Here is a new book recently out I thought people here might be
interested in:
The Samurai Film
Author:Alain Silver
Publisher:The Overlook Press
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.
http://www.midnighteye.com/books/samurai-film_stray-dogs-lone-
wolves.shtml