the gangsters.
That Zatôichi manages to appear original is certainly similar to
the films previously discussed: all the permutations on Rashomon,
or the comic versions of Seven Samurai. It speaks to a point made

by Todorov (1990) about how innovation occurs within genre: it is

only by the mixing of old forms that something new might be cre-
ated. What is intriguing from the point of view of whether a film
is successful or not is that Last Man Standing does this precisely as
did Yojimbo, faithfully mixing the gangster genre with the samurai
drama in the case of the latter, and the Western with the Mafioso
film in that of the former. Yet, Last Man Standing was seen to fail
and Walter Hill, according to Galbraith (2002), refuses to discuss
Kurosawa’s story that is credited in the open sequences. What seems
to have gone wrong is, as already suggested, that the humor that was
another aspect of the film that had somehow translated in the Leone
version and that surfaces in the Kitano permutation disappears from
the Hill film. That humor, that culturally contextual intangible, does
somehow make it into the translation or remake is a puzzle to be
solved in relation to the films that will be considered in the next chap-
ter. First, however, the issue of film, violence, and aesthetics needs to
be briefly considered.
The Aesthetics of Violence

Can there be an aesthetics of violence? I noted earlier that Tarantino
argues that the use of violence in his films should be read in terms of
their aesthetics rather than in any moralistic way. It is a very post-
modern point to make: the look of the thing matters, but the viewer
is not meant to find an internal meaning. It is this “emptying out” of
meaning that has been used in the arguments against the depiction
of violence in films, games, or television (cf. Prince 2000b): the vul-
nerability of children to such nihilistic depictions is an issue about
which parents in the United States are much incised. Yet, as I argued,
Tarantino’s films seem to me to have similar moralistic points to
make about men and their relation to violence as do, in this case,
Kurosawa, Leone, Hill, and Kitano. Depictions of violence, whether
beautifully composed, carefully framed, and realistically enacted or
not, are, in and of themselves, meaningless. It is the context within
which the violence occurs that renders the act meaningful and, fre-
quently, moralistic.
Thus, when Sanjuro’s apparent objectivity, his amoral stance, is pit-
ted against the mad glee of the killer Unosuke, his “playful” challenge
to the authority of the gangsters who are occupying the town turns
into a cosmic battle between good and evil. Similarly, No Name’s
declared disinterest in the rights and wrongs of the feud between the

The Lone Hero 159
Rojos and Baxters is turned into a moral challenge when he finally

meets Ramon who is clearly psychotic. Hill uses the same motif in
Last Man Standing, when the petty criminal, con man, and killer
John Smith finally encounters the monstrous Hickey (Christopher
Walken). Moreover, Smith’s determination to clean up the town stands
in stark relief against the Sheriff’s (Bruce Dern) corruptness disguised
as neutrality. Finally Zatôichi is thrust into a complex situation by the
cruelty of others who assume that a blind man is an easy target. While
it could be said that the use of special effects, the concern with the
composition of violent scenes, the efforts to render them both realistic
and accessible to audiences robs such scenes of their shock value for
some, the fact remains that the stories, in and of themselves, make
certain moral assumptions about justice in the world.
To argue, then, that an aesthesized violence, stylistic and styl-
ish, robs narratives of any meaning, is to miss the point: meaning is
not, as Ricouer (1981) has argued, to be found in single constitutive
elements, but in the relationship of these elements to each other. In
Kurosawa’s films, and in many of the remakes, adaptations and in the
variety of permutations that come out of his work, the concern with
social injustice remains at the core of the story. That violent means are
sometimes the only way to deal with injustice is dwelt with as an issue
in Seven Samurai: men who are professionals in the world of violence
have no place in “normal” society. Yet, paradoxically, in all versions
of the stories, Japanese, European, or North American, men of vio-
lence can somehow find a sort of purpose or redemption in fighting
for just causes. This has long been the theme of heroic tales. It is the
villains who die meaningless deaths, while the heroes are remembered
with gratitude and might even live on to fight another day. The paci-
fist hero is, perhaps sadly so, rare in our modern mythologies.
To argue, as some like Tarantino do, that the concern with technique
and style—the look of the thing—is inherently apolitical ignores the
engagement that audiences may have with a film. Leone’s “beautiful”
men aside, his attempt to comment on U.S. immorality was read as
a commentary on Vietnam by late 1960s audiences. The “failure”
of Last Man Standing might well be that it failed to engage with
1990s concerns about violence and drugs (referenced to by the boot-
leg liquor) in a way that made sense, while Zatôichi’s playfulness
and humor sit well with its darker message about the ways in which
modern Japanese seem to be too cut off from each other and their
“traditional” values. Given such possible readings of the films, the
framing of the violence acquires meaning and makes a moral point;

however, this moral point, when so aestheticized might well lead to

an inversion of the director’s original intent: “war as hell” can also
be read as being about the glory of war, or the nobility of heroic
interventions. It was the possibility of violence to change the world
in ways associated with divine or supernatural intervention, however,
that crossed over in many versions of the film. This theme of change
born from violence is also central to the final two films to be consid-
ered in this book.

10
Cloning Kurosawa
The life of man

should burn as if on fire,
the life of an insect
should be thrown into the fire.
Ponder and you will see that
the world is dark
and this floating world is a dream.
Burn with abandon!
—The lyrics to the fire festival song in The Hidden Fortress
Introduction
It was argued in the previous chapter that combining genres was the
one way to come up with something new. Certainly this is the inter-
esting point of adaptations, remakes, or permutations: they always
result in something new while maintaining the connection to the old.
Or to elaborate on the reference to Lucas’ Star Wars series, unless the
clone is raised in a manner identical to the original, it is not going to
be the same person, although there will be resemblances. Cultural
context, which includes the historical and social as well as language,
means that even the most faithful remakes or adaptations become
something else. Both the combination of genres as well as the ability
of a text to mutate would seem to be Lucas’ (The Hidden Fortress
DVD) reasons for arguing that Star Wars is not his version of the
Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san akunin or Three
Villains of the Hidden Fortress 1958). Lucas admits that his film is

about a princess and a “treasure” (in this case information) that need
to be got to safety; but in the Kurosawa film, there was only General
Rokurota Makabe, played, ever reliably, by Toshiro Mifune, who was
responsible for accomplishing this mission. There are no young men
vying for the feisty Princess Yuki’s (Uehara Misa) affection, although
the Japanese film does offer us two downtrodden peasants turned
foot soldiers in the place of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamil) and Hans
Solo (Harrison Ford).
These two men are Tahei (Chiaki Minoru) and Matakishi
(Fujiwara Kamatari), both regular actors in Kurosawa films. Just
in the four films considered for this book, Chiaki played the young
priest in Rashomon, and Heibei in Seven Samurai; while Fujiwara
played Manzo in Seven Samurai and the silk merchant in Yojimbo.
Both were versatile actors and brought comic overtones to their por-
trayal of two “friends” who have left the village to make their for-
tunes at war. However, as they discuss right at the film’s beginning,
war has done nothing for them except made them poorer and almost
got them killed. That they have suffered is clear—they witness, in
the film’s opening scene, a lone samurai, run down and speared by
the enemy, his death played out for the audience in Kurosawa’s signa-
ture slow motion. They know, if captured and recognized as deserting
soldiers from the army, that they too might be killed and they come
up with a plan to make their way home, across enemy territory. But
the journey, traversing a deserted plain that looks almost as if devas-
tated by nuclear fallout, is not without its perils, including the disas-
ters wrought by the men’s own personalities. They bicker, attempt
to betray each other, run off, and end up being captured and sent to
work digging for the missing treasure of the Akizuki clan. The scenes
in the pit in which they are set to dig and the shots of the enslaved
soldiers marching up and down the steps of the captured Akizuki for-
tress are clear references to Kurosawa’s engagement with the social
realism of the Russian filmmaker Eisenstein.
So far the film seems to reflect many of the themes of Kurosawa’s
1950s oeuvre: the way in which the peasants are oppressed and used
by aristocratic elites; how the peasants themselves are complicit in
this oppression and are not innocents; the savagery of war; and, in
the figure of the orphaned princess, how it is women who suffer the
consequences of men’s heroism. Yet The Hidden Fortress, once Tahei
and Matakishi encounter General Rokurota, is more like a fairy tale
than it would be expected given its first third. This may well be due
to the fact that Kurosawa wrote the screenplay with three others:

Cloning Kurosawa 163
Hashimoto Shinobu, Kikushima Ryuzo, and Oguni Hideo. The film is

also symptomatic of an interesting shift that appears to have occurred
generally in his work. In the early 1950s, films like Rashomon, Seven
Samurai, Stray Dog, Scandal, Throne of Blood, and Ikiru explored
the twin themes of guilt and responsibility. In these earlier films, the
main (guilty) characters have to learn (or fail to learn) how to accept
responsibility for their actions, how to live in society with others,
how to make the world better. By the time we reach the 1960s, with
Yojimbo and Sanjuro, Kurosawa seems to have worked through much
of his ideas about guilt (although this theme would resurface in Ran
and Rhapsody in August) and was more interested in the acceptance
of responsibility as the way in which true heroism is made. Sanjuro
shoulders the burden of righting wrongs for the various families in
Yojimbo, but seems to have no guilty secret of his own; then he tries
to teach a group of overeager young samurai how to act responsibly
in the sequel Sanjuro. The concept of the lone gunman who is really a
sort of knight errant is one that translated fairly straightforwardly, as
we saw, in later versions of Yojimbo. But as Richie noted (in conversa-
tion) how could you “translate” the plot of Sanjuro? You would need
to make it about a troop of boy scouts!
Thus, The Hidden Fortress would appear to be a pivotal film
between the earlier work that focused on issues of guilt and the later
films that were more interested in the theme of responsibility. It is also
an interesting departure for Kurosawa. It was his first film in wide-
screen, as well as a more lyrical film, calling on a style that evokes
a sense of “fairy tale” as Richie notes (1996:136–137). Yet it is not
a pure fairy story; in fact, it might appear, from the first section of
The Hidden Fortress, that the two cowardly, sniveling, weeping, and,
frankly, dishonest peasants are the characters who must learn about
responsibility. While they are completely human, they are also comic
creations and so they never really develop as characters; in fact they
seem to regress, at one point drawing straws to see who will have the
first go at raping the mute maidservant (Princess Yuki in disguise).
There may be, at the bottom of these roles, some reflection of the
disdain Kurosawa felt for people who would not learn to be respon-
sible for themselves. Whatever the reason for the portrayal of these
two, it is no surprise that Star Wars changed these characters into
robots. This solved the problem, which also arose for the remake of
Seven Samurai with its portrayal of peasants, of how to represent an
underclass in the “classless” United States as well as a presumably
classless future.

The two farmers are also problematic as human beings for, despite
providing a few laughs, there is little likeable about them. Lucas does
away with the second problem by making them loyal retainers, R2D2
and CPO—the former speaking only in squeaks and the latter comi-
cally British, a complaining, whining servant who is, nevertheless, a
faithful follower (he is programmed to it). In contrast, there is nothing
loyal about Tahei and Matakishi in the original, they would not only
sell each other out if it profited them, but also have to be threatened
every step of their journey by General Rokurota. It is Rokurota’s seem-
ingly callous nature, happy to use these very “amusing” (omoishiroi
again) peasants in his escape with the Princess and the Akizuki gold,
which will fund a new campaign, that makes him the apparent third
villain of the Japanese title. The general however is not the character
who has the most to learn in this film.
The character who must learn to shoulder the burden of responsi-
bility is Princess Yuki. She is barely sixteen, a spoiled young princess,
whose doting father raised her as a boy, letting her run wild. When
news comes that one of her body doubles,1 Rokurota’s sixteen-year-
old sister, has been killed by the Akizuki clan, she berates him for not
expressing any emotion.2 Her old lady-in-waiting apologizes for the
Princess’s tirade—she recognizes Rokurota’s suppressed grief. Princess
Yuki, however, not only does not see this, but does not care that her
words might cause her general any further hurt. Yuki is a character,
it could be said, whose heart is in the right place, but who does not
know how to best express or restrain her feelings; she does not know
how to deal with others except to give them orders; she has empathy
for her dead stand-in, but has no compassion for the woman’s griev-
ing brother. As the last member of her family, she must shoulder the
responsibility of heading the clan, but she is still immature. In short,
she is a teenager who must learn how to rule and command others.
There is nothing of Princess Leia in her; Leia seems older, long used
to command, young but clearly more sympathetic and mature in her
outlook.
Princess Yuki, undisciplined tomboy, has none of these qualities.
She is so rash that Rokurota has to try to trick her in order to disguise
her royalty, he says that he assumes that she would not be capable
of playing a mute. No fool, despite her immaturity, Yuki immedi-
ately guesses his ruse: “I’m contrary, so you say I couldn’t do it in
order to get me to argue that of course I could.” Agreeing to the “dis-
guise” (Japanese aristocrats speak such a formal version of the lan-
guage that it almost constitutes a dialect in itself), does nothing to

dampen the Princess’ basic toughness: she escapes the curious Tahei
and Matakishi by leading them through the worst part of the forest;
remains capable of silently bullying the peasants when they try to
run off with the gold; and quite happily pulls Rokurota aside to give
him information or to order him to buy one of the former Akizuki
peasants who has been sold into prostitution. This last, a tall and
ungainly female, played by Higuchi Toshiko, is as close to anything
The Hidden Fortress has to offer as a Wookie.
Along the way, seeing life in the city, being touched by the fierce
loyalty of the slave they have freed, taking part in a fire festival in
the forest, learning something as well from the baseness of Tahei
and Matakishi, Yuki begins to grow up. But it is the steadfastness
of General Rokurota, determined to get their little group to safety,
forced to play the villain with Tahei and Matakishi and yet so clearly
noble, who seems to teach the princess the most. In one of the most
exciting scenes from amongst all of Kurosawa’s film, he shows us
just how great the general is. 3 Discovered by some Akizuki guards on
horseback, Rokurota chases them on foot, kills one, takes his horse,
and, in series of quickly edited pans, rides the other man down and
ends by riding straight into the arms of the enemy.4 There, he and
General Hyoe Tadokoro (Fujita Susumu) engage in a duel. They are
both old enemies and yet respect each other almost as friends; the
fight is not to the death, so when Rokurota bests him, Hyoe lets him
go—until they meet again, he promises.
This sequence, exhilarating and displaying all of Kurosawa’s mas-
tery at depicting men at arms, seems to contradict the initial message
of the film (and of many of the films before it): that there is noth-
ing glorious or wonderful about war. This single combat, however,
might well fall into the category of samurai values that Kurosawa did
admire: the mastery of the lance and sword. It is this mastery that
makes Kyuzo so admirable in Seven Samurai; he is not interested in
killing men, just in the technique of the fight. It is the moral Mifune
tries to impart to the young men in Sanjuro, skill is one thing, killing
another, and death in any event is horrible. What this example demon-
strates is that Kurosawa, fiercely critical of Japanese militarism, still
remained enthralled by the skills of the samurai as a warrior class,
he wanted to present his heroes as ordinary humans and yet they
become heroic through the use of their skills. In Seven Samurai and
Yojimbo we had examples of how these skills could be used for good,
rather than being ideologically reworked for “evil.” The price remains
a high one: people lose their lives, and it is only the possible marebito

