Robert Altman compares the samurai and western genres via ‘Rashomon’
In Japan, there is the samurai film genre, and in the West, there is the analogous western. In many ways, the two cinema categories complement one another, at least in the sense that there is often a male lead protagonist who is a hired hand and perceives themselves as being above the law and the writer of their own destiny.
In fact, when western legend Clint Eastwood came to famously play ‘The Man With No Name’ in Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti western series, The Dollars Trilogy, his character was based on the kind of masterless samurai adventurers as made famous by Toshiro Mifune in the films of Akira Kurosawa.
Kurosawa’s 1954 film Seven Samurai was remade, of course, into the American western film The Magnificent Seven, directed by John Sturges and starring Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. The director Robert Altman once discussed the similarities and differences between the samurai film genre and its western analogue.
Altman discussed Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon and explained how Japanese audiences perceive the samurai film genre in the same way that Americans view the classic western, even though there are some stark differences between the two, particularly in the acting styles.
“The acting style of Mifune and the Japanese actors is quite different from the English-speaking, European styles of acting,” Altman said. “The Mifune character was perhaps a little exaggerated, but that’s the music of that culture.” So too are the lead heroes of westerns greatly exaggerated in both dialogue and appearance.
Altman continued, “A Japanese person will never see the film the same way as a non-Japanese person. The Japanese person knows the history of the samurai, like we do the American western. Every culture has its own set of what you grew up with as children. So we miss a lot of that in this film because we just don’t know the background.”
However, for Altman, perhaps because of that similarity between the mythology of the respective genres, there can at least be some understanding of the kind of story that is being told in a film like Kurosawa’s, as a similar narrative that has pervaded the western consciousness for several centuries.
“The best thing about it was that for non-Japanese audiences is that there was not a lot of dialogue,” the director added. “It was a visual film, and the titles are almost there to keep you up with it. It’s the visual stimulation that hits the audience. That’s the reason for film; otherwise, we could just turn the light out and call it radio.”
Check out the full video of Altman’s thoughts on Rashomon below.
