Samurai cinema
Chanbara, also commonly spelled "chambara", meaning "sword fighting" films, denotes the Japanese film genre called samurai cinema in English and is roughly equivalent to Western and swashbuckler films. Chanbara is a sub-category of jidaigeki, which equates to period drama. Jidaigeki may refer to a story set in a historical period, though not necessarily dealing with a samurai character or depicting swordplay.
While earlier samurai period pieces were more dramatic rather than action-based, samurai films produced after World War II have become more action-based, with darker and more violent characters. Post-war samurai epics tended to portray psychologically or physically scarred warriors. Akira Kurosawa stylized and exaggerated death and violence in samurai epics. His samurai, and many others portrayed in film, were solitary figures, more often concerned with concealing their martial abilities, rather than showing them off.
Historically, the genre is usually set during the Tokugawa era. The samurai film hence often focuses on the end of an entire way of life for the samurai: many of the films deal with masterless rōnin, or samurai dealing with changes to their status resulting from a changing society.
Samurai films were constantly made into the early 1970s, but by then, overexposure on television, the aging of the big stars of the genre, and the continued decline of the mainstream Japanese film industry put a halt to most of the production of this genre.
Chanbara also refers to a martial arts sport similar to fencing.
Samurai film directors
and Masahiro Makino were central to the development of samurai films in the silent and prewar eras.Akira Kurosawa is the best known to western audiences, and similarly has directed the samurai films best known in the West. He directed Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo and many others. Toshirō Mifune, arguably Japan's most famous actor, often starred in Kurosawa's films. Mifune himself had a production company that produced samurai epics, often with him starring. Two of Kurosawa's samurai movies were based on the works of William Shakespeare, Throne of Blood and Ran. A number of his films were remade in Italy and the United States as westerns, or as action films set in other contexts. His film Seven Samurai is one of the most important touchstones of the genre and the most well known outside Japan. It also illustrates some of the conventions of samurai film in that the main characters are rōnin, masterless unemployed samurai, free to act as their conscience dictates. Importantly, these men tend to deal with their problems with their swords and are very skilled at doing so. It also shows the helplessness of the peasantry and the distinction between the two classes.
Masaki Kobayashi directed the films Harakiri and Samurai Rebellion, both cynical films based on flawed loyalty to the clan.
Kihachi Okamoto films focus on violence in a particular fashion. In particular in his films Samurai Assassin, Kill! and Sword of Doom. The latter is particularly violent, the main character engaging in combat for a lengthy 7 minutes of film at the end of the movie. His characters are often estranged from their environments, and their violence is a flawed reaction to this.
Hideo Gosha, and many of his films helped create the archetype of the samurai outlaw. Gosha's films are as important as Kurosawa's in terms of their influence, visual style and content, yet are not as well known in the West. Gosha's films often portrayed the struggle between traditional and modernist thought and were decidedly anti-feudal. He largely stopped making chambara, switching to the Yakuza genre, in the 1970s. Some of his most noted movies are Goyokin, Hitokiri, Three Outlaw Samurai and Kedamono no Ken.
Kenji Misumi was active making samurai films from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. He directed roughly 30 films in the genre, including some the Lone Wolf and Cub films, and a number in the Zatoichi and Sleepy Eyes of Death series.
An excellent example of the kind of immediacy and action evident in the best genre is seen in Gosha's first film, the Three Outlaw Samurai, based on a television series. Three farmers kidnap the daughter of the local magistrate in order to call attention to the starvation of local peasants, a rōnin appears and decides to help them. In the process, two other rōnin with shifting allegiances join the drama, the conflict widens, eventually leading to betrayal, assassination and battles between armies of mercenary rōnin.
Recently another director, Keishi Ōtomo, has directed a live-action adaption of Nobuhiro Watsuki's manga series Rurouni Kenshin, which tells the story of a former Ishin Shishi named Himura Kenshin. After the end of the Bakumatsu, he becomes a rōnin wandering Japan's countryside, offering protection and aid to those in need as atonement for the murders he once committed as an assassin. The film was a huge critical and commercial success. Rurouni Kenshin was theatrically released on August 25, 2012, in Japan, grossing over $36 million in the country and over $60 million worldwide as of November 2012. It was released on home media on December 26, 2012. The film has been licensed for distribution in over 60 countries in Europe, the Americas and Asia. The movie premiered in North America as an opening selection for the 2012 LA EigaFest on December 14, 2012. Two sequels titled Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Taika-hen and Rurouni Kenshin: Densetsu no Saigo-hen were released in 2014.
Popular characters in samurai films
Zatoichi
A blind burly masseur and yakuza with short hair, he is a skilled swordsman who fights using only his hearing. While less known in the West, he is arguably the most famous chanbara character in Japan.The Crimson Bat
Four movies about another blind character, Oichi a.k.a. "the Crimson Bat", a female sword fighter, was made in response to the huge success of Zatoichi.Nemuri Kyōshirō
Nemuri Kyoshirō, the master of the Engetsu sword style, was a wandering "lone wolf" warrior plagued by the fact that he was fathered in less than honorable circumstance by a "fallen" Portuguese priest who had turned to worshipping Satan and a Japanese noblewoman whom the "fallen" priest had seduced and raped as part of a Black Mass and who had committed suicide after Kyōshirō was born. As a result, Kyōshirō despised both Christianity and the shogunal government.Miyamoto Musashi
A substantial number of films have been made about Miyamoto Musashi, a famed historical warrior and swordsman, most notably a three-movie series starring Toshiro Mifune and a six-movie series starring Kinnosuke Nakamura, both based on the novel Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa.Lone Wolf and Cub
Lone Wolf and Cub, the tale of a samurai traveling Japan with his son in a wooden pram was made most notably into a six-film series starring Tomisaburo Wakayama as Ogami Itto, a live action television series starring Kinnosuke Yorozuya as Ogami Ittō, a 1993 film with Masakazu Tamura as Ogami Ittō and a 2002-2004 television series starring Kin'ya Kitaōji as Ogami Ittō.Sanjuro/Rōnin with no name
Sanjuro, played by Toshiro Mifune, is the wandering rōnin character who acts as a yojimbo in two of Kurosawa's films, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. In both films, 三十郎 Sanjuro makes up a different surname, thus leading some to label the character as a "rōnin with no name", in reference to the Man with No Name character who was directly inspired by Yojimbo and portrayed by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" of Spaghetti Western films.Mifune later played analogous roles in two films released in 1970, the Zatoichi film Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, and Incident at Blood Pass, the two 1972-1974 TV series Ronin of the Wilderness and Yojimbo of the Wilderness, the 1975 TV series The Sword, the Wind, and the Lullaby, the 1976 TV series Ronin in a Lawless Town, the 1981 TV movie series The Lowly Ronin, and the 1983 TV movie The Secret of Cruel Valley.