Sanjuro who gets to enjoy the process in the later film, Yojimbo, and
not suffer any consequences.
In The Hidden Fortress, the general is reluctant to kill others, but
he does “what a man has to do.” It is this measured reluctance that
wins their freedom at the film’s end. General Hyoe is punished and
disfigured by his Lord for letting Rokurota go. When the princess, the
young servant girl they have bought, and Rokurota are captured and
sentenced to death, Hyoe comes to berate the general for the punish-
ment he has received. He first appears in the doorway, dark and defi-
nitely frightening and then reveals a scarred face that is reminiscent of
Darth Vader without his mask in The Return of the Jedi (Marquand
1983). But the princess, no longer required to be mute, is not cowed
by the angry general, and she lectures Hyoe on what his punishment
tells her about his Lord. A true nobleman would never punish a vas-
sal, whose loyalty is necessary, for an act of honor—to do so seems to
her cruel and a waste. She would not treat her vassals so, she argues.
Life, she goes on to say, is both too precious and fleeting to waste in
such petty acts of vengeance, and she sings the fire festival song that
she learned the night before while dancing with the peasants in the
forest. The princess has grown up: Rokurota bows to her in respect.
Hyoe, after a night’s pondering on her message, turns coat and frees
the party the next morning.
Lest the energy and pure fun of some parts of the story appear to
be Kurosawa wandering far from his favorite issues, the film ends
with Tahei and Matakishi being rewarded for their help by the prin-
cess, who asks them not to argue over the gold she gives them. But,
at first, they do not recognize Yuki and her general, who are dressed
in the formal robes of the nobility, and sit before them as if on a
stage. They look like figures out of a painted scroll, or actors in a
play. The two peasants have stumbled into someone else’s story. They
have been witness to and temporary actors in this unreal adventure
with its impossibly happy ending and, as in a fairy tale, they too have
been rewarded. As they leave the palace, gates shutting behind them,
cutting them off forever from this unreal world, they begin to bicker
once more. True, it is about trying to give each other the gold, but it
is pure slapstick again. Perhaps they have learned to be better people;
perhaps the princess will be a good ruler—yet there is something so
forbidding about the gates and castle behind them that the nagging
feeling of whether anything has really changed surfaces.
Somehow, in this very successful film—it was a great hit for
Kurosawa—that seems pure romance (in its original use of the word),

there lies a parallel story about what war, capitalism, and modernity
do to ordinary men. The message is not about bravery or nobility at
all, in fact, it is about how men are reduced to their most base by the
experience of fighting. In this final scene of The Hidden Fortress, my
earlier point about myth and ideology being part and parcel of each
other is graphically illustrated. The fairy tale world of the elite has
political repercussions for the ordinary people who must endure a
brutal feudal system. It is only in stories, in fairy stories, that nobility
exists in its purest form, perhaps this is the reason why the film has
been remade as The Last Princess (Higuchi 2008).5 In post-recession
Japan, comedy and fairy tales are needed and have to be retold, or,
as the Japanese trailers would have it, get “Reborn.” In the origi-
nal, it is Tahei’s and Matakishi’s inadvertent stumbling into this other
sort of story that “saves” them from the effects of their desperate
pursuit of wealth, and, in turn, Yuki’s sojourn in their world makes
her a “better person,” one able to understand the poverty and mis-
ery of her subjects. Kurosawa shows how the existence of the ordi-
nary world is essential to the survival of the elite—each constitutes
the other, although ideologically they should remain separate. The
film depicts a collusion and collision between the two very disparate
worlds—themes that Kurosawa reexplores when the soldier substi-
tutes for the feudal lord in Kagemusha (1980) and when the Fool
takes the Lord in hand in Ran (1985)—and this situation gives the
film its energy, despite its unwieldy plot. It would be interesting to see
how the remake, released in May 2008 in Japan (and not available
for viewing at the time of going to print), speaks to a Japanese youth
that has adopted different material values than those of their parents
(Mathews and White, eds. 2004).
Another Kurosawa theme is that of the thin line between villain
and hero, as implied by the “three villains” of the title. As with the
four main characters who all claimed guilt in Rashomon, the samu-
rai, bandits, and farmers in Seven Samurai; and Sanjuro in Yojimbo,
no one is purely noble or purely evil in this film. This is an aspect
of the film that Lucas used as the basis for not only the character
of Hans Solo, but also as the impetus for one of the most extensive
“flashbacks” or prequels in movie history: the story of Darth Vader.
If in The Hidden Fortress the two farmers stand for the Japanese,
who, seduced by the promise of the rich spoils of war (a variation on
Weber’s pirate capitalism), have become the very worst they could be,
then Darth Vader, the poor boy made good, who is seduced by the
dark side of power and increasingly fascist politics, is an analogous

Figure 11 Princess Yuki Sleeps, The Hidden Fortress
Source: Kurosawa 1958. Toho Co., Ltd. Courtesy of The Criterion Collection
Figure 12 Princess Leia Awakes, Star Wars IV

Source: Lucas 1977. Lucasfilm Ltd. Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox
American. What Lucas might owe to Kurosawa then is the desire to

give a more nuanced depiction of villainy and heroism than Hollywood
is generally credited with.
From Medieval Romance to Science Fiction Past6

As with the various permutations on Rashomon, Lucas took the
Kurosawa film as a jumping off point for his own vision. Acknowledging
the Japanese director’s visual influence, the use of wipes especially,
Lucas not only turns the story inside out, but also combines a few
genres in his own way: Westerns, particularly in the figure of Hans
Solo; early science fiction serials such as Flash Gordon; and flying
sequences from Second World War films. There also is a bow to the

Japanese with the design of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s and Luke’s kimono-

like clothing, as well as in the sword-fighting sequences. Yet Lucas
had specific concerns of his own that were very much of his gener-
ation. He has called Star Wars, in interview, his Apocalypse Now
(Coppola 1979), and a film he would have liked to make.
In conversation with audiences, I have found a general consensus
that this is a strange thing to say: for many audiences Star Wars is a
Cold War parable about the dangers of the “Evil Empire” and the
triumph of American values. Yet the film that preceded Star Wars,
American Graffiti (1973), gives some clues as to the truth of Lucas’
assertion. The end credits with their potted histories of “what hap-
pened next” includes the death of at least one character in the Vietnam
War. Vietnam was on Lucas’ mind. The question of whether the Jedi
are meant to be the Vietnamese or the Emperor is meant to be a sort
of symbolic representation of communism is less important than a
theme that is shared between both the Japanese film and Star Wars:
in a time of crisis, of war, the main character must mature, learn to
face their responsibilities. Princess Yuki must learn that people will
die to save her and to accept the burden of their deaths without blam-
ing others. In Star Wars there is an echo of this when Princess Leia’s
home planet is destroyed just to show her the power of the Death Star.
However, it is Luke, hunted by storm troopers and, eventually, Darth
Vader himself, who must learn the most. That this process of matura-
tion was impossible to depict in a single film is as much a reason for
the sequels as was the box office success of the first film.
Like Kurosawa, Lucas was also challenged to make his film look as
real as possible. For Kurosawa this meant both meticulous historical
research as well as a fascination with filming in the rain and mud, get-
ting blood to spurt out when limbs are cut, or accurately depicting the
pathos of death. Yet his concern with getting it to look right on film
led to a certain aesthetization of the very thing Kurosawa was trying
to critique: war might be hell, but it looks heroic in his films. Lucas
as well, in his attempts to rise to the challenge of making the future
and fighting in space look realistic, has been critiqued for creating
the computer-reliant special effects blockbuster. Just as Kurosawa’s
attempts to offer a social critique of Japan are often misread as the glo-
rification of the samurai by foreign audiences, so too is Lucas (along
with Spielberg) often tarred with spawning a monster of his own: the
summer blockbuster. Star Wars however was a fairly low-budget film
that cheered many of my generation. The independent filmmakers of
the 1970s had created a cinema that seemed moribund, without much

energy, obsessed with what it meant to be a post-Vietnam United

States (often without ever referencing the place), or with an emphasis
on romance that seemed to be fairly sterile. The effect of Star Wars’
brio on the young audiences of the late 1970s can only be understood
by those who were there: it offered a positive vision of the future. The
effect on subsequent filmmaking is also immeasurable.
Lucas, along with Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, always
generously acknowledged the work of Kurosawa (and other foreign
filmmakers) and championed him in a time when financing his films
was becoming more and more difficult. Without them, Kagemusha,
Ran, Dreams (1990), and Rhapsody in August (1991) probably
would not exist. And it is through the permutations on Rashomon,
Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo, that the work of Kurosawa could be
said to be constantly referenced by many directors, some of whom
are only aware of the influence of the remakes on their own work—
Robert Rodriguez, for example, always talks of Leone’s trilogy and
its influence on him without mentioning Kurosawa’s original. In some
cases the reference might be in terms of a plot line, in others in the
narrative techniques that are used when filming battle scenes. From
Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg 1998) to Lord of the Rings (Jackson
2001–2003), rare is the war film that is not judged as to whether its
battle scenes live up to Kurosawa’s standards of realism.
The idea of a Kurosawa influence pops up at the oddest times
as well. Think of The Terminator (Cameron 1984) that many write
about as a variation on the final girl horror theme (Clover 1993).
The heroine has her treasure, the son she is to have one day, and
she is aided in her escape by a single warrior. Is this a permutation
on The Hidden Fortress? If there are any pathetic clown-like char-
acters it is in the fleeting moment when the police realize that Kyle
Reese (Micheal Biehn) has been telling them the truth all along. I
have already mentioned Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, whose heroine
and British advisor share the same sort of relationship as General
Rokurota and Princess Yuki, and whose heroine took seven years
to grow up. Her quieter cousins survive in Japanese films like Kaze
no Tani no Naushika (Miyazaki 1984). Or take Shanghai Noon
(Dey 2000), a film that I found myself citing when a student said
that The Hidden Fortress needed a modern kung fu remake. Here
a kidnapped princess and missing treasure are rescued by the two
clownish heroes, one of whom is in love with her.
Watching the Matrix Revolutions (Wachowski 2003), it becomes
impossible not to think of Kurosawa when Neo and Smith begin their

fight in the rain. Seeing the opening battle sequences of Hero (Ying
Xiong, Zhang 2002) it becomes clear that China is one of the few
places left where men and horses are cheap enough that some real
Kurosawa-like framing can take place. Read the IMDB notice board
on Seven Swords (Chat Gim Tsui 2005) and find a blogger’s warn-
ing that it has nothing to do with Seven Samurai. What is interest-
ing about Kurosawa is that despite his relationship with what has
become the Hollywood old guard (Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas),
he has remained a hero to a whole new generation of 1990s indepen-
dent filmmakers who are now, a decade later, becoming a bit of an
establishment themselves. This is an example of individual history
and genealogy-making that aims to separate the serious young film-
maker from the stereotypic Hollywood director.
If we accept Foucault’s point that “genealogy is history in the form
of a concerted carnival” (1984:386), it becomes obvious that this claim
of “descent” from Kurosawa and the use of tropes that seem to come
from his body of work are part of a process of fitting one’s artistic
genealogy into a single history (also meaning story, of course) about
film, which since it is narrated to/by its descendants, leaves it open to
the riotous generation of competing new narratives. Such genealogies
are shortcuts; desire lines in fact, a way of establishing one’s “street
cred” and describing what sort of filmmaker one is: someone who is
open to many influences, with a broad store of cultural capital and
the ability to use it in creative ways (knowledge capital). The display
of this knowledge happens at both the level of the filmmaker and the
audience: watching the trailers for The Last Princess, for example, it
seems obvious to me that Darth Vader references abound. The flow
of knowledge this represents—from Japan to the world, especially the
United States, back to Japan and out to the world once more—will be
considered in my final chapter.


Conclusion
Thinking with Films
“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .”
—Opening titles to Star Wars IV
In my thinking with the films of Kurosawa and the remakes and

permutations they have generated, I have taken as a starting point the
perception of audiences, critics, and filmmakers themselves that there
exist relationships amongst all the films used, and I have described
the films themselves as if they were my ethnographic data. It is the
perception of relatedness, which had to be supported by discussing
the films, that is the true core of my argument about global imagin-
ings. To make my argument I have referred not only to the abun-
dant theory on narrative and translation, but have used the concepts
of desire lines and knowledge capital, albeit, not in the manner that
they might be used by geographers or businessmen respectively. I have
used desire lines to describe the desire of human beings to see con-
nectedness by assuming a similarity of meaning that cuts across any
problems in translating from one language, as well as cultural and
historical contexts, to another. Translations and perceptions of relat-
edness become conceptual bridges leading to something new, while
retaining the old.
I have used the term knowledge capital to describe a subcategory of
cultural capital—many filmmakers may well claim a relationship to
the “great” filmmakers from previous generations as part of their cul-
tural capital, but the decisions as to how to use this knowledge in their
own work represents a different level of knowing. While a straight-
forward remake could be just a business decision (it did well in the

original foreign language, let us try it in English) for Hollywood, the

permutations represent a variety of strategies by the director: have they
reused the story, the plotted elements, and the narrative techniques,
emulated the camera work, or put in a jokey reference? The decisions
taken and the references made can, at the level of the individual, be
used as a way of subverting current conventions as Lucas did in Star
Wars, and as many of the 1990s generation of independent filmmak-
ers, whose work may only refer to Kurosawa, see themselves as doing.
Ironically, as discussed above, subversive moves in filmmaking often
end by becoming incorporated into the mainstream canon, just as
filmmakers often make the move from independent productions to
working in the mainstream global film business.
What remains at the end of such discussions and at the end of
tracing through patterns of relatedness is the fact that the processes
of filmmaking, while firmly part of the financial and technological
“scapes” of globalization, are the closest we have to an example of the
workings of a global culture. Yet such a statement is problematic for
many. A recent IMDB discussion on the fact that the third film in the
Nightwatch trilogy would be made in English rather than Russian,
despite keeping the same director, evoked the very accurate observa-
tion by a German discussant: as far as he was concerned Russian and
English were both foreign languages. Thus, either production of the
film was a foreign production. Such an example highlights how the
flow of global films constantly encounters the local. The problem, I
would like to argue, is not in this clash of global and local—that is
natural we might say—but in the assumption that culture at the local
level is ever homogenous and single. While it is essential to nationalist
ideology that the state’s “culture” be represented as a shared national
culture, within the nation-state differences in class, locality, genera-
tion, ethnicity, religion, and even gender mean that the national cul-
ture is never as monolithic as it might be represented. If this is true of
culture at the “local” level, than it is also true of the global version:
despite competing versions of reality, different languages, histories,
religions, and so on there is something we might call a culture in
an equally loose sense. For theorists such as Jameson (2006), this
culture is that of capitalism and assuming the pernicious triumph of
capitalist ideology as the basis of this global culture means that all
films are subject to an interpretation that is political. To take such a
line, however, is to land us back in the camp of a hegemonic global
culture. If instead, we take culture to be ever contested, ever fluid,
ever changing, and imbued with the possibility of subversion, while

