- Document type
- Book review
- Published
- 24 October 2005
The Samurai Film
- Author:
- Alain Silver
- Publisher:
- The Overlook Press
Stray Dogs & Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook
- Author:
- Patrick Galloway
- Publisher:
- Stone Bridge Press
- Review by:
- Jasper Sharp
Despite being the oldest, most recognisable and arguably the most popular genre in Japanese film, the samurai film has had surprisingly little written about in book form outside its home territory. Most of what exists in English forms part of studies on Akira Kurosawa, and for a very long time the only real publication devoted to the genre remained Alain Silver's The Samurai Film, which first appeared back in 1977. The situation is about to change though, and not a moment too soon, what with the renewed interest in the genre through the efforts of Quentin Tarantino and Tom Cruise. The second half of 2005 not only sees the return of Silver's tome in an updated and expanded third edition, but also the publication of a brand new volume, Patrick Galloway's Stray Dogs & Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook.
You could easily construe the lack of coverage of the genre as a testament to the thorough work Silver put into his tome. The Samurai Film has always been one of the standard publications on Japanese cinema in English, covering the genre with great erudition and perceptiveness. With so many of the standard works on Japanese film disappearing from the shelves due to a publishing industry increasingly obsessed with bestseller rankings and Oprah's reading list, Overlook Press deserves a big round of applause for resurrecting Silver's study for a new generation. Granted, they probably wouldn't have taken the chance if Kill Bill and The Last Samurai had flopped. The author obliges by adding an entirely new chapter in which both films feature prominently, but, characteristic of the book's approach as a whole, he places these foreign tributes into the proper context of the chanbara genre's evolution over the past twenty-odd years.
The Samurai Film is still every bit as thorough as it ever was. Silver takes the time to define everything from narrative and character types, via the use and function of violence, to the roots of the celluloid samurai in fact, art and fiction - all before the first film is even mentioned. Key directors (Kurosawa, Gosha, Okamoto, Shinoda), series (including perennial fan favourites Zatoichi - expanded to include the Kitano version - and The Sleepy Eyes of Death), characters (like Musashi Miyamoto) and individual films are scrutinised and discussed in great depth. The chapter on Hideo Gosha (he and Kurosawa the only directors to have an entire chapter dedicated to them) still stands as the single most important and authoritative piece of writing on this great director (but what a shame that almost no one has followed suit and actually released a few of his films...).
The author's approach regularly results in close textual analysis, but he always works from the larger framework of demonstrating, by way of his various test cases, how the genre functions and to what ends. The results never cross the line into becoming ham-fisted or bogged down in jargon. A great example are the few paragraphs devoted to Throne of Blood, in which Silver very succinctly tells us exactly why Kurosawa is a great filmmaker - without ever resorting to hackneyed talk of humanism and rousing epics.
Silver's point of departure for his analyses is always the film itself. He never attempts to hammer his subjects into any kind of theoretical mould, which is exactly why The Samurai Film is still every bit as pertinent as it was thirty years ago. Had the author placed his labours within any of the critical frameworks popular at the time of its original publication, the text would by now have felt badly dated and the book would have become a relic. Instead, it achieves what all great film analysis does: it helps you understand the genre and the films better, and thereby enjoy them all the more as a result. With the updated text it's destined to hold up for probably quite a few decades to come. Like many of the movies it discusses, The Samurai Film is a bona fide classic. Mandatory reading for anyone interested in Japanese film.
Availability
The Samurai Film
The Overlook Press
To those less concerned with analysis and more with just good old-fashioned sword fighting, Patrick Galloway's new book will come as a very welcome addition. A kind of entry-level stage to Alain Silver's advanced course, Stray Dogs & Lone Wolves presents itself as a guidebook and reference for fans and newcomers of the genre, covering 51 films, ranging from such acknowledged classics as Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, the Samurai trilogy and Sword of Doom, to established cult items like the Zatoichi series, Hanzo the Razor and Lone Wolf and Cub. In between, Galloway gives ample space to lesser-known titles like Kenji Misumi's breathtaking Destiny's Son, the straight-faced Shinsengumi chronicle Band of Assassins and the self-consciously epic Heaven and Earth, as well as to films on the outer fringes of the genre like the Yokai Monsters films, the Daimajin series and the unforgettable Kwaidan. All of these are treated with the same enthusiasm by the author, who turns in well-researched and easygoing reviews.
A book of this kind is actually a lot trickier to pull off than it seems. Guidebooks about genres come with a built-in risk, a Catch-22 almost: being truly exhaustive and complete is usually an unrealistic (and, one could argue, pointless) option, and so the author has to limit himself to either a subjective selection or to what is available to him. Either way, the fans will always complain that some of their favourites haven't been included.
Galloway has come up with one way of getting around this problem and setting clear parameters for himself and his readers: all the films included are available in some form with English subtitles. If any of the films under discussion tickle the reader's fancy, then he or she will know that they can get hold of them and also, thanks to the hints and release info provided by the author, how. Very handy indeed.
This approach has one drawback, though: it doesn't cover any new ground. Galloway treats roughly the same period as Silver, i.e. the post-war years until the present day, beginning with the movie that started it all for Western fans: Kurosawa's Rashomon (and continuing all the way up to Yoji Yamada's Oscar-nominated Twilight Samurai). There is no information on the early years of the genre, and founding fathers like Daisuke Ito and Masahiro Makino receive no mention, despite the fact that they remained active well into the 1970s. This isn't necessarily criticism of Galloway, though. Anything pre-war is notoriously difficult to see - if even still extant. The author has simply chosen his parameters and follows them through quite well.
What does let the book down a bit, though, is the ease with which Galloway needlessly resorts to some of the less wholesome tendencies of fan writing. The back cover explains that one of his motivations to write this book was that he was "tired of seeing his favorite film genre mistreated by most academics." In his attempts to write an accessible alternative, however, he regularly veers to the other extreme; reading Stray Dogs & Lone Wolves you occasionally feel like you're being treated as a twelve-year-old whose closest experience of a samurai film is Kill Bill and The Last Samurai. The ridiculing of other genres (he takes regular cheap shots at the kaiju eiga, but doesn't stop to realise that Akira Kurosawa's budget-inflating whims were only possible thanks to the success of those "sweaty guys in rubber suits" working at the same studio), the railing against "cinema snobs", "academics" and "culture vultures", and the use of childish lingo like "loosey-goosey" - these are all misplaced and unnecessary, and merely tarnish what the author sets out to do. Galloway's strengths as a writer could easily have carried this book on their own, so why he felt the need to compromise his abilities and resort to the facile demonising and the underestimating of his readers is a bit of mystery.
Regardless of this, Galloway's guidebook will come as a valuable resource to many, particularly those new to the genre, and is guaranteed to start you off on a quest for great swordfight flicks. There are some nice visuals here too, with plenty of stills and poster artwork. The promo shots of the main players, in and out of samurai garb, are a particularly nice touch and include some unforgettable poses - check out Shintaro Katsu at his lounge lizard best in a white suit and bow tie.
Combined, Stray Dogs & Lone Wolves and The Samurai Film form a worthy tribute to one of the great genres in world cinema history. Between them they contain more than enough for fans of the genre and those intrigued by the recent wave of Western tributes to chew on. But the full story of samurai cinema still remains to be told.
Availability
Stray Dogs & Lone Wolves: The Samurai Film Handbook
Stone Bridge Press