#2: Seven Samurai

(originally published Feb. 18, 2010)

Wednesdays are the days between classes, and they’re reserved for killing time, avoiding class prep, and haircuts. I’ve been avoiding finishing edits for a chapter because I’ve hit that point where I dislike everything I’ve written. According to Kenneth Turan, Seven Samurai took Kurosawa and his screenwriters six weeks to write. And I’ve been working on this novel for almost two years?

Seven Samurai clocks in at almost three and a half hours, but that’s three and a half hours not spent editing, I suppose.

In any case, I knew I was being terribly verbose when I wrote the chapter so some judicious trimming is in order. It’s a matter of cutting out lines as ruthlessly as one cuts marauding bandits.  I always take perverse pleasure in the scene where the women of the village come out from their shelter, armed with spears, rakes, and other pointy domestic objects, in order to perforate a fallen bandit. For a film in which women’s primary roles are either menial labor, samurai seductresses (despite the pageboy haircuts) or bandit favors, seeing them take the initiative—as bloody as it is—is refreshing. Needless to say, I’m a huge fan of the whole pinky violence subgenre as well.

Hmm, I have drifted off-topic. Imagining girls wielding swords will do that.

This must be at least the fourth or fifth time I’ve seen Seven Samurai, and yet, strangely, each time, I can’t remember which samurais live and which ones die. Well, I know for sure that three live and that at least three die, but the fate of the seventh one is always up in the air for me. That’s a testament to either Kurosawa’s engaging storytelling or my crappy memory. As it is, I remember clearly that, when I was younger, our PBS station in Denver (Channel 6!) used to play Kurosawa movies start to finish, no commercial interruptions. And this, if anything, was my introduction to film as works of art. I eagerly waited with my fingers on the “record” button of the VCR to preserve Throne of Blood (we read MacBeth my senior year of high school) and Ran (which didn’t fit onto one tape) for posterity. Rashomon too, as I recall. Not that I ever watched any of them again once I had recorded them, but that’s the way it was in the days of VCR. Rewinding those tapes was just too onerous.

But as much as I want to say I saw Seven Samurai that way too, I can’t say for sure that it happened. Odd—the more I try to remember if it showed or not, the more the only thing that sticks in my mind is the Japanese character for “intermission.”

#1: Grand Illusion

(originally published Feb. 17, 2010)

Who doesn’t love Jean Gabin? I suppose if you’re going to start a new project, it might as well have some form of Jean Gabin in it. He exudes an effortless cool, and his fleshy face invites (or at least suggests) pinching. And, as the world-weary French officer Maréchal in Grand Illusion, he lends an earthy charm to a film that examines class, warfare, and class warfare.

Matthew and I watched the film in the evening, even though we were slightly tired from a day of teaching. For me, first days (despite this being the second week of classes), are always accompanied by inescapable feelings of awkwardness—meeting a room full of new faces that look up to you to either teach them or to entertain them for an hour and fifteen minutes. On top of that, I haven’t taught an undergraduate creative writing class for about five years, so I felt I was explaining too much and not enough simultaneously. The day I can’t think of something interesting to say about Junot Diaz’s “Ysrael”… My fiction writing students skewed heavily towards those who seemed mostly interested in fantasy and/or vampire novels. Which in itself isn’t a problem, as I was once a total sci-fi/fantasy/horror literature nerd. But I don’t remember what knocked me out of my lavender-colored gossamer space suit, but it sure as hell wasn’t Ann Beattie’s “Janus.” (Come to think of it, it might have been Nabakov’s “Signs and Symbols,” but I slogged through the Norton Anthology so long ago that it no longer matters.)

The less said about composition classes, the better.

Instead, I’ll mention my two favorite scenes in Grand Illusion. One is the obvious one: the discussion of fading aristocracy between the French POW Cpt. Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and his warden, Cpt. von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim). Their conversation about—and understanding of—their diminishing place in the world holds such poignancy. Their stiff manners and noblesse oblige might be the products of a ridiculously privileged life, but it’s what they have, and damn it, they’re going to keep at it until the end. They’re like two dinosaurs circling each other, knowing that they’re already fossils.

The other scene takes place earlier, in what I’ll call the POW camp of love. For a film that only has two actual females towards its end (a ministering nun and a widowed German hausfrau), the first half of the film has females:  1) mentioned in passing as playthings at the French mess hall; 2) pinned against the wall at the German mess hall; 3) or dismissed as Jody-fucking harlots at the first POW camp. In such a male-occupied space, females only exist as fantasies, projections. So when a baby-faced POW Maisonneuve puts on a dress in preparation for a all-prisoner!, all-singing! cabaret show, the other prisoners pause and stare as he wanders through the hall, asking, “Don’t I look funny?” It’s a moment of disbelief and misplaced lust that would almost make me fear for poor Maisonneuve, if it weren’t clear that the scene were being played for humor.