Conclusion 175
appearing singular and hegemonic, then it is possible to make the case

for a global culture as an active imagining on the part its denizens—
and this is in the end, as any anthropologist will tell you, the simplest
definition of culture: an active imagining.
For filmmakers the flow of great films is global, a resource to
which they are often lucky to have access (although there exist his-
torical moments when a country might close itself to the foreign),
but so is the flow of not-so-great, or even mediocre films since the
advent of video, DVD, and the Internet. That so many of the films
made in other places, at other times, remain accessible to so many
different audiences, speaks more to the ability of a film—as with any
art form—to mean different things at different times while somehow
retaining a sense of its original uniqueness, than it does to the brain-
washing qualities of the medium. This heteroglossic aspect of films
results in the new versions of any given story. That this is possible
with films is not unusual: this is after all a feature of narratives in gen-
eral. Heath quotes Branigan on this (from what must be class notes
since the reference is to a mimeograph): “To the extent that the cam-
era is located in an ‘impossible’ place, the narration questions its own
origin, that is, suggests a shift in narration.” Heath goes on to note:
“ ‘Impossible,’ of course, is here decided in respect of the ‘possible’
positions of the observer moving about, the disturbance involved seen
as a disjunction of the unity of narration and narrated, enunciation
and enounced.” (1986:401).
Thus while the processes of translating stories and retelling them
are two sides of the same coin, the processes can appear impossible
to do accurately despite the desire for understanding that fuels it. The
adventures of Princess Yuki and Princess Leia, or of Tom Thumb and
Little One Inch are not the same; the fight of Buffy against vampires
is very different from Mina’s in the original. Yet, we recognize the
similarities that make the stories kin if not actual translations of each
other.
It is the film director’s role as a bridge within this process that is
interesting. In a recent homage to Michelangelo Antonioni, Martin
Scorsese (2007) summed up how this happens by discussing his first
experience of seeing an Antonioni film:
The people Antonioni was dealing with, quite similar to the people in
F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s novels (of which I later discovered that Antonioni
was very fond), were about as foreign to my own life as it was possible
to be. But in the end that seemed unimportant. I was mesmerized by

“L’Avventura” and by Antonioni’s subsequent films, and it was the fact

that they were unresolved in any conventional sense that kept drawing
me back. They posed mysteries—or rather the mystery, of who we are,
what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time. You could say that
Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul. That’s why
I kept going back. I wanted to keep experiencing these pictures, wan-
dering through them. I still do.
The watching of a foreign film, for many directors, appears to feed

into their creative processes—they are always looking for some way
to express, visually, the story that many of us take for granted were
originally written down. By melding together the visual experience
with narrative causality, directors seem to assume that they can
understand what they are seeing. It might well be broken down into
techniques, a question about knowing how to do that—and yet the
underlying assumption seems to be that repeating the process is not
only possible, but necessary in order to reproduce a similar experi-
ence in another film. Seeing is assumed to be, if not believing, some-
how understanding. Death is not pretty—so showing the goriness of
an amputated arm or hand makes the point whether in a Japanese,
Italian, or Hollywood film. Battles are messy, frightening events, so
the mud, the chaos, panicked horses, stoic men marching straight to
death are all images that appear to clearly make that point across
cultures. Film directors, then, seem to be working at the level of some
assumed meta-structure of what modern life and experiences are like
and how these experiences have been shared around the world. While
the experiences may well be similar, there are also the felt differences
that need to be articulated.
So it is that when asked about their relationship to Kurosawa,
many filmmakers say that they feel flattered that they are mentioned
in the same breath, but always stress how what they have done is
from their own perspective. Tom Tykwer wondered if Run, Lola, Run
owes anything to Kurosawa save the repetition of the story (private
communication); the cinematographer for Hero, Christopher Doyle,
spoke (in interview to Charmaine Chan) of how Kurosawa painted;
Bryan Singer says, in the DVD interview for the Usual Suspects, that
it the lie of the camera, rather than the human lie that is the difference
in his work; George Lucas speaks of his admiration for Kurosawa and
yet denies the label of remake. It is clear that referring to, adapting, or
reworking Kurosawa is part of a larger process in which filmmakers
are always involved: looking for the place in which to tell their own
version of a story, in their own way. Rarely does a filmmaker speak

Conclusion 177
of the commonality of human experience—that is not to say that they

are unaware of it, but rather they take it for granted, if this common-
ality did not exist, their films would not make money. What is global-
ization about if not about shared structures and the shared experience
of these structures?
Such an argument might appear to be taking us away from the
idea of translating Kurosawa, but it is in the direct remakes of the
films that we begin to see how stories have not only been somewhat
reworked to fit a different time or place, but that interesting moments,
slices of experience we might say, remain shared. Women as a “prob-
lem” or a mystery, enigmas that cannot be understood or trusted, is
a theme that travels across not only the remakes of Rashomon, but
also, we can say, many of the permutations. Moreover, in the more
interesting permutations on Rashomon such as Les Girls, Courage
under Fire, Reversal of Fortune, Last Year in Marienbad, the prob-
lem of men’s relationships with women also surfaces. If there is a
problem of understanding, it does not occur in a vacuum, but lies at
the heart of the very relationship that makes it possible for societies to
function and reproduce: the male and female as couple. Can we ever
know the truth? The police procedural variations on Rashomon, as
well as the last two “remakes,” cannot resist telling us that we can, if
the topic is murder. But if we want to know about men and women as
such—well, that can never be solved.
The Seven Samurai, in contrast to Rashomon, presents us with
another issue: what does it mean if the most commonly available ver-
sion of a film is truncated? If we are going to be purists, then the
argument is clear: the original is not understood and has been poorly
translated. However, the core of the story seems to have traveled not
only well, but in case of the remakes, not to have changed very much
at all. Professionals come to the aid of a village, the villagers learn to
take responsibility for their own protection, while the professionals
realize, once again, how they do not belong in regular society. Even
the comic variations in which the professionals are actors or circus
performers retain much of the same message: any man (note the gen-
der bias) can be a hero if they are willing to take on the burden and
responsibility of fighting, but professionals are still necessary to teach
us the mechanics of fighting/winning. What makes a hero, even if it
is the common man as hero, seems to remain fairly constant across
time and societies.
Yojimbo, which began life as a Western novella, looks at the anti-
hero, that problematic individual, who does the right thing, but

perhaps for the wrong or unknowable reasons. What Kurosawa added

to the Hammett story was the folkloric possibility of Sanjuro being
a marebito, a bit of religion, that surprisingly, traveled from Japan to
Catholic Italy, and on to the more religiously mixed United States.
In all three films, someone’s prayers appear to be answered by the
appearance of the stranger in town. In the Japanese film, the prayer is
implied in the argument the father has with the son who runs away to
be a gambler; in A Fistful of Dollars, the implication remains in the
way in which the woman and her family are named, Marisol, Jose,
and Jesus; while in Last Man Standing, the theme is fully articulated
at the very start of the film. The way in which elements of Yojimbo
have been fairly accurately translated leads to the very heart of this
book: how is it possible to keep some of the meanings of these narra-
tives constant across cultures?
I have already provided two answers to this question: the similar-
ity of human experience, or the presumed similarities, and the fact
that we build new stories from old. Lucas’s opening line to Star Wars
reminds of this last: the fact that stories resemble each other allows us
to speak of shared experiences across time; the assumption of shared
experience leads us to tell similar stories. Reality is constructed
through these narrative processes; the stories shape our experience as
much as we shape the stories (Bruner 1986).
One way to understand this is to return to the point made in chapter
one about the difference between stories as basic structures, plots as
a way of organizing these structures and narratives as the techniques
used to tell the story. There may be only seven basic plots in the world
(Booker 2004), as has been famously claimed, and, as a result, few
“grand stories.” I use the term here explicitly referring to Lyotard’s
(1984) phrase the “grand narrative,” but with a difference. The grand
stories—the one-world histories, the religious foundation tales about
gods—are undermined by being narrated, a process that always intro-
duces difference. Stories then resemble the paradox I offered in chap-
ter one about dominant ideologies and the readings of film: they seem
both familiar and easy to understand and yet are always undermined
by their narrative reiterations—this is how we get contested histories,
resistances to ideology, heresies, and new religious movements.
The grand narrative has not ended precisely because it never
existed. In the eras when grand stories appeared to be the most plau-
sible, whenever, wherever that was, they could only do so by ignoring
the essentially polyphonic narrativity of human experience. What has
been challenged in postmodernity is the social assumption about the

Conclusion 179
correctness and superiority of the grand story that prohibits alterna-

tive narratives. In this sense, we are, at the least, modern if not post-
modern when we argue for the possibility and necessity of various
narratives coexisting: traditional societies were/are aware of compet-
ing narratives, but fought/fight for the single grand story to be held
to as “true.”
The brilliance of Rashomon may well be that it was the first film
to portray this postmodern condition and its consequences, the shock
of the priest, woodcutter, and commoner, symbolizes the distress
caused by the postwar awareness that we had come to live in a world
where difference had not only to be acknowledged, but had also to be
accommodated, and that more than one version of the truth might
exist. That this awareness does not sit comfortably with the way in
which social reality is constructed around a grand story is demon-
strated by all the remakes that cannot resist offering us a solution
to the murder. We may acknowledge that reality is subjective when
it suits us as individuals, but cannot bear the implications of this as
social beings, we want the possibility and certainty of human conti-
nuities and so we make them.
Thus, to return to the example of reading films cross-culturally,
the sense of the familiar that is found in a “foreign film,” or in a
Hollywood blockbuster shown outside of the United States is possible
because audiences look for the shared meaning in the narrative. This
leads to a global sharing of stories that are also constantly breaking
down into new narratives, permutations on the originals, jazz-like
improvisations, riffs on what is already known and understood. This
constant reworking is possible because the film business is global, but
also because film directors are engaged in the global and local in a
manner that makes them creative “bridges,” This is not to deny the
teamwork that is part of any film production, nor to ignore the film
producers who finance the remaking of these stories, hoping for a
profitable return, but to anchor these processes within the vision of
the person responsible for bringing the story and its plot together in
a narrative structure that is meant to be visibly distinctive. Or, to put
it in terms of the loss of identity of which Kurosawa and other great
directors have been accused, the successful translation of these tales
relies on the artist being willing to be both global and yet local simul-
taneously. This is not a loss of identity, but a willingness to have more
than one simple identity.
Obviously, this is not an analysis that could be made of all films,
nor is every film easily translatable. What is a frightening story in

one society, for example, may or may not terrify in another nor suc-
ceed at the box office. Focusing only on differences, however, loses
sight of the fact that telling stories about the things that we fear is an
attribute shared by such “different” tales, it ignores the fact that there
are human continuities as the filmmaker MacDougall (1998) argues.
These continuities, however, have to be constantly made and remade,
shoring up the social construction of reality against the entropy of our
individual narratives. In other words, conceptual bridges, if not main-
tained, will fall. While we value the individual, differing, narrative as
“unique” and “original,” the building blocks of these bridges remain
other narratives and shared experience.
In the case of Kurosawa, the human continuity was the twentieth-
century experience of a modern form of warfare in which the con-
cepts of humanity and moral responsibility were called into question
(Arendt 1994). This was followed by the ideological maneuvering
required of the citizens in the defeated countries (a post-Vietnam
and post-socialist experience as well) that gave birth to or inspired a
renewed impetus in tales about ordinary heroes, while concurrently
calling into question the construction of reality and the nature of
such heroes. In his concern with these issues, Kurosawa has long been
called a humanist. Thus Kurosawa’s very Japanese concerns about
war, violence, guilt, responsibility, and ordinary people managed to
translate again and again into a genealogy of films that speak to our
sense of shared humanity.
This is, of course, a more optimistic version of global culture than
that found in works such as Global Hollywood 2 (Miller et al. 2005),
which documents how the number of films made by Hollywood con-
stitutes about 20 percent of the world’s total, often outnumbers the
locally made films watched by audiences, and how Hollywood also
invests in many local cinemas. This bald picture of the media and
financial ‘scapes involved certainly brings us back to the “Hollywood
as Godzilla” scenario. However, if we see films as not only hetero-
geneous, but also as heteroglossic in the Bakhtinian sense (Bakhtin
1981), and thus dialogic in nature, then it becomes apparent that
“global culture” cannot be simply described as a hegemonic force,
nor as simply a form of Americanization. As with all culture, global
culture is problematic and, while often essentialized, it is in fact some-
times vague to the point of seemingly disappearing, and only really
experienced as having reality when contrasted to one’s own or some-
one else’s culture. Thus it may seem to represent the power of, in this
case, Hollywood, but in truth it always is fragmenting, evolving, and

Conclusion 181
changing—while frequently being just what we want it to be. Global

culture, like all culture, is the product of human imagining; and films,
as narratives, are just one example of how paradoxically this act of
the imagination is both simple and complex. Like Simmel’s bridges
and doors, films connect and disconnect, act as thoroughfares at the
same time as they represent boundaries, while allowing us to perceive
and articulate both similarity and difference. All of that built on the
technology of light and shadow, contained on strips of fragile cellu-
loid or magnetic tape, encoded on a DVD, or invisibly transmitted
over the air—what greater proof of human creativity and the desire
lines of the imagination do we need?


Notes
Prologue
1. For Japanese names I have generally used the order used in Japan: surname
followed by first name. However, for personages that are well known outside
Japan, I have referred to them as would film critics, theorists, and audiences:
first name followed by surname.
2. In fact North American cultural anthropologists have tried to do away with
the “culture concept,” thereby essentially undermining their own discipline—
much to the amusement of sociologists—and certainly contravening the
empirical trend found in most societies, which firmly insist on the existence of
their own unique cultures.
3. Although I wonder if the financial is really ignored. Recently my own chil-
dren startled me by announcing that they could not believe that a certain
famous director had helped produce what they thought was a terrible film.
They expected him to have a better sense of where to put his money.
4. Bruner, of course, relies on the work of many others—Barthes, Ricoeur,
Chomsky, Kermode—to make his points.
1 Setting the Scene

1. In contrast, the science fiction writer William Gibson (2001) seems well aware
of such conceptual loci and even situates them on actual bridges—the meta-
phor made real—in his novels. Building on Augé’s (1995) terms, non-places
become the birthplaces of innovation.
2. Silent nonnarrative films were shown throughout the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury. For example, Japan saw its first film in 1898 (cf. Anderson and Richie
1982). The first narrative film was The Great Train Robbery (1903) directed
and photographed by Edwin S. Porter in New Jersey. Interestingly, the first
continuous narrative film (sixty or more minutes long) was made in 1906 in
Australia by Charles Tait. This was the story of the notorious outback bush-
ranger Ned Kelly, The Story of the Kelly Gang, a film that has been remade
numerous times since. The first feature-length film made in Europe was by the
Frenchman Michel Carre (L’Enfant prodigue, 1907). D.W. Griffith directed
the first film made in Hollywood, In Old California (1910). The move from the

184 Notes
East to the West coast in the United States was to have important consequences
for the development of the film industry (for more details, there is an excellent
online source at www.filmsite.org/grea.html). As Atherton (n.d.) has argued
in relation to photography, as a modern “art” filmmaking is global largely
because of its short history, no one society can claim superiority in the art by
virtue of having been doing it longer than anywhere else.
3. I am thinking here of Sessue Hayakawa in the silent era and various Latin
Americans such as Carmen Miranda or Desi Arnaz in the sound era.
4. France and Italy especially pushed for trade protection against U.S. films
and, later, television programs as part of their postwar cultural reconstruc-
tion in 1946–1947. Recently the U.S. film maker Quentin Tarantino has
waded into this debate, blaming British actors for the collapse of the British
film industry! The actor Sir Ian McKellen has responded by pointing out the
role of financers and producers who don’t fund the local.
5. On the need for a mass education system to achieve this, theorists as diverse
as Althusser (1984) and Gellner (1988) are agreed.
6. Ivy devotes two chapters in her Discourses of the Vanishing (1995) to an
analysis of the work Yanagita Kunio put into the tidying up of the originally
rather gritty and incoherent Tales of Tono, the collection of folktales that
has come to stand for the peasant “soul” of Japan. He did no more than the
brothers Grimm had done in Germany, a century earlier.
7. As I will discuss below, I am not happy with the concept of ideologies as gen-
erally understood; I prefer the notion of dominant mythologies.
8. In arguing that myths are also dialogic, I am arguing here against Bakhtin who
believed myth was an “absolute form of thought” (1981:367) along with ide-
ology. I would argue that both myth and ideology aim to be absolute forms
of thought, but are defeated in this by continuing to be expressed in everyday
language, as well as through rituals, despite their existence in formulaic stories.
Traditional rituals might not be dialogic, but by Bakhtin’s own definition lan-
guage always is: “Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is
heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological
contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of
the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between
tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form” (1981:291).
9. Even children as young as eight years of age, in my experience, are capable
of this. I did a small research project on children’s opinions about the first
Harry Potter film and found they held a vast array of opinions about the
movie, many of them deeply critical about what had been done to a story
they knew very well.
10. O’Flinn (1999) disagrees with the notion that Dracula is polyphonic in the
sense in which Bakhtin means it, since all the characters are British, but this
seems an odd caveat since Bakhtin’s analysis was partially based on Dickens’
novels with their huge casts of British characters.
11. I take up this point in more detail in Chapter ten.
12. For a detailed discussion of these relationships and how they are used in
film, see Bordwell (1985).

Notes 185
2 Portrait of an Artist as Filmmaker

1. A brief list of this Japanese work includes Tasogawa’s Kurosawa vs
Hariuddo (Kurosawa versus Hollywood) (2006); Tsuchiya’s Kurosawa-san
(2002); Nishimura’s Kurosawa Akira: Oto to Eizo (Akira Kurosawa: Sound
and Image) (1990); and Sato’s Kurosawa Akira no sekai (Akira Kurosawa’s
World) (1969).
2. The historian Miriam Silverberg (2007) nicely documents this era, borrow-
ing the term “montage” from film editing, in order to capture the heteroge-
neity and rapidity of the urban lifestyle in prewar Japan. The anthropologist
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (2006) documents the wide Western and Eastern
education that elite young men of the era had.
3. Kurosawa’s relationship with Dostoevsky and his films as dialogic and inter-
textual are best explored by Goodwin (1993).
4. Cazdyn offers us an interesting analysis of Rashomon in which he asserts,
“What finally emerges is Kurosawa himself—Kurosawa the risk-taker,
Kurosawa the free agent” (2003:242).
5. Galbraith (2001) notes that Kurosawa wrote many “typical” war film scripts
during this time.
6. It remained a favorite irony of Kurosawa (1982), that his film They Who
Step on the Tiger’s Tail (Tora no O wo Fumu Otokotachi, 1945) was banned
by both governments for different reasons: once for its irreverence toward
samurai traditions and later for its reverence of samurai values.
7. Kurosawa notes that after one of two important strikes at Toho Studies in
1946, communist party members came to dominate the union (1982).
8. Benshi did not just translate or read the storyboards, but elaborated the
entire story—often narrating the interior states of the characters (see
Standish 2005).
9. On this see Yoshimoto (2000), whose massive book on Kurosawa is an
attempt to rescue his work from the orientalist and eroticizing theorizing of
Western film specialists.
10. In a recent UK poll of the greatest films of the twentieth century, Rashomon
and Seven Samurai both came in the top ten. Directors and critics such as
Denys Arcand, George Armitage, John Boorman, Lewis Gilbert, Taylor
Hackford, Ann Hui, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Lester, Gillies Mackinnon,
Babak Payami, Philip Saville, and Santosh Sivan voted for the latter; while
Ray Anderssen, Gillian Armstrong, Jana Bokova, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Joe
Dante, Ernest Dickerson, Randa Haines, Norman Jewison, Paul Mazursky,
Janvir Mokammel, Digvijay Singh, and Paul Verhoeven voted for the former.
Critics had Kurosawa at number six of the top ten great filmmakers of
all times; directors placed him third behind Orson Welles and Frederico
Fellini.
11. In his book (1995) Peter Dale deconstructions some of the most idiosyncratic
and persistent themes of this discourse.
12. Oshima wrote a scathing essay on the American film and the cultural danger
it poses to non-U.S. filmmakers (1992).

186 Notes
3 Rashomon: The Problem of Subjectivity

1. The commoner in Rashomon says this when he hears the final version of the
story (Richie 1987:86).
2. I refer here to what was in the year 2004 the number one television drama
series in the United States: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Anthony Zuiker,
2000–present). CSI made clear its own imaginative link to Kurosawa with its
episode Rashomama, aired April 27, 2006.
3. Eco’s Holmes-like investigator in The Name of the Rose (1983) famously mis-
reads clues all throughout the novel, finally only discovering the murderer
almost by accident, like Sam Spade, after various adventures and near-death
experiences. The truth, it would seem, is never easy to discover. The reference
here to Dashiell Hammett’s detective is also relevant since Kurosawa knew
Hammett’s work as we shall see in chapter nine.
4. There was a complex hierarchy within the samurai as well as a division between
samurai (as warriors) and aristocrats in ancient Japan. A high-status couple would
not have been travelling alone, nor would the woman have been exposed to the
elements—she would have travelled inside a litter with the screens drawn.
5. The Japanese verb used by Masago to describe what happened to her, okasu
(to rape), also means to commit an error, to sin, to break, and to violate. The
use of this term rather than the more legalistic gôkan, which does not have the
sense of sin or error, indicates what she is feeling.
6. Many theorists who work on Kurosawa have been quick to point out that the
convoluted narrative structure of the film is not nearly as complex as Citizen
Kane (Welles 1941); nor was the idea of the flashback within a flashback at
all new to Western audiences, who might have seen the more psychologically
complex B picture The Locket (Brahm 1946).
7. Richie’s translation of Rashomon (1987:86).
8. The link between war and alternative versions of the truth is made quite
powerfully by the many Web sites that link Rwanda and Rashomon. Telling
the truth in the aftermath of war is, clearly, difficult in all sorts of ways.
Can any society bear to hear the truth about the acts of violence committed
during war?
9. The term is used both by sociologists and anthropologists (cf. Heider
1988:73–81; Mazur 1998; Roth and Mehta 2002)
4 Remaking Rashomon: From Subjectivity to

“the” Truth
1. The psychiatrist says this at the end of Quante Volte . . . Quella Notte, (Bava
1969). See the next chapter.
2. It is interesting that the attempt to understand human consciousness can
reduce a scientist to speculating about the role of imagination, something
intangible that cannot be mapped.
3. Suggested to me by D. Gellner’s (n.d.) comments on blood sacrifice in
South Asia.

Notes 187
4. The other possibility, never explored by The Matrix, is to wonder: What if

we are all dreaming and dreaming a different dream?
5. In this, I am arguing against Sontag (2004)—the possibility of understand-
ing, whether afforded to us through narratives or visually through images,
must always be considered along with the impossibility of creating shared
meaning.
6. As Prince notes about the film that won the Venice Film Festival in 1951,
the essays on Rashomon “now fill several volumes” (1991:128). For readers
interested in the initial reception of the film as well as the various attempts
by critics to “solve” the crime in the film, Richie’s discussion in The Films
of Akira Kurosawa (1996) is important and his edited Focus on Rashomon
(1987) is also essential. Prince (1991), Goodwin (1994), Yoshimoto (2000),
and Galbraith (2001) also have substantial sections on the film.
7. There was also a 1961 BBC version directed by Rudolph Cartier, in which
Tani Yoko played the wife, Lee Montagne the bandit, and Robert Hardy the
husband.
8. A 2004 production of the play at the Asian American Theatre not only
acknowledges this in its publicity, but is also designed as an attempt to return
the story to its Japanese origins—costuming the actors in Kabuki style.
9. For the fans of The Outrage it is James Wong Howe’s cinematography and
Martin Ritt’s command of black and white film that make it worth the
watching.
10. Castle (2003), in an odd article on Rashomon in the online journal Film
and Philosophy, tries to argue for the possibility of some sort of strange
time jump in the story: that the baby found in the gate is Masago’s and
the bandit’s child, proof of which, he notes, could be the amulet case left
with the child. I only mention this possibility because it suggests another
more plausible intent on Kurosawa’s part: the bandit and wife could well
have been executed and the child, born soon after, is meant to be her, rein-
carnated immediately and given another chance at life. If so, she is truly
the character who would appear to merit the most compassion from the
audience.
11. As already mentioned, the verb for rape and to break or violate, okasu, is
the same in Japanese.
12. This might be an odd reference to an entirely different Kurosawa film,
Sanjuro, in which the actions of the silly-seeming wife and cheerful young
bride-to-be ultimately help to save the day, but only after a long argument
about what color camellias should be send down a stream as a signal. In frus-
tration, the hero tosses all the camellias he can find into the water.
13. It is tempting to try and argue for some sort of real connection between Clint
Eastwood as a star of a Kurosawa remake (A Fistful of Dollars, Leone 1960)
and as director of this film. It could be argued that Play Misty for Me is a
working out of the frightening consequences of the sexual revolution that
stands in contradistinction to the playful film by Bava (to be discussed in
chapter five) and that, having worked in Italy, Eastwood was not unaware
of the latter’s work. But that is a jump, as it is a jump to posit that Saegusa,
despite the general Japanese admiration of Eastwood, was influenced by this
early example of his directorial work. It is interesting, however, to note that

188 Notes
many Westerners to whom I have mentioned the title Misty immediately think
of the Eastwood film!
5 The Battle of the Sexes: Or, the One Scenario

when Subjectivity is Acceptable
1. The comment on the sandwich board glimpsed in the opening and closing
scenes of Les Girls
2. The Webster dictionary defines a permutation as an “often major or funda-
mental change (as in character or condition) based primarily on rearrangement
of existent elements (the system has gone through several permutations); also:
a form or variety resulting from such change [technology available in various
permutations].” In its mathematical usage, a permutation is “the act or pro-
cess of changing the lineal order of an ordered set of objects; also: an ordered
arrangement of a set of objects.” Both the normal usage and the more precise
usage of the term in mathematics, it seems to me, apply to film permutations.
3. Lord Wren in Les Girls.
4. The psychiatrist in Quante Volte . . . Quella Notte.
6 Permutations on the Theme of Murder:

The Search for Solutions
1. The unseen judge in The Outrage utters this single phrase when the bandit’s
storytelling gets too ornate.
2. Dershowitz talking to his client Claus von Bulow.
3. Bakhtin, who saw the epic as a “closed” type of genre, would not agree with
me on this depiction of the Odyssey as polyphonic, because of the way in
which the voice of the storyteller dominates in the epic. However, the poten-
tial for Odysseus’ story to be polyphonic is revealed both in its novelistic and
film versions where the flashback comes into its own and opens the narrative
up for the audience.
4. The film was made years before the OJ Simpson trial (1994–1995), but appears
to reflect an attitude that colored the public’s reaction to that event.
5. Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) is also often cited as being like Rashomon
because one of its scenes is shown from three different points of view. However,
each retelling is a way into a “what happened next” scene for each of the char-
acters involved and not about a subjective interpretation of events. Given that
the story of the film is about a woman turning the tables on her male persecu-
tors—none of whom is an honest human being—it could be argued that this
story, unlike Misty, is a skilful working out of female vengeance that does not
involve her killing anyone: she leaves the men to do the violent work. This may
owe much to Elmore Leonard’s original novel Rum Punch (1992).
6. Only one woman has ever been awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor,
Dr. Mary Walker, who won it for the courage she displayed in treating the

Notes 189
wounded during the Battle of Bull Run in 1861. Despite the continued pres-
ence of women in the U.S military, serving in various capacities, no other
woman has yet been awarded a medal.
7. Meiyo and meisei being only two such terms, both based on the character read
as myô or mei, which means distinguished, noted; wise, name, or also read as
na meaning name, fame, reputation, pretext. Neither of these terms could be
translated as “face,” menshi, which is based on the character men meaning
face, features, mask, face, guard, surface, plane, side, facet, aspect, and so on.
7 And on Television . . .
1. Teddy to Leonard Shelby in Memento (2000).
2. In fact, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) does assert that
actual violence in the United States is fed by a diet of news and fiction pro-
grams that continuously represent society as dangerous and violent.
3. Joe Spano is best known for playing the sensitive and very moral detective
Harold Goldblume in Hill Street Blues, the series that is arguably the “grand-
father” of all these police shows.
4. Or, as another one of the many MA students I’ve taught over the years—a
priest—once quipped in class: “Anyone who believes in a single rational version of
reality has never been married”! Unlike the priest in Rashomon, this insight on
his part led him to the study of anthropology rather than shocked depression.
8 The Group Western

1. As with Rashomon, the process of remakes continues. The Kurosawa fam-
ily endorsed the animated extended television version of the film, Samurai 7
(Takizawa 2004) and there is also a version set in Thailand, The Seven
Samurai, based on Hashimoto’s screenplay (cowritten with Kurosawa) due
out in 2009.
2. Prince (1991:209) analyses the framing in the scenes in which Rikichi is shown
at odds with the other villagers as one way of “reinscribing him within the
group.” This insistence on seeing aspects of Japanese groupism in such scenes
misses the point: the framing shows how Rikichi presents a problem for the
others. The question is, why do they listen to him? Normally, problematic,
eccentric, or annoying villagers were just ignored in Japanese society. Instead,
Rikichi’s histrionics always elicit some sort of response from the other men. If his
attitude is a problem, it is because they have committed a crime against him.
3. Two Westerns spring to mind in relation to this theme. The Gunfighter
(King 1950) and Shane (Stevens 1953), a film of which Kurosawa was fond.
Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) might also be seen as a version of this tale. One
of the best non-genre versions about this issue was the film The Best Years of
Our Lives (1946).
4. With its continuing involvement in foreign wars, this theme in the United
States has had a long run. Such stories explore the lives of these men in their

190 Notes
new professions—generally in law enforcement. For example, the novels (and

their film versions) of Joseph Waumbaugh look at the dysfunctional lives of
older Korean War vets and then Vietnam vets who work as police officers,
as do the novels of James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly. In films, we
have the morally perturbing Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976); Rambo (Kotcheff
1982), who begins the series as mentally disturbed; Year of the Dragon
(Cimino 1985); and the very popular Lethal Weapon (Donner 1987) series.
On television we had a series that might be called a comic version of the
Seven Samurai via the Wild Bunch (Peckinpah 1969): The A Team (Cannell
1983). Boomtown offered us Fearless as a haunted Gulf War veteran.
5. Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven.
6. The Cisco Kid, The Gene Autry Show, The Lone Ranger, The Roy Rodgers
Show, Zorro, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Cheyenne, Maverick,
Davey Crocket, Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Wagontrain—to name just a few. For
an analysis of this era see Boddy (1998).
7. Revolutionaries still exist in modern Mexico as the ongoing revolt in
Chapas shows.
8. In fact the Japanese title of the Magnificent Seven, Arano shichinin (The wild
seven), rather makes the point and anticipates Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.
9. The Japanese film Eleven Samurai (Ju-ichinin no Samurai, Kudo 1966) was
not a sequel to the Kurosawa film.
10. It could be argued that during this pre-Tokugawa era the samurai were still
a group of professionals whose ranks could be joined by any ambitious peas-
ant, and so clearly are a class in the Marxist sense. By the Tokugawa era,
when the samurai had become a group into which you had to be born, they
could better be described as a caste.
11. Buck in The Magnificent Seven, 1998.
12. I raise this last as only a possibility. It is not clear if the village is meant to
be organized along honke/bunke (main household/branch household) lines
where the main household can provide generations of village heads or if it is
meant to be the more independent type of organization where a head arises
out of one man’s successful maneuvering through internal politics. The former
system was frequently associated with the organization of the Tokugawa era
and was seen to be the dominant form of leadership right up until the postwar
era. The latter system remained associated with a more egalitarian type of vil-
lage organization, such as fishing villages (cf. Nakane 1967), and is perhaps
more historically accurate for the era in which the film is set.
13. As in The Lone Ranger who was lone only in that he was the last of his
Texas Ranger troupe, he always had his faithful “Indian” companion; pre-
figuring the alternative reading of the Western as largely homoerotic—see
Fassbinder’s Whity (1971), or Lust in the Dust (Bartel 1985). More recently,
the filming of E. Annie Proulx’s novel Brokeback Mountain (2005) has been
causing controversy over a male screen kiss.
14. Gelt in Battle beyond the Stars.
15. During the 1970s, Corman’s distribution company was, according to
Galbraith, responsible for the foreign distribution of several art house films
such as Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, Bergman 1972), Amacord

Notes 191
(Fellini 1973), and The Story of Adele H. (L’histoire d’ Adele H., Truffaut
1975). Corman’s admiration of these films may appear surprising as does
the information that the horror film director Wes Craven knew Bergman’s
Virgin Spring (1959) well enough to remake it as Last House on the Left
(1972). For an interesting analysis of these films see Brashinsky (1998). The
active interest of independent filmmakers in foreign films is one that I will
discuss in chapter ten.
16. Flik to Hopper in A Bug’s Life.
17. The British comedians Morecombe and Wise may have anticipated this film
in their film The Magnificent Two (Owen 1967), but I cannot establish any
connection between the two.
18. The science fiction permutation on Seven Samurai crossed with Mad Max,
entitled World Gone Wild (Katzin 1988), explores no new territory and is
notable only for the manic performances of Adam Ant and Bruce Dern.
19. A cross between the clay “pixilated” figures of the old monster films pio-
neered by Ray Harryhausen and computer animation techniques.
20. And it should not be forgotten that Kennedy’s administration was, in the
1960s, linked to the ideas of King Arthur’s court and Camelot.
21. That at some level he strongly identifies with his character, perhaps an in-
joke aimed at Leonard Nimoy who played the Vulcan Mr. Spock, is made
clear when later, chatting on the phone at home, he is still in full make up.
22. There is, perhaps only for me as a frequent viewer of these films, a nice
link between the villains of The Magnificent Seven and The Terminator.
Calvera’s final words, in a Mexican accent, to the villagers in the film’s first
scene are: “I’ll be back.”
23. Most films, from Hollywood and elsewhere, relied on a single camera. While
Kurosawa did not invent the technique of multiple camera use (it was used in
early Hollywood musicals, for example, to give a less static effect and Desi
Arnez had been using it in television from 1950), his use of the technique in
battle sequences is seen to be pioneering.
9 The Lone Hero

1. There is some debate on this. See Barra’s “From ‘Red Harvest’ to ‘Deadwood’ ”
(2005) on dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2005/02/28/hammett/index.htm
accessed November 19, 2008.
2. The ronin (masterless samurai) and the nobleman in disguise who wander
the countryside righting wrongs have been popular on Japanese television
and in films, including Tôyama no Kinsan, the Kuzure vkami (Lone Wolf
and Cub) series, which consists of manga (Koike Kazuo and Kojima Goseki
1970–1976), two television series (1973–1976; 2002–2004), and several
films as well as a video game; Hanzo the Razor series, and, of course the
Zatôichi series.
3. Mad Max beyond the Thunderdome (Miller 1985) ends with just such a
communal “remembering” of the hero: pointing to his mythical status and
possible ideological immortality.

192 Notes
4. This certainly marks the time as being post-Tokugawa. While muskets and
cannons were used by samurai from the sixteenth century onward, pistols
were a modern weapon that arrived with Japan’s opening to the West.
5. That Sanjuro might be more than human is also hinted at by the sequel to
Yojimbo, Sanjuro (Tsubaki Sanjûrô 1962). At the film’s opening he appears
from the back of a Shinto shrine in which the young samurai are meeting.
“I checked everywhere,” protests the young man in charge of organizing
the meeting, “there was no one here!” Moreover, the wife (Irie Takako) of
the honest but ugly bureaucrat Matsuta (Itô Yûnousuke) seems to recognize
something in the scruffy Sanjuro. “You glitter too much,” she says to him,
“Like a sword.” She tries to convince him that problems can be resolved
without resorting to violence, that “staying in the scabbard” is important.
It would be interesting to see the 2007 Japanese remake of Tsubaki Sanjûrô
directed by Morita Yoshimitsu, based in part on Kurosawa’s script.
6. Mrs. Baxter to the Man with No Name.
7. Every time I showed the film on my course, my largely female students would
sit and sigh over how good looking Eastwood is in this film. They had no
such relationship with Mifune!
8. The three-way duel, or Mexican stand-off, of For a Few Dollars more has
made it into the iconography of Tarantino, obviously—although it is thought
to be borrowed from John Woo’s work—but is most wonderfully parodied in
Pratchett’s novel: Men at Arms (1994).
9. Felina to John Smith in Last Man Standing.
10. Perhaps this is Leone’s first attempt to work with the theme he fully develops
in Once Upon a Time in the West, where, as Frayling notes (2000), he said
he wanted to depict the West “when it had lost its balls.” The myth being
echoed here is that of the demasculinization of men by civilization or the
matriarchy of modernity.
11. An interesting statement from a man who, by all accounts, was well tied to
his wife.
12. Note I use the term easily—the strong female characters in Escape from
New York and Mad Max die in a blaze of gunfire, only, in these films, they
take several bad guys with them when they are killed.
13. Almost the first thing I was told when arriving in Japan in 2003 was how
Kurosawa’s daughter Kazuko had taken Takeshi Kitano to task for this, say-
ing that his use of violence had none of the moral underpinning that was the
foundation of her father’s work.
14. Zatôichi (Kitano 2003).
10 Cloning Kurosawa
1. Lucas does keep this reference to The Hidden Fortress in his portrayal of
Princes Amedela and her body doubles in the first two of the Star Wars series
(1999, 2002).
2. This is one of the few points on which I disagree with Richie. He argues
(1996) that Rokurota is the third villain because he does not care about his

Notes 193
sister’s death, only about his mission. However, the music and Mifune’s stoic
posture as he strides through the forest on his way to the princess’ hiding place
to give her the news of the death of her retainers, make the point very clear:
the death of his sister is devastating for him. This scene is an excellent example
of how physical an actor Mifune was. If the general is the third bad man, it is
because of the way in which he uses the peasants.
3. Incidentally, Mifune gets to show off his riding skills learned in his childhood
in Manchuria (Galbraith 2002).
4. The DVD for this film only became available in December 2008 as this book
was going to press. A careful viewing of it revealed the need for a rather long
discussion of the film, as well as many other Japanese TV and Toho Studies
remakes of Kurosawa films that recently have been aired or are being planned.
Hollywood is working on new remakes as well, which all begins to sound as
if completing this manuscript would be a neverending process. The Hidden
Fortress, Star Wars, and The Last Princess comparison will be the subject of a
forthcoming paper I plan to give at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies
2009 conference in Tokyo, Japan. For more news on Kurosawa remakes check:
http://akirakurosawa.info/2007/10/29/an-akira-kurosawa-film- remake-
roundup/, as well as http://www.totalfilm.com/news/mike-nichols-remaking-
kurosawa-s-high-and-low, both accessed on December 19, 2008.
5. It could be argued that Spielberg refers to and gently pokes fun at the impossi-
bility of the deeds in this scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989),
where the young Indiana tries something similar only to end battered and
bruised. But then again, it might be homage to hundreds of similar scenes in
many Westerns.
6. Eco (1987) has written on the convergence between science fiction fantasy
and medieval romances, noting how the former rely on the magical thinking
of the latter.


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Kurosawa Akira Filmography

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210 Bibliography
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1993. Madadayo (Mâdadayo). Japan: DENTSU Music and Entertainment.

Index
Absent presence, 5, 34 Japanese, 38, 53, 130
Actors, 4, 5, 6, 23, 84, 86, 108, Artists, 6, 9, 20–21, 33, 58
118, 124, 131, 136–138, 143, as bridges, 44, 179
152, 162, 166, 177, 184-n.4, and creativity, 1, 2
187-n.8 identity of, 3, 7, 19, 171
Aesthetics, 85, 140, 158–160 western, xvi, 22
see also Film, art; Violence Asia
Africa, xvii, 2, 40 East, xvii, 3, 142
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), South, xiv, xvi, xvii, 186-n.4.3
31, 47, 54, 56, 57, 59, 64, Southeast, xvii
91, 98 Audiences, xiv–xv, xvii, 9, 15–17,
Americans, 5, 7, 13, 40, 47, 49, 79, 23, 24, 26–27, 34, 36, 38,
81, 83, 137, 139, 149, 159 39–40, 41, 45, 47, 49–50, 57,
Native, 120, 122, 124, 67, 70, 72–73, 76–77, 82,
125–126, 127 86–87, 95, 100, 105–106,
Ang Lee, 28, 190-n.13, 204 114–115, 159, 170, 173, 180,
Anthropology, xix, 2, 3, 11, 183-n.1, 186-n.3.6, 187-n.7,
185-n.2, 189-n.7.4 188-n.6.3
and film, xiii–xiv, xviii, 1, 3, 173 children, 16, 133–134, 135, 158,
of globalization, xiii–xiv, 183-n.3, 184-n.9
xvi–xvii, 175 as critics, 2, 11–12, 26, 44,
methods, xiv, xvii 62–63, 107, 109, 150, 156, 169,
and Orientalism, 7–8 184-n.9
theory, xiii, xv, xviii, 7, 9, 44, 45, filmmakers as, 2, 6, 16–17, 26,
183-n.2, 186-n.3.9 108–110, 171, 173, 175
Antonioni, Michelangelo (1912– and foreign films, 7, 15–16, 23,
2007), 6, 175–176 108, 110, 117, 131–132, 169,
Art, 1–2, 7, 20, 65, 108, 142, 156, 175, 179
183–184-n.1.2 ideology and, 2, 108, 132
as commodity, xv, 9 imagination, 10, 15–16, 36, 78,
and globalization, 4, 19 79–80, 85, 86, 91–92, 94–95,
and film xviii, 4, 20, 44, 140, 98–100, 104, 110, 159, 179, see
175, 190–191-n.15 also Imagination

212 Index
Audiences—Continued Buffy the vampire slayer, 13–14,

Japanese, 9, 20, 23, 24, 26–27, 44, 170, 175, 208
36, 39–40, 77, 84, 116, A Bug’s Life, 128, 132–134,
187–188-n.13 191-n.16, 206
and knowledge, 108, 129, 130, plot, 133–134
171, 179, see also Knowledge story, 131–132, 135
television, 8, 27, 155–156 Buñuel, Luis, 5, 6
as voyeurs, 62, 90, 162
see also Fans; Film, buffs Capitalism, 6, 16, 108, 151,
167, 174
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 2, see also Class; Ideology
9, 10, 12, 20–21, 34, 98, 104, Carpenter, John, 96, 150, 204
180, 184-n.8, 184-n.10, 188- and Kurosawa remakes,
n.6.3, 195 95–96, 110
Battle Beyond the Stars, 128–130, Censorship, 9, 15, 21–22, 34, 53,
133, 190-n.14, 207 118, 120, 185-n.6
story, 128, 130–131, 135, 159 Chan, Jackie, xvii, 28, 205
Bava, Mario, 43, 72, 81, 110, China, 5, 27, 80, 140, 171
186-n.4.1, 204 Christianity, see Religion
and Kurosawa remakes, 65, 69, Citizen Kane, 76–77, 79,
76–77, 187–188-n.13 186-n.6, 208
Benjamin, Walter, 1–2, 9, 15, Class, 24, 50–51, 52–53, 55, 82,
196 108–109, 116, 121, 122,
Bergman, Ingmar, 5, 6, 190– 125–126, 133, 135, 163, 167,
191-n.15, 204 174, 190-n.10
Blade, 13, 207 samurai, 33, 121, 165
Blade Runner, 136, 139, 207 Comedy, 65–66, 68–69, 73, 96, 99,
Bollywood, xiv, xvi, 80 128, 130–131, 138–139, 142,
Boomtown, 78, 96, 105, 110, 127, 151–152, 153, 162, 163–164,
200, 204 188-n.5.2, 191-n.17
narrative, 100 film, 14, 24, 64–65, 138–139,
stories in, 102, 103, 189–190- 157–158, 177, 189–190-n.4
n.8.4 Consciousness, xviii, 6, 44, 51,
story of, 99–102 186-n.4.2
Borders, xviii; xix, 48–49, 118, 149 Consumption, 3, 14
see also Mexico of commodities, xv, 2, 109
Bridges, xiv, xviii, xix, 29, 44, 175, Coppola, Francis Ford, 12, 24,
179, 181 26–28, 44, 169, 170–171, 205
conceptual, xiv, 2–3, 16, 173, Copying, xix, 1–2, 15, 20, 44
180, 183-n.1.1 see also Permutations
creation of, 2, 29, 175, 179 Copyright, 5, 118, 141, 149, 150
Buddhism, 31, 35–38, 41, 58, 75, Corman, Roger, 128, 130,
102, 143–144 190–191-n.15
see also Religion Cosmopolitism, see Global, citizens

Index 213
Courage under fire, 78, 87–90, 97, and the imagination, xviii, 2,
105, 110, 177, 209 104, 106, 149, 168, 173
stories in, 88–89, 91 lines, xviii, xix, 16, 107–111, 171,
story of, 87–88 173, 181
Creativity, xv, xviii, 1–2, 14, 44, Dialogic, 2, 9–11, 20–21, 105, 111,
75–76, 105, 109, 111, 132, 131, 180, 184-n.8, 185-n.3
135, 169, 171, 176, 179, 181, imagination, 10, 78, 80, 92,
187-n.5 98, 104
see also Artists; Filmmakers relationship, 34, 105, 110
Crime, 32, 36, 54–55, 57, 63, 68, Difference, xiv, xviii, xix, 10, 93,
72–73, 77–81, 83–86, 98, 100, 108, 135, 136, 167, 176,
104, 117, 122, 149, 187-n.6, 178–181
189-n.8.2 in films, xiv, 11, 47, 61, 65, 68,
as genre, 54, 98–100, 143, 186-n.2 75–76, 81, 84, 90–91, 92,
Critics, xvii, 12, 26, 36, 38, 39, 67, 98–99, 101, 105–106, 122,
99, 108, 109, 155, 173, 142, 151, 176–177, 187-n.12
183-n.1, 185-n.10 and identity, 8, 15, 22, 28–29, 37,
American, 4, 25, 40, 54 41, 45, 46–47, 50–51, 106–107,
Japanese, 24, 25 108–109, 115, 121, 122–123,
Cukor, George, 66, 205 174, 184-n.8
and Kurosawa remakes, 68, in meaning, 2, 9, 11, 16, 43–44,
76, 110 46, 63, 73, 80, 87, 98, 127,
Cultural, 2, 3, 6, 11, 17, 26, 53, 139, 173, 175
158, 161, 173, 184-n.4, 184- see also Similarity; Social, reality
n.10, 185-n.12 Directors, see Filmmakers
capital, 6, 108–109, 171, 173 Disjuncture, xvi, xviii, 2, 107
cross, 15, 16, 179 and scapes, xvi, 2, 174, 180
imperialism, 4, 5 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich,
similarity, 15, 41 36, 56, 77, 90, 114
theory, xiii, xvii, 2–3, 183-n.1 and Kurosawa, 20, 33–34, 37–38,
Culture, xiii–xiv, xvi, 2, 68, 75, 47, 102, 185-n.3
106, 107, 138, 176, 178, 181, novels, 20–21, 33, 34–35
183-n.2
dominant, 11, 44, 45, 174 Eastwood, Clint, 27, 62, 124,
global, xviii, 2, 6, 174–175, 180 148–151, 152–155, 187–188-n.13,
Japanese, 38, 55, 75 189-n.8.3, 192-n.9.7, 205
local, 6, 34, 174, 180, 187-n.6 Economics, xvi, xvii, 5
nation-state, 8–9, 174 Eisenstein, Sergi, 6, 162
popular, xv, 1, 3, 6, 9–10, 108, Epics, 5, 76, 114, 188-n.6.3
109, 137 Europe, 3, 4, 7, 40, 80, 105, 118,
similarity, see Cultural, similarity 149, 183–184-n.1.2
European, 4–5, 39–41, 45, 47,
Desire, xv, 13, 16, 22, 40, 41, 47, 69, 94, 105–106, 110, 149,
49, 53, 101, 103, 121, 139, 175 151, 159

214 Index
Experience, xiii, xiv–xv, 16, 25, 26, context, 34, 41, 47, 55, 57,
38, 47, 53, 63, 79–81, 84, 63–64, 72, 82–84, 114–116,
86–87, 98–99, 114, 149, 167, 122, 142–143, 163, 190-n.12
176–177, 180–181, 186-n.3 crews, 6, 179
of film, 10–11, 175–177 criticism, xvi, 2, 14, 24, 25, 36,
and gender, 68 38, 108, 183-n.1, 184-n.9, see
individual, 9, 36, 44, 46–47, 56, also Critics
104, 178 as dialogic, 2, 34, 111, 131, 180,
shared, 39–41, 45, 47, 84, 106, 185-n.3
176–178, 180 expense, xvii, 4, 113, 170
see also Subjectivity as feminist, xiii, 52–53, 55, 62,
91, 187–188-n.13
Fans, xvii, 9, 24, 50, 72, 128–129, festivals, xvii, 4, 27, 128, 187-n.6
137, 187-n.9 foreign, xiv, 4, 16, 19–20, 23,
see also Audiences; Film, buffs 26–29, 45, 69, 75, 94, 108,
Fantasy, 9–10, 12, 25, 48, 62, 109, 142, 174–176, 179,
63–64, 76, 91, 111, 193-n.6 190–191-n.15
Fellini, Frederico, 6, 185-n.10, 191- French, 4–5, 53, 79–80
n.15, 205 gender in, see Men; Women
Feminism, xiii, 14, 52–53, 62, 64, and globalization, xiii, xv, 3, 5,
68, 91, 135 11, 16, 27, 29, 106, 109, 173–
Festivals, 144–145, 157, 161, 175, 177, 179–180, 184-n.4
165–166 grammar of, 15, 141, 149, 176
Film, xiii, xvii, xix, 1–3, 11, 19–20, historical, 25, 48, 113–114,
21–28, 33, 35, 38–41, 45, 47, 143, 190-n.12, see also
51, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 65, Samurai, film
66, 68, 71, 76, 80, 81–83, 85, history of, 6, 19, 109, 129, 167,
92–93, 95, 107–111, 118, 120– 183–184-n.1.2
121, 123–124, 126, 129, 133– horror, xviii, 12–13, 69–72, 81,
136, 140, 181, 184-n.12, 170, 190–191-n.15
185-n.10, 187-n.9, 188-n.6.4, and ideology, 2, 9, 106, 132, 178,
191-n.22 see also Ideology
American, the, 4–5, 185-n.12, see industry, 1, 3, 4–5, 20–21,
also Hollywood 22–24, 27–128, 141, 149–150,
analysis, xiv, xv, xvi, 3, 29, 34, 183–184-n.1.2
147, 185-n.9, 187-n.6, 187- knowledge, see Knowledge
n.10, 190–191-n.15 and Marxism, xiii, 3, 135
art, xviii, 44, 140, 158–160, 175, multiple readings of, 9–10, 17, 39,
190–191-n.15 56, 76, 109–110, 119, 159–160,
audiences of, see Audiences 174, 179, see also Dialogic;
buffs, xvii, 2, 70, 109, see also Heteroglossia
Audiences and myth, see Myth
business, xvii, 6, 28 narration, see Narrative
censorship, see Censorship narrator, see Narrator

Index 215
noir, 56, 77, 79, 94, 136–137, independent, 28, 109, 169, 171,
148–149 174, 190–191-n.15
permutations, see Permutations Japanese, 11, 24, 27, 54, 56, 87,
and politics, xiii, 128, 136–137, 110, 168
167–168 and knowledge capital, 16–17,
polyphony, see Polyphony 108–109, 129, 171, 174, 176,
producers, xvii, 4, 25, 179, 190–191-n.15
183-n.3 Western, 25, 26, 48, 87
realism, 57, 83, 97–98, 105, 114, Filmmaking, xiii–xiv, xviii, 1, 22,
162, 169 29, 40, 81, 174, 183–184-n.2
as resistance, xv, 21–22, 25, local, 3–4, 20
109, 115 techniques, xv, 14–17, 24, 28, 40,
science fiction, 128, 129, 132, 69, 76–77, 81, 84–86, 93, 95,
136–139, 168–171, 191-n.18 98, 100, 108, 110, 113, 124,
scripts, 1, 6, 7, 22, 50, 118–119, 139–140, 157, 159, 170, 174,
125, 129, 141, 185-n.5, 176, 178, 191-n.19, 191-n.23,
192-n.5 see also Rashomon technique
silent, 3, 12, 20, 22, 49, 131, Fistful of Dollars, a (Per un pugno
183-n.1.2, 184-n.3 di dollari), 148, 155
South Asian, see Bollywood narrative, 148
studies, xiii–xiv, 17, 19, 21, story, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153
75, 109 Flashbacks, 14, 47, 54, 56, 70,
subjectivity, see Subjectivity 76–77, 79, 81, 84–85, 86, 88,
theory, xv, xix, 1, 34, 183-n.1, 90, 95–96, 98, 100, 103–104,
186-n.6 107–108, 157, 167, 186-n.3.3,
tragedy, 69, 131 186-n.3.6, 188-n.6.3
translation of, xiii–xiv, 14–15, Frankfurt School, 1, 9
28, 43, 48, 75, 117, 141, Freud, xv, 10, 71
177–180, see also Translation
violence in, see Violence Galaxy Quest, 128, 135–139, 207
Westerns, see Westerns plot, 137–138
Filmmakers, xiv, xvii, 1–7, 15–17, story, 138
21–23, 26, 29–41, 43, 46, Genealogy, 76, 79, 95, 106, 109,
50, 52, 75, 76, 79, 85, 86, 171, 180
90, 93, 95, 99, 105, 110, 113, Ghosts of Mars, 78, 95–96, 98, 99,
118, 124, 138, 140, 147, 160, 105, 204
171, 173, 175, 176–177, 180, narrative, 95
183-n.3, 185-n.10, 185-n.12, stories in, 95
187–188-n.13 story of, 95–96
as artists, 11, 29, 44, 175, 179 Global, the, xiv, xvii–xviii, 6,
foreign, 6, 27, 28, 69, 94, 110, 11–12, 28, 179–180,
162, 170, 174 183–184-n.3
and genealogies, 27, 106, business, xvii, 4–5
170–171, 173 citizens, 6

216 Index
Global, the—Continued 142, 159–160, 162–163, 165,

culture, xiv, xvi, xviii, 2, 174–175, 168, 169
180–181 Heteroglossia, 9, 12, 104, 175, 180
economy of, xvi, xvii, 8 Hidden Fortress (Kakushi Tori no
film distribution, 3, 5, 27, San Akunin), xix, 13, 14, 51,
174, 179 106, 111, 128, 157, 161–168,
film production, 3, 5, 27, 179, 192-n.1, 193-n.4, 209
174, 179 plot of, 167
flows, xiv, xvi, xix, 19 story of, 14, 165–167, 168
and human imagination, xv–xvi, Hill, Walter, 159, 205
173, 175 and Kurosawa remakes, 148–149,
and local, xiv, xvii, xviii, 3–5, 45, 151–155, 158
174–175, 179 History, 11–12, 16–17, 29, 37, 40,
politics of, xvii, 137 47, 48, 55, 68, 72, 75, 105–106,
see also Story, grand 114, 115–116, 124, 132,
Globalization, xiii–xiv, xvii, 3, 5, 135–138, 139, 142–143,
45, 174, 177 155–156, 161, 169, 171, 173,
Group(s), 11, 59, 81, 85, 87, 175, 184-n.8, 190-n.12
113–140, 163, 165, 184-n.8 of film, 6, 19, 109, 129, 167, 183–
heroic, 111, 142 184-n.2
Japanese, 122–123, 124, 126, national, 8, 33, 48, 64, 118–119
127, 134, 189-n.8.2, 190-n.10 see also Samurai, film
Guilt, 21, 29, 34, 36–39, 53, 55–56, Hitchcock, Alfred, 6, 199
62–63, 64, 68, 75, 84, 90, Hollywood, xvii, 3–4, 7, 9, 28, 68,
94, 97, 101–102, 104, 114, 81, 117, 119, 124, 141, 152,
116, 167 155, 168, 174, 176, 179,
and responsibility, 102, 163, 180 183–184-n.1.2, 191-n.23
Gunfighters, see Men, as directors, see Filmmakers
gunfighters dominance of, 4, 5, 9, 106, 180
and local cinemas, 5, 118, 180
Hegemony, 5, 10, 106 and remakes, 29, 48, 54, 193-n.4,
Hero, the, 13, 22, 28, 29, 49, 56, see also Remakes
89, 90, 111, 124, 129–132, resistance to, 5, 120, 185-n.1
134, 139, 159, 165, 169, 177, Homogenization, xviii, 174
180, 187-n.12, 189–190-n.8.4, Honor, 64, 90–91, 119, 129–130,
191-n.3 132, 151, 166
antihero, 111, 149–150, 167, Medal of, 88, 188–189-n.6
177–178 Human, xix, 10, 11, 12–13, 33, 40,
lone, 111, 123–124, 127, 141–160 44, 53, 56, 59, 62, 68, 73, 90,
super, 122, 144, 148 95, 96, 100, 102, 108, 132,
Heroines, 13–14, 38, 44, 51, 62, 136, 139, 146, 148–150, 155,
88–89, 91, 93, 95–96, 110, 163, 165, 176, 192-n.5
136, 170, 188–189-n.6.6 activity, 2, 5, 45, 111
Heroism, 51, 88–89, 91, 111, 124, beings, xiv, xv, xviii, 15, 25, 36,
130, 132, 134–136, 138, 139, 46, 56, 164, 173, 188-n.6.5

Index 217
connections, xviii, 2–3, 45, 47, artists, 9, 21

179–180 culture, 9, 53, 75, 90, 113, 115,
consciousness, xviii, 73, 97, 105, 122, 127, 142
186-n.4.2 folktales, 9, 25, 143, 167, 184-n.6
creativity, xviii, xix, 44, 104, and globalization, 19–20, 171,
111, 181 183-n.1.2
emotions, 32, 65, 84 Heian era (794–1185 CE), 64, 75
experience, 16, 46, 97, 105, identity, 6–9, 23–25, 27
177–178 literature, 9, 78, 141
narration, xiii, xviii, 44, 105 Occupation of, 9, 34, 84, 123
Humanism, 20, 29, 138–139, 180 and religion, 37, 178
Showa Era, 20, 52, 185-n.2
Identity, 2, 3, 5, 8–9, 43, 45, 85, studies of, xiv, xix, 7–8
108, 131, 179 Taishô Era, 20, 185-n.2
Japanese, 6–9, 38–39, 116 Tokugawa Era, 139
national, xviii, 6–9, 33, 45 and the U.S.A., xvi, 4, 7–8, 14,
see also, Kurosawa, identity 55–56, 76, 124, 171
Ideology, xv, xvi, 5, 10, 38, 45, 105, jidai-geki (period film), see
132, 174, 179, 184-n.8 Samurai, film
dominant, 2, 9–10, 12, 27,
108, 122 Killing, The, 80, 84, 86, 98, 99, 206
as myth, 9–10, 167 narrative, 78–79
and the nation-state, 8–9, 174 story of, 78
Imagination, xv–xvi, xix, 10–11, Kitano Takeshi, 27, 192-n.13,
78–80, 91–92, 98, 99, 104, 192-n.14, 206
142, 181, 186-n.4.2 and Kurosawa remakes, 156–158
and desire, xviii, 107–111 Knowledge, 6, 16, 20, 91, 115, 149
popular, 3, 150 capital, 6, 108–109, 129, 138,
In a Grove (short story), 31, 41, 171, 173
47–48, 54–55, 56, 64, 72, Kubrick, Stanley, 110, 206
75, 141 and Kurosawa remakes, 78–79
Internet, 2, 9 Kurosawa, Akira, 1, 4–6, 11, 19,
Iron Maze, 38, 57, 75, 76, 209 35–36, 45–46, 62–63, 69, 71,
narrative, 55–56, 75–76 83–84, 86, 90, 94, 98, 101,
stories in, 54–56 127, 131–132, 138, 142, 147,
story of, 54 149, 158, 185-n.6, 185-n.7,
185-n.10, 186-n.3, 187-n.10,
Japan, xvi, xix, 1, 3–5, 6, 8, 19, 21, 189-n.8.3
24, 26–27, 28–29, 31, 33, 38, as artist, 20–21, 22, 24, 25, 26,
39–41, 48, 51, 52–54, 57, 62, 33, 152, 176
64, 80, 105, 107, 114, 116, 117, and Dostoevsky, 20–21, 33–35,
119, 140–141, 151, 169, 37–38, 47, 90, 102, 185-n.3
183-n.1, 192-n.3, 193-n.4 family, 19–20, 192-n.13
aristocrats, 8–9, 130, 162, films, xiii, xv, xvii, xix, 2–3, 21,
164–165, 186-n.4 24–26, 29, 38, 55–56, 64, 78,

218 Index
Kurosawa, Akira—Continued Last Man Standing, 7, 155, 159,

119, 129–130, 159, 162–163, 178, 192-n.9
166–167, 187-n.12, 190-n.9 narrative, 148, 150–151, 155
and globalization, 5–7, 27–28, story, 152–153, 154, 158
109, 162 Last Samurai, The, 26, 87, 156, 209
and Hollywood, 4, 28 Last Year at Marienbad (L’année
and humanism, 29, 180 dernière à Marienbad), 78, 85,
humor, 131, 151, 153, 155, 157 94, 95, 97, 105, 177, 207
identity, 14–15, 22–23, 38, 179, narrative, 79–80
185-n.4 Leone, Sergio, 27, 48, 148–149,
influence, 1, 14, 17, 54, 76–78, 154–155, 170, 187-n.13,
87–88, 95, 107–108, 113, 117, 192-n.10, 206
128, 136, 156–157, 168, and Kurosawa remakes, 139, 141,
170–171, 173–174, 176–177, 151–153, 155, 158–159
186-n.2 Les Girls, 65, 72–73, 76, 94, 110,
international fame, 4–5, 7, 177, 188-n.5.1, 188-n.5.3, 205
23–25, 27 narrative, 65, 67–68, 73, 75–76
Japanese identity of, 6–7, 24–27 stories in, 66–68
life, xix, 19–29 story of, 66
literature on, 6–7, 19, 33–34, Lévi-Strauss, Claude. xiv, xv, 44
75, 80–81, 113, 121, 140, Literature, 1, 6–7, 16, 19, 124, 148
185-n.1, 185-n.9, 186-n.6, Local, xviii, 3–6, 7, 14, 29, 45, 120,
187-n.6 184-n.4
politics, 20–22, 25, 39, 116, 121, filmmaking, 3–5, 28, 106, 174,
132, 139, 146, 151–152, 154, 179–180
162, 165–167, 169 see also Global
remakes, xiv–xv, xix, 1–2, 7, Lucas, George, xii, 24, 26–27, 129,
14–17, 45, 47–49, 57–58, 68, 168, 170, 174, 176, 178, 206
72–73, 106, 117–118, 139, 148, and Kurosawa remakes, 14, 28,
153, 161–162, 173, 180, 100–101, 164, 167–169, 171,
187-n.13, 189-n.8.1, 193-n.4 192-n.10.1
screenplays, 7, 34, 41, 59, 98,
114–115, 118, 130, 131, 135, Magnificent Seven, The (film), 121,
141, 143, 153, 155, 158, 129, 131, 133, 142, 159,
162–163, 166, 178, 185-n.5, 190-n.8, 191-n.22, 205, 208
192-n.5 plot, 124
techniques, 4, 5, 7, 14, 23–24, 34, stories about, 117–118
39–40, 49, 54, 57, 61, 63, 69, story of, 118–119, 135
76, 79–80, 82, 85, 87, 98, 104, Magnificent Seven, The (television),
140–141, 152, 157, 162, 165, 122, 132, 155, 159, 190-n.5,
169, 191-n.23 190-n.11, 206
and Toshiro Mifune, 23–24, narrative, 124
49–50, 152, 162, 165 story, 125, 127, 135
and women, 14, 25, 29, 50–52, Marxism, xiii, 3, 11, 37, 135, 169,
65, 153 190-n.10

Index 219
Masculinity, 71, 76, 85, 127, 135, 153–154, 162, 165, 192-n.7,
138, 192-n.10 192–193-n.2, 193-n.3
see also Men Misty (Misuti), 38, 57, 64, 75, 76,
Mass Media, xviii, 1, 3, 8–9, 12, 91, 93, 104, 187–188-n.13
62, 75, 81, 104, 107–109, narrative, 57, 61, 75–75
137, 146 stories in, 59–61, 62
and ideology, 9–10, 90, 180 story of, 57–59, 61, 63,
Meaning, 2, 7, 9–14, 26, 34, 44–45, 188-n.6.5
80, 95, 104, 114, 158–159, 171, Modernity, 1, 3, 8, 32, 43–44,
173, 187-n.5 54, 72, 77, 106, 108–109,
and translation, 15–16, 43, 136–137, 140, 151, 157, 170,
46–47, 110, 178–179 176, 179, 180, 183–184-n.2,
Memento, 78, 96, 98, 100, 105, 192-n.10
189-n.7.1, 207 and gender, 51–53, 142–143, 154,
narrative, 95 159, 167
stories in, 94–95 in Japan, 9, 20, 26, 48, 63, 110,
story of, 94, 95 114, 116, 159, 192-n.4
Men, 31, 32, 33, 36, 39, 55, 58, see also Postmodernity
67–68, 81, 92, 94, 115, Murakami, Jimmy T., 128, 207
119, 123, 128–130, 132, Myth, xv, 11–12, 58, 61, 63–64,
138, 142, 143, 146, 148, 150, 131–132, 134, 137, 139, 149,
152, 155, 158–159, 161, 162, 159, 184-n.8, 192-n.10
165–166, 171, 177, 192-n.10, definition of, 9–10, 44, 184-n.8
192–193-n.2 and ideology, 9–10, 132, 167,
and crime, 49, 52, 57, 59, 61, 63, 184-n.7, 184-n.8, 191-n.3
78, 83–85, 92–93, 102–104, national, 8–9, 48
144–146, 151 and Westerns, 49, 118, 132,
as gunfighters, 120–121, 149, 154
123–127, 133
Japanese, 19–20, 23–24, 117, Narration, see Narrative; Narrator
123, 144–145, 185-n.2, Narrative, xiii, xviii, xix, 44, 65,
189-n.8.2 73, 75–75, 108, 118, 124, 132,
and violence, 25, 88–91, 95, 102, 159, 179–180
114, 116–117, 122, 165, 167, and consciousness, 44–45, 47,
176, 189–190-n.8.4, 192-n.5 110, 187-n.5
and women, 50–52, 59–60, 62, creativity, xiii, xviii, 22, 27, 45,
64, 65–68, 71, 80, 119, 171, 175, 179–180
153–154, 177, 188-n.5 definition of, 14, 175
see also Heroes; War and difference, 45–46, 136,
Mexico, 48, 118, 120, 122, 133, 178–180
135, 149, 154–155, 190-n.7 grand, 98, 104, 178
see also Borders and individuality, 35–36, 41, 46,
Mifune Toshiro (1920–1997), 23, 76, 105, 178, 180
27, 32, 49–51, 86, 119–120, plausibility, 45, 124
141, 142, 143, 150–152, and remakes, 43–44, 47, 68

220 Index
Narrative—Continued 131, 159, 161–162, 168, 170,

and social reality, xviii, 10, 33, 173, 175, 177, 188-n.5.2,
44–45, 56, 73, 95, 104, 110, 191-n.18
136, 178 comic, 64, 128, 157–158
as technique, 10, 12, 14, 16, 33, creativity, 44, 161, 174
34, 38, 61, 76–77, 81, 86, 95, and narratives, 14, 16, 65, 73,
100, 107, 113, 139, 170, 174, 110, 179
176, 178, 183-n.1.1, 186-n.3.6, Plot, 8, 13–15, 40, 46–47, 64, 65,
188-n.6.3 66, 69, 77, 96, 108, 113–114,
translation of, 7, 9, 75, 106, 109– 124, 128, 133–134, 137–138,
110, 141, 148, 173, 175, 178 151, 152–153, 156–157, 163,
see also Polyphony 167, 170, 174, 179
Narrator, 34, 35–36, 40, 78, 97–98, definition of, 14, 178
143, 148, 150, 155, 171, 178 Politics, xvii, 22, 52, 123, 137, 167,
benshi, 20, 22, 185-n.8 190-n.12
unreliable, 79, 80, 82–83, 87, postwar, 6, 128, 136
95–96, 101, 105 Polyphony, 10, 21, 33–34, 41, 76,
Nation-state, 8–10, 40, 45, 77, 188-n.6.3
117, 174 Postmodernity, xv, xvii, xix, 1, 6,
Japan, 1, 22, 29, 37 56, 109, 178–179
No Regrets for our Youth, 22, 51 theories of, xiii, xv, xix
Nolan, Christopher, 97, 207 Power, xvi, 2, 4–5, 13, 36, 55, 85,
and Kurosawa remakes, 94, 110 92–95, 103, 122, 146, 169,
Novels, 1, 9–10, 20, 37, 98, 105, 180–181
131, 175, 183-n.1, 184-n.10 of film, 2, 47, 49, 122, 179
detective, 78, 190-n.4 political, 54–55, 77, 135, 157,
167–168
Oshima Nagisa (1932–), 5, 20, of stories, 16, 52, 63
185-n.12, 201 and women, 51, 61, 93, 136
Other, the, 5, 10, 12, 16, 34,
39, 107 Quante volte . . . Quella Notte (Four
vampires as, 11–14 times that night), 65, 76,
Outrage, The, 38, 47, 55, 56, 57, 186-n.4.1, 188-n.5.1, 204
58, 59, 62, 63, 69, 71, 72, 76, narrative, 65, 75–75
90, 91, 118, 120, 121, 136, plot, 69
187-n.9, 188-n.6.1, 207 stories in, 69–72
narrative, 75–76 story of, 60, 70
stories in, 188-n.6.1
story, 49, 51–52 Rashomon (film), xix, 4, 14, 31–42,
65, 67–69, 77, 78–82, 84–87,
Perceived cultural similarity, see 90–91, 93–94, 96, 102–105,
Similarity, perceived cultural 107–111, 114, 116, 118, 127,
Permutations, xix, 7, 12, 14, 17, 27, 130–131, 138, 141, 157, 162,
29, 47, 38, 56, 68, 75–96, 163, 167, 168, 170, 177, 179,
97–98, 105, 107, 110–111, 113, 185-n.4, 185-n.10, 186-n.3.1,

Index 221
186-n.3.7, 187-n.6, 187-n.10, Reservoir Dogs

188-n.6.5, 189-n.7.4, 189-n.8.1 narrative, 84–85
international success, 16, 23–25, stories in, 85
29, 45, 53–54 story of, 84–85, 86
as mystery, 36, 73, 76–77, 94, Resistance, xiv, xv, 13, 21–22,
97–98, 103 59–60, 87, 115–116, 122–123,
narrative, 33, 34, 35–36, 38, 41, 126, 154, 177, 178–179
45, 73, 75–76, 107, 110, 113 Resnais, Alain, 207
stories in, 31–36, 50–51, 186-n.3 and Kurosawa remakes,
story of, 38, 39–41, 49, 65, 75, 79–80, 110
110, 131, 187-n.8, 187-n.10 Responsibility, 35, 37–39, 53, 62,
translations of, 29, 43–64, 75, 68, 77, 81, 88, 90–91, 94–95,
107, 110, 186-n.7 97, 101–102, 104, 116, 120–
Rashomon (short story), 31, 41, 121, 124, 130–131, 162–164,
47–48, 54–56, 57, 58, 59, 63, 169, 177, 179–180, 190–191-n.15
65, 75, 84, 92, 98, 141, 187-n.8 see also Guilt
Rashomon effect, 41, 88, 107, Reversal of Fortune, 38, 78, 81–84,
186-n.3.8 94, 98, 105, 110, 177, 207
Rashomon technique, 47, 56, 76–78, narrative, 82
92, 95, 98–99, 104–106, stories in, 82–83
107–108, 132 story of, 82, 83–84
Red Harvest, 141, 143, 153, 178, Rhapsody in August (Hachigatsu no
191-n.1 Kyôshikoku), 25, 51, 163,
Religion, xviii, 2, 37, 58, 129, 170, 210
147, 174 Richie, Donald, 20, 23, 25, 28, 31,
in film, 38, 58, 61, 146–148, 32–33, 36, 39–40, 48, 49, 56,
150–151, 153–154, 178, 57, 63, 71, 82, 90, 113–114,
192-n.5 115, 116, 119–120, 122, 128,
Remakes, xiii–xiv, xv, xix, 2, 5, 144, 150, 161, 163, 183-n.1.2,
11–12, 14, 29, 38, 43–49, 186-n.1, 192–193-n.10.2
52–54, 56, 57, 64, 65, 72–73, Ritt, Martin, 75, 207
97, 106, 107, 110–111, and Kurosawa remakes, 38, 48,
117–118, 119, 121, 123–124, 50–53, 76, 118
128, 129, 131, 139, 140, Rodriguez, Robert, 48, 150,
147–148, 152–153, 155, 159, 170, 207
161, 163, 167, 170, 173, 176–177, Ronin, see Samurai, unemployed
179, 183-n.1.2, 187-n.13, Run, Lola, Run, 78, 98, 105, 110,
189-n.8.1, 190–191-n.15, 176, 208
192-n.5, 193-n.4 story of, 92–94
and creativity, 11, 28–29, 44, Russia, 10, 20, 35, 37–38, 114,
75, 96, 109, 113 162, 174
as translations, 6, 14, 16–17,
28, 43, 48, 53, 75, Saegusa Kenki, 187–188-n.13, 207
113, 158 and Kurosawa remakes, 38,
see also Copying 57–64

222 Index
Samurai, 19–20, 23, 26, 28, 31–33, story, 113–114, 115–116, 119,
38–39, 49, 59–60, 114–116, 127, 130–131, 135, 144, 177
119, 121–124, 130–132, 135, translations of, 106, 111, 113,
139, 141–144, 147, 156–158, 125, 128, 130–131, 139, 141–
162, 167–169, 187-n.12, 142, 157–158, 170–171, 177
190-n.9, 190-n.12, 191-n.9.2, Shame, 37–38, 64, 90, 115, 145
186-n.4, 190-n.10, 192-n.4, see also Guilt
192-n.5 Shinto, 37, 58, 61, 63, 143–144,
film (jidai geki), 14, 25, 27, 29, 192-n.5
48, 51, 85, 87, 106, 111, Similarity, xv, xix, 46, 144, 147,
113–114, 116–117, 119, 122, 157–158, 173, 175–176, 178, 181
125, 127–133, 138–139, 142, perceived cultural, xvii, xviii, 15
143, 151–152, 156–159, social, xviii, 41, 155–156
162–163, 165, 170–171, 177, see also Difference
185-n.6, 185-n.10, 189-n.8.1, Simmel, Georg, xix, 17, 181
189–190-n.4, 190-n.9, Simpsons, The, xvi, 107
191-n.18 Singer, Bryan, 27, 208
on television, 115, 127, 141, and Kurosawa remakes, 86–87,
155–156, 189-n.8.1 110, 176
unemployed (ronin), 116, 117, Social, 6, 9, 12, 33, 35, 41, 68, 142,
143, 191-n.9.2 161, 179
values, 146, 165, 185-n.6 critique, 114, 132, 169
Sanjuro (Tsubaki Sanjuro), 51, justice, 29, 83, 159
85–86, 163, 165–166, reality, xix, 10, 16, 46–47, 56, 61,
187-n.12, 192-n.5, 209 73, 97, 104–105, 110, 131, 135,
Sanshiro Sugata (Sugata Sanshiro), 162, 178–180
21, 22, 209 system, 118, 131
Schroeder, Barbet, 38, 207 Society, xv, xvii–xviii, 8, 11, 35,
and Kurosawa remakes, 110 40, 48, 56, 68, 73, 77, 90,
Scorsese, Martin, 175–176, 117, 129, 131, 142, 154, 155,
189–190-n.4, 207 159, 163, 177, 183–184-n.2,
Screenwriting, see Film, scripts 186-n.8
Second World War, 4, 7, 21, 33–34, Japanese, 33, 35, 50–51, 110,
36, 38, 64, 107, 115–116, 168, 115, 127, 141–142, 189-n.8.2
185-n.5 and stories, 63, 135, 179–180
see also War U.S., 53, 106, 122, 189-n.7.2
Seven Samurai, xix, 14, 25, 27, 29, women in, 62–63, 97
51, 85, 114, 122, 127, 129, Spielberg, Steven, 27, 169, 170, 171,
132–133, 138, 141, 151, 152, 193-n.5, 208
159, 162, 163, 165, 167, Star Wars, 14, 128, 129, 161, 163,
185-n.10, 189-n.8.1, 169–170, 173–174, 178,
189–190-n.5, 191-n.18, 209 192-n.10.1, 193-n.4, 206
narrative, 124, 139 story of, 14, 128, 167–168
plot, 113–114, 124, 128, Status, 6, 72, 108–109, 138, 186-n.4
133–134, 137–138 see also Class

Index 223
Story, xviii, 2, 11–14, 16, 22, 24, system, 4, 5

25, 28–29, 31–33, 38, 40–41, Sturges, John, 208
43–45, 47, 49, 50–51, 54, 55, and Kurosawa remakes, 119–122
57, 58–62, 65–72, 75–76, 79, Subcultures, xvii, 129, 138
81, 82–86, 88–91, 94–96, 98, Subjectivity, xix, 10, 12, 31–41,
100–104, 107–108, 113–116, 43–64, 65–73, 79–81, 93–94,
117–118, 119, 127, 130–131, 97–98, 104–105, 107–108, 110,
138, 142–144, 147, 148–151, 131, 179, 188-n.6.5
153–156, 158–159, 166–168, Subtitles, 14, 15, 53
171, 176, 183-n.2, 184-n.9, see also Translation
185-n.8, 186-n.3.1, 187-n.8, Sullivan’s Travels, 138, 208
187-n.10, 188-n.6.3, 188-n.6.5
as bridges, 29, 178 Tarantino, Quentin, 27, 79, 86, 109,
comic, 131, 138, 151, 155 140, 157, 158–159, 184-n.4,
crime, 51, 77, 98 188-n.6.5, 192-n.8, 208
definition of, 14, 43, 174, 178 and Kurosawa remakes,
fairy, 45, 111, 132, 163, 167 84–85, 110
and gender, 68, 76, 92 Television, 8, 45, 83, 96, 104–105,
grand, 178–179 146, 158, 184-n.4, 191-n.23,
of the Grand Inquisitor, 34–35 193-n.4
horror, 81, 179–180 and film, 24, 27, 47, 54, 56, 132,
human need for, 41, 45, 104, 176, 155, 189-n.8.1
178–179 samurai dramas, 127, 141, 146,
and knowledge, 16, 52, 76–77, 155–156, 191-n.9.2
111, 178, 184-n.9 series, 47, 78, 96, 97–106, 122,
as mirrors of society, 9, 16–17, 125, 127, 129, 136–138,
63, 73, 90, 98–99, 104, 117, 186-n.3.1, 189–190-n.4
127, 143, 159 Westerns, 118, 131
narrators of, 78, 110 Translation, xiii–xiv, 2, 6, 7, 14–17,
retelling of, 3, 14, 16–17, 20, 28, 29, 43, 48, 52, 53, 110,
43–45, 46, 48, 52, 56, 68, 75, 141, 158, 173, 175
107, 111, 117, 156, 174–175, faithful, see Translation, word-
176, 178–179, 183-n.2 for-word
short, 31, 54, 55, 63 possibility of, xiv, 7, 9, 45–46, 75,
structures, 43, 99 110, 113, 142, 175, 179
and subjectivity, 41, 44–47, 61, as problematic, xviii, 3, 45,
84, 97, 108, 110 46–47, 75
translation of, 14, 46, 48, 52, 56, word-for-word, 15–16, 46
110, 113, 128, 131, 135, 142, see also Subtitles
175–178 Truffaut, François (1932–1984), 6,
Story of the Kelly Gang, The, 191-n.15, 208
183-n.2 Truth, xix, 29, 32, 40, 43–64, 65,
Storytelling, 14, 20, 22, 131, 66–68, 70–71, 73, 77–78,
188-n.6.1 80–84, 87, 89–91, 94–95,
Studios, 21, 24, 28, 113 97–98, 105, 108–110, 132,

224 Index
Truth—Continued aesthetitics of, 85, 158–160

134–135, 169–170, 177, in film, 10–11, 140, 158, 192-n.3
179–180, 186-n.3.3, 186-n.3.8 and the U.S.A., 11, 125–126
individual, 34–36, 39, see also
Subjectivity War, 31, 36, 85, 87, 117, 120,
Tykwer, Tom, xii, 93 136–137, 145, 160, 162, 167,
and Kurosawa remakes, 27, 92, 169, 180, 185-n.5, 186-n.8,
110, 176 189–190-n.4
American Civil, 49, 90, 91, 118,
U.S.A., 3, 5, 10–11, 13, 21, 25, 28, 125, 149
48–49, 50–53, 55, 56, 69, in film, 21–22, 25, 26, 34, 36,
82–84, 88, 90, 105–106, 39, 53, 87–90, 117, 162,
119–121, 123, 127, 133, 165–166, 168–170, 189-n.8.3,
136–137, 149, 151, 158, 163, 189–190-n.8.4
168–169, 178, 180, 184-n.4 Gulf, 64, 81, 87–91, 94, 101, 125,
and crime, 56, 83–84, 99–100, 189–190-n.4
136, 186-n.3.2, 189-n.7.2 Second World War, 4, 7–8, 21,
film, 3–5, 25, 65–66, 87, 132, 33–34, 38, 64, 115–116, 168
179, 183–184-n.2, 185-n.12 victims of, 25, 29, 165
history, 40, 48, 53, 70, 90–91, Vietnam, 53–54, 64, 150, 169,
108, 117–118, 122, 125–126, 189–190-n.4
128, 137, 149, 150, 155, Welles, Orson, 76–77, 87, 94,
169–170 185-n.10, 186-n.6, 208
individualism, 120, 122, 124, Westerns, 117–118, 135–136, 151,
135, 142, 189–190-n.4 155, 168, 189-n.8.3, 193-n.5
and Japan, xvi, 7–8, 14, 22, 47, characters, 52, 56, 123–124, 137
53–57, 76, 110, 115, 124, 171 revisionist, 126, 154
novels, 54, 111, 124, 143 Spaghetti, 69, 149–150
women, 51, 54, 67, 91, see also see also Myth
Women Willis, Bruce, 27, 148–149, 150,
see also Americans 153–154, 155
U.S.S.R., see Russia Women, 12, 29, 38, 46, 50, 53, 55,
Usual Suspects, The, 78, 105, 110, 65, 67–68, 91, 97, 100–101,
176, 208 102–104, 110, 115, 127, 132
narrative, 87 American, 51, 54, 91
stories in, 86–87 in film, 32, 33, 36, 49–52, 55,
story of, 86 57, 61–62, 67–68, 77, 82,
90, 92, 110, 115–116, 119,
Value(s), 3, 6, 10, 22, 109, 138, 180 122–123, 126, 130–131,
American, 48, 106, 137, 169 135, 144–145, 148, 151–154,
Japanese, 116, 146, 159–160, 155, 157, 164, 170, 177,
165, 167, 185-n.6 178, 187-n.12, 188-n.6.5,
Venice Film Festival, 4, 27, 187-n.6 192-n.12
Violence, 76, 122, 131, 139, 150, Japanese, 20, 21, 25, 39, 49–50,
180, 186-n.8, 189-n.7.2, 192-n.5 53, 62, 91, 186-n.4

Index 225
and men, 39, 50, 55, 57–64, narrative, 148

65–73, 80, 91, 151, 153–154, plot, 151–153, 157
188-n.6.5 story, 35, 141, 148, 153, 155,
as problems, 51, 62, 92, 97, 151, 165–166
154, 177 translations of, 106, 139–140,
sexuality, 12–13, 62 141, 148–149, 156, 158, 177–178
and violence, 14, 33, 52–53, Yoshida Hiroaki, 209
85–86, 91 and Kurosawa remakes, 38,
and war, 91, 105, 162, 188–189-n.6 54–56
see also Heroines
Zatôichi, 191-n.9.2, 192-n.14, 206
yakuza, 144, 146, 158, 178 plot of, 156–157
Yojimbo, xix, 14, 51, 143, 151–152, story, 156
155, 162, 163, 167, 170, Zwick, Edward, 91, 209
192-n.5, 109 and Kurosawa remakes, 78, 87–90

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Remaking Kurosawa

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

1 Setting the Scene 1

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

Hayakawa, as well as with any Japanese academic willing to lend an ear

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

My approach also owes something to Deleuze’s point that

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

through participant observation, the experience of globalization may feel

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

In order to write scripts, you must first study

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

reproduction” (1973). A careful reading of the essay reveals that

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

make “bridges” that become conceptual “places”—locations from

The Local and the Global

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

deep roots—directors, technicians, and actors were quickly forming

. . . success of Rashomon in the United States is most interesting, for

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

films he wanted to make. So like Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, or many

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

Global Citizens or Cosmopolitanism

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

“made in the USA.” Yet details of this image—the total otherness of

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

aristocrats (flower arranging, tea ceremony, calligraphy, to name a

The Paradox of Shared Meaning

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

more mundane human realm.8 By the very positing of these realms,

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

As an anthropologist I find such arguments both culturally bound

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

remains, whether they are deemed to be faithful to the original or

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

The impulse to tell a story of a young, not necessarily special, girl

Remaking Kurosawa/On Translation

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

Conversely it could also be argued that the initial impulse to translate,

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

a human affinity with the world depicted in the film (MacDougall

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

editing process that pulls the final version together. Technology to a

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

10.1057/9780230621671 - Remaking Kurosawa, Dolores Martinez

There is nothing that